National Parks Update

Over the course of the last 40 years, they’ve become a disappearing institution, according to Pew Research Center analysis of US labor statistics. Pew senior writer Drew DeSilver wrote about the phenomenon recently referring to the Great American Summer Job. And they were great, weren’t they? Not always fun or glamorous, but man, those of us who were teenagers in the 70s and 80s really could land all kinds of work to make a little spending money and while away the summer days. Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and will talk about how and why things have changed for teen workers in summer time.

The United Nations says more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas and that figure is rising quickly. On the one hand, urbanization brings modern benefits for quality of life and access to services. On the other, people who live in cities are more likely to suffer from anxiety disorders, depression and even schizophrenia. Researchers at Stanford University have been looking into the power of nature to mitigate those mental illnesses and published some intriguing evidence in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Greg Bratman is a doctoral student at the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University.

When did greed become acceptable in American culture? Marcus Smith and BYU history professor Grant Madsen discuss this question.

This weekend marks the two hundred and eleventh anniversary of one of history’s most famous, or infamous, duels. On July 11, 1804, the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, fatally shot his long-time political rival Alexander Hamilton, a noted Federalist who had been the first Secretary of the Treasury in the US. Here at Brigham Young University, we have in our library’s Special Collections an original letter written by Dirck ten Broeck, a former law clerk under Hamilton, who, in fact, had an appointment to see Hamilton on that fateful afternoon. The meeting never happened, but ten Broeck was there with Hamilton when he died and he wrote this letter to tell his father what happened. Russ Taylor is the Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and Dr. Matt Mason is an Associate Professor of History here at BYU. See a scan of the letter here