Kristin's Playground » History Nugget

History Nugget: Mountain Dew

beautyredefined — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:23:12 +0000

So, Pepsi has recently released the limited edition products Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback. These sodas are sweetened solely by sugar, and with their retro marketing are designed to remind the drinker of “the good ol’ days.” That’s great, and my husband is quite excited about the idea of sugar-sweetened soda being readily available, but it made us wonder. Mountain Dew has a such an unnatural reputation that the thought of it ever having been sugar sweetened seemed odd. So, this week’s history nugget takes a look into the past of Mountain Dew.

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:

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

Lone Star History Nugget

beautyredefined — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 03:26:46 +0000

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.)

Weber, David J. (1992), The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale Western Americana Series, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300051980