Mountain Dew first made an appearance in Tennessee in the 1940s, when Barney and Ally Hartman created a lemon-lime drink to use as a mixer for whiskey. Their first label featured Willy the Hillbilly, and the words, “A special blend of mountain water and flavor in the traditional hillbilly style.” It was marketed as “zero-proof moonshine;” Mountain Dew was in fact a common slang for illegal moonshine in those days. They really wanted to go for the drinking hillbilly crowd.

Pepsi bought the third formulation of the product in 1964, and in 1973 moved away from the hillbilly vibe to an active outdoors-y style aimed at a younger generation. Over the years, it’s been through a number of controversies, from the caffeine content, to dubious claims of what Yellow 5 does to male teenagers, but it remains an ever popular drink; it was the fourth best-selling carbonated drink in 2007.

From what I can best tell, Mountain Dew made the switch to high fructose corn syrup in 1984 when the Pepsi and Coke companies did. So, perhaps Mountain Dew Throwback really is reminiscent of a previous version. Either way, we bought some, and it’s tasty. We think they tweaked the formula a little bit as well, in order to ensure that there would be a taste difference to most drinkers.

(As an interesting side note, many countries outside of the US still use sugar in their beverages, and in Canada, Mountain Dew is caffeine free. Non-cola beverages are prohibited from containing caffeine there.)

Resources:

• A history of Mountain Dew
• Mountain Dew Wikipedia Page
• The Early Bottles of Mountain Dew

Recently on the History Nugget meme:

• A story about hockey by Barb Ashcroft

• NY state marker for Millard Filmore by Cameron Douglas
• The Lone Star Nugget by Kristin

]]> http://proxc.net/2009/05/03/history-nugget-mountain-dew/feed/ 2 http://proxc.net/2009/04/26/lone-star-history-nugget/ http://proxc.net/2009/04/26/lone-star-history-nugget/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:26:46 +0000 beautyredefined http://proxc.net/?p=244 After an exciting weekend in Texas, and seeing large single stars on many a home, I decided that the origins of Texas’ “lone star” would make for a good history meme. I also thought it would be nice and simple, since time has once again gotten away from me, and this will barely make the cutoff for this week. Alas, it doesn’t appear to be so easily looked up. However, this website gives a number of possibilities for the origin of the “Lone Star” state, claiming that a single star was used during the Long Expedition of 1819, an attempt to “to free Texas from ‘the yoke of Spanish authority,’” [1] and at Austin’s Colony, the first American settlement in Texas. Some think that the lone star was chosen from a desire to join the United States; others think it came from from them being the lone Mexican state trying to exercise their rights from the 1824 constitution. Whatever its origins, it appears to have been flown on a flag on a number of important battles in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Texas Secretary of State doesn’t shed a whole lot of light on the origins of the star, but does say this, giving us a date for its first “official” use:

Since revolutionary times, Texas has chosen the Lone Star as its symbol. Despite the fact that Texans were at war with the federal government sitting in Mexico City, the Texas Provisional Government took the time to adopt an emblem of “a single star of five points, either of gold or silver” as the “peculiar emblem” of the Republic on March 12, 1836, only ten days after declaring independence! Nine months later this “peculiar emblem” provided the bases for the first Texas seal, which in two years would finally take on the form that we recognize today. This simple and graceful design now appears on official documents, identifies state aircraft, and adorns both the original and new portions of our capitol building.

Sadly, I’m still rather unsatisfied with this. Don’t suppose anyone has better information than I about the origins of the “lone star” symbol?

(As an aside, this website gives a detailed account of the history of the Texas flag, but they all start out with the star as a given.)

1. Weber, David J. (1992), The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale Western Americana Series, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300051980
]]> http://proxc.net/2009/04/26/lone-star-history-nugget/feed/ 0 http://proxc.net/2009/01/19/the-first-drawings-of-the-moon/ http://proxc.net/2009/01/19/the-first-drawings-of-the-moon/#comments Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:00:40 +0000 beautyredefined http://proxc.net/2009/01/19/the-first-drawings-of-the-moon/ This year is the “International Year of Astronomy,” in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first astronomical observations with a telescope. However, this week I’ve seen a lot of news about Thomas Harriot, an English astronomer and mathematician. As a launch event for the International Year of Astronomy, the Royal Astronomical Society has been touting Harriot’s first drawing of the moon as seen through a telescope. It’s a rough drawing, but it clearly shows some well known features of the moon. What’s more, is that it’s dated at the 26th of July, 1609, months before Galileo’s first drawings done in December. Since Harriot never published his work, he has been much less well-known than Galileo, and the RAS is doing its best to promote the English astronomer’s accomplishments.

This whole thing reminded me of a talk I’d heard a couple of years ago. John David Jackson, author of the infamous Classical Electrodynamics textbook, came to Michigan and delivered a talk entitled “The Zeroth Theorem of the History of Science” (pdf). The premise of this theorem is that any scientific idea or phenomenon named for someone was usually discovered by someone else. He gave 5 specific examples during his talk, and it was interesting to see what names survived and who was lost in the details. Makes you wonder what other historical events are attributed to the wrong people.

This post was inspired by the History Nugget Meme from the Markeroni Blog:

The History Nugget meme is a place to write about history. All entries are welcome, whether you write about a photograph you took or want to enter a full-blown article. The only “rule” is that it has to be about the past in some way.

How to play:

1. Write about something or someone historical in your blog or website.
2. Come to the current week’s post to post your link, title and text for how you want your post described.
3. At the start of the next week’s meme, I or somebody else will compile the entries from the previous week into the next week’s meme to encourage others to come read what you write. We’ll also encourage others to post the list of links on their blogs, so we all get more link love.

Entries from last week

1. Aran Knitting Knugget by Kristin.
   A brief history of the aran sweater.

2. No more chocolate in the two-kilo size by Linda R. Moore
   The demise of Woolworth’s in the UK after nearly a hundred years.

]]> http://proxc.net/2009/01/19/the-first-drawings-of-the-moon/feed/ 0 http://proxc.net/2009/01/12/aran-knitting-knugget/ http://proxc.net/2009/01/12/aran-knitting-knugget/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:00:21 +0000 beautyredefined http://proxc.net/2009/01/12/aran-knitting-knugget/ My good friend Linda has recently introduced a new weekly meme via the Markeroni Blog. The goal? To compile a weekly list of “History Nuggets” from participating blogs. These can be any type of post, so long as they have some connection to history. I thought I’d contribute this week by taking a brief look around into the history of Aran sweaters.


Photo used under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of druzziel, on Flickr.

Since I’ve taking up knitting again, and have gotten up the particular urge to start my first-ever sweater, it’s hard to ignore the many Aran sweater patterns that are out there, and the history and mythology behind them. (There appears to be a lot of information out there about these sweaters, and it’s hard to tell where history ends and myth begins, so forgive any errors and my vastly incomplete knowledge of the subject.) These recognizable sweaters originated from the Aran islands in Ireland. Originally given to the fishermen of the islands, these sweaters were relatively more water-resistant, since they were knit with wool that still contained lanolin from the sheep. The sweaters are complex, and richly textured – usually having distinct columns with varying patterns. The columns are symmetric around the center of the sweater, and each stitch pattern carries its own significance. Cables are reminiscent of the fisherman’s lines and are a desire for good luck; other patterns may represent hard work, success, a good catch, etc.

One of the pervading myths about these sweaters is that each of the Irish clans had their own distinctive pattern, and that the bodies of fishermen lost at sea could be recognized by their sweaters. This was prompted by a 1904 play by J.M. Synge where a drowned fisherman was recognized by his hand-knit socks – his wife remembered dropped stitches from when she had made them. There is no record of anything like this actually occurring, however, and most research seems to indicate that connections to particular clans are mostly marketing ploys to sell sweaters to unsuspecting tourists. Aran sweaters are often thought of as ancient, traditional patterns, when it seems that they were perhaps invented in the early 1900s to be knitted and sold by the women of the islands. The first commercial patterns for these sweaters appeared in the 1940s by Patons of England, and they appeared in Vogue in the US in the 1950s.

These sweaters are beautiful, and a wonderful souvenir of a trip to Ireland (or a beautiful, hand-knit garment from a friend), but it seems that most of the marketing behind them relies on legend rather than history.

Aran Isle Sweaters
Aran knitting tradition
Wikipedia’s entry on Aran sweaters
The History of Aran Knitting

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