Denali once more!
President Obama just announced that Mount McKinley was going to be "renamed" Denali. Why the quotes around renamed ? Well, it turns out that the whole Denali / McKinley thing has been controversial for quite a while. OK, to be really precise, its been controversial in (some parts) of Ohio where McKinley is from ( Tod from Ordinary Gentlemen explains this in gory detail). See, the thing is, everybody called the mountain Denali right up to the 1890s, when, as usual, politics intervened. As part of the "Gold vs Silver" battle of the 1890s (the whole " crucify mankind on a cross of gold " bit by William Jennings Bryan), Denali was renamed McKinley to stick it to William Jennings Bryan, and only to do so. No other reason (Bryan's opponent in these wars? McKinley...) In 1897 an Alaska-based gold miner named William Dickey penned an opinion piece for the New York Sun, saying that the federal government should rename Densmore to Mt. McKinley, a