Noel C. Cilker

Dear Friends, I'm moving my blog over to Medium.com. It's the same great taste in a different place! Check me out at  https://medium.com/@NoelCCilker , and follow me to get my latest entries. I just posted one there about communicating with relatives after Hurricane Irma and comparing that to the 1906 earthquake. Thanks for being such supportive subscribers! Love, Noel

Hurricane Harvey has been dominating the most recent news cycle, and for good reason. It's the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Wilma in 2005, and it's dropped the most water of any of the tropical storms measured in the U.S.: up to 50 inches in some places, eclipsing Tropical Storm Amelia from 1978. Aid workers rescue flooded-out residents in Texas following Hurricane Harvey.   GlobalGiving The stories of the damage Harvey has inflicted - both on lives and property - are heartbreaking. But where does Harvey stack up against other disastrous storms in American history? Hugo For some reason Hugo is always the first name I think about when the topic of hurricanes comes up. It's probably because I was a kid when I watched it on the news, and that early impression more than anything made it Bad Hurricane #1. Hugo formed over the eastern Atlantic in September, 1989 and hit South Carolina just above Charleston on September 21....

On a cold, wind-chilled morning in January of 1961, John F. Kennedy was standing at the podium of the U.S Capitol in Washington D.C. It was his inauguration. As thousands shivered and breath steamed from their noses while they watched, Kennedy uttered his famous lines : "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." President John F. Kennedy speaking at his inauguration in 1961.   AP The lines received applause and cheers, and became one of the most famous presidential quotes in American History. If only Kennedy had written them. Instead, that distinction belongs to Kennedy's aide, Ted Sorensen. According to Robert Schlesinger's book White House Ghosts , Kennedy told Sorensen to solicit suggestions, keep it short and make it forward-looking. It seems strange that ...

After the first debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Facebook friend of mine posted a meme about Trump having never paid taxes which would have supported infrastructure, the military, roads, health care, etc. I'm no fan of Trump, but I was curious to see if that was true. So I went to Politifact.com to check it out. It was false . It turns out, for the years we do  have Trump's tax returns (which is its own, unending issue), he did  pay taxes. So, hoping to clear up the misinformation, I wrote a comment back to my friend that, while I didn't support Trump, it was important to judge someone on actual facts. I also included the link to the Politifact article. My friend deleted my comment, then he wrote, "I don't intend to be fair or even-handed when it comes to [Trump], even if I get it partially wrong sometimes." "But there are so many other true things to get him on!" I pleaded. He didn't respond...

True, the focus over the past few days has been on Donald Trump Jr. and his shady meeting with a Russian lawyer , but I prefer to look at a happier moment from the past week. Independence Day! The holiday is a time to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and all the fun times (hot dogs! beer! parades! fireworks! NPR tweets! ) that resulted because of it. Sort of. The adoption of the DOI remains in most people's brains - if they think about it at all - as an inevitable, patriotic event. However, for the men in the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 who approved the DOI, and the men on August 2, 1776 who signed it, theirs was a dangerous act that amounted to treason. They may look calm, but the men who approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 were well aware of the gravity of their actions. So did anything actually happen to those signers after they put pen to paper? One popular essay , written by a man named Gary Hildrith, ...

This past Sunday and all throughout June, cities around the world from Athens to Lisbon to Bogota to Albuquerque celebrated Gay Pride. In big American cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, millions of spectators showed up to watch hundreds of floats jaunt down main streets in their city's pride parades. In San Francisco's parade, it is common these days to see politicians, high schools, and dozens of corporations making their way down Market Street clad in rainbow garb. Marchers get political in the 2017 San Francisco pride parade.   Douglas Zimmerman / SFGate.com But how did all this pride start? Go back forty-eight years to 1969 in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. On the early morning of June 28, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that catered to gays, lesbians, transgendered and others on the margins of the community. Police raids were common on gay bars, but this time the patrons fought back, setting of a rio...

As a historian, it gives me a jolt of joy when a president has a firm grasp of history. We saw that earlier this week when President Trump met with the president of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela. The American president quipped: "The Panama Canal is doing quite well. I think we did a good job building it, right — a very good job." It was the Panamanian president's response that made me smile: "Yeah, about 100 years ago." It's nice when a president has a firm grasp of history. President Varela of Panama and President Trump.   Prensa Latina Some on the Internet are having fun and saying President Trump gaffed by taking credit for building the canal, but they could be making something out of nothing. He never actually stated that he's responsible for it. Regardless, it doesn't hurt to review how the canal came to be . . . yes, about a hundred years ago. The idea for a canal across Panama came long before the United States was involve...

A week and a half ago, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. In my post last week , I listed a few of the past presidents who took action on behalf of the environment, which included both Democrats and Republicans. In response to the president's withdrawal, many businesses, state governors and city mayors pledged to uphold the U.S.'s side of the agreement, even if the country as a whole is no longer a participant. On June 1st, the so-called Climate Mayors from around the country released a statement vowing to move forward on environmentalism, proclaiming: "If the President wants to break the promises made to our allies enshrined in the historic Paris Agreement, we’ll build and strengthen relationships around the world to protect the planet from devastating climate risks." Mayors who signed on include Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Martin Walsh of Boston, Bill de Blasio of New York City and Ed Lee of San Francisco. But ...