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, after sitting US President and gold-standard champion William McKinley.
"...McKinley not only never set foot on the mountain, he never once set foot in the state of Alaska; he appears to have had no real policy or personal interest in the Alaska, mountains, cartography, or America’s wilderness."

That said, it turns out that in the US, you can rename (or, as in this case, re-rename) places if you jump through enough hoops.  In the 1970s, Alaska jumped through all these hoops, dotting all the is and crossing all the ts, except, well,

According to rules established earlier, it turned out that the US Board is supposed to change names after the steps Alaskans had taken have been completed — except when there was a bill in Congress that was already dealing with such a name change. And so Congressman Ralph Regula, then-US Representative from Ohio (McKinley’s birthplace) introduced legislation  that mentioned the name change and then refused to bring it to vote, thus forcing the US Board to refuse the request from Governor Hammond. Regula would go on the re-introcude that bill’s language every single Congressional session from 1975 until his retirement in 2009 for the sole purpose of thwarting the Alaskans. Since his retirement, his 1975 language continues to be re-introduced at the begining of each legislative session by other Congresscritters, specifically to use the Board’s rules of order from accepting Alaska’s request for a name change. Thus does McKinley share the dubious distinction of being the American mountain that has one official name in the one US state in which it’s located and another official name in all the other 49."

Nice work Ohio!
So yeah, I'm happy that its Denali again, and, for real, Thanks Obama!