245,359 research outputs found
“Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799
No full textThis study analyzes a hitherto unexamined group, the French diplomatic corps during the Revolution (1789 to 1799), and focuses on the question of loyalty and conscience. For some diplomats choice was an illusion as their status often determined their fate. Some supported the king and continued to do so in spite of the high cost, often creatively sabotaging the Revolution. Others put nation, as they defined it, above king. Because the definition of loyalty constantly shifted the corps, like the army and the bureaucracy, was periodically purged. Those who had worked for or been sympathetic to the old regime or those who had allied with a certain political faction came under scrutiny. The turmoil in the diplomatic corps not only had international repercussions but also reflects larger societal trends, such as the attack on the aristocracy and the displacement of one elite by another. The French diplomatic corps was thus emblematic of many issues surrounding the revolutionary struggle of this decade.Publisher PD
Heritage Society (Houston)
No full textLetter from J. H. Nellis to Messrs. Burtis and French discussing numbers of coupons
Interview with William J. Mobley by Jerry French, June 4, 2001
No full textOral history interview with William J. Mobley as interviewed by Jerry French.
Mr. Mobley discusses his family farm and how it became part of the Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. He would work on the refuge and talks about his duties, the weather, equipment, and early years of the refuge and the issues associated with it.
Organization: FWS
Name: William J. Mobley
Years: 1964-1994
Program: Refuges/Law Enforcement
Keywords:History; Employees (USFWS); Personnel; Wildlife refuges; Law enforcement; Biography; Work of the Service; Wildlife refuges; Waterfowl; Insects; Youth; Public attitudes; Weather impacts; Farms and farming; Youth; Restoration, Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge; family farmINTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM J. MOBLEY
BY JERRY FRENCH, JUNE 4, 2001
MR. FRENCH: Good afternoon. It’s June 4th, 2 pm. I am interviewing Mr. William
Mobley. This is Jerry French. We are doing the interview on the front porch of his brick
home in Maxwell, New Mexico. Bill is a longtime Service employee and recently retired
after spending thirty years. The interesting thing about Bill’s background is the Maxwell
Refuge. Much of this refuge was built on his family’s property. Bill, tell us about your
parents and grandparents and what it was like to grow up on that property.
MR. MOBLEY: My parents and grandparents came to this part of the country around
1920. My grandfather bought this property. Originally, it was 215 irrigated acres, which
at that time was sufficient for two families. He passed away in 1943 and my father took
up the payments on that piece of property. He was living there at the time that the
government bought it. Although he wasn’t farming it, I had begun to farm it in 1962. We
didn’t sell to the government until 1966. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how
you look at it, I went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service. I count my thirty years
with them as some of the most valuable time that I have ever spent anywhere. I really
cherish every day that I worked for them. As far as growing up on the farm; my earliest
memories date back to probably 1939. 1939 was the tail end of the depression here.
Nobody had anything. Everybody was reasonably well satisfied because nobody had
anything. Everybody was broke. We were pretty well off. My Dad had diary cows and
he separated the milk and produced cream, which was shipped to the creamery. Mother
had chickens and she sold eggs to the local store, and traded them from groceries. That’s
how we got along until probably 1943 or so. Some of the earliest work days that I
remember were following a pair of workhorses behind a corn cultivator. At that time,
cropping is this area was pretty diversified. We had sugar beets, corn, small grain, and
soybeans. Of course the root crops suffered pretty much because of the introduction of
European vine weed. That was introduced into the area in the sugar beet seed, as I
understand. When that exists, it’s hard to raise anything without using chemicals. Now,
it’s gone now to alfalfa cropping, or alfalfa rotation systems. Soon after the refuge was
established, we discovered that we had to either farm it, or find somebody else to farm it.
I inherited that job for this refuge. I established the system of sharecropping, the
cooperative farmer agreement system. This worked very well until 1977 when we ran out
of cooperative farmers that either got too old, or too lazy to farm. We began to farm
some of it ourselves then. We did farm a lot of the acreage up until the time that I retired
in 1994. I had to stop and think about it a little bit. [What year] It seems like about two
days ago, actually.
MR. FRENCH: Bill, there’s a lot of wildlife here. Maxwell is very well known for the
Eagles that come out there, and for the Goose populations. What were the wildlife
populations out there when you were a child?
MR. MOBLEY: When I was child waterfowl populations were pretty good. Probably
because of the diversified farming methods. But then in later years, about the time that
the refuge was established, you had to really look to find a Canada goose. There were
quite a few ducks, but the Canada goose was nonexistent. I never saw an Eagle for about
ten years during that period, either bald or golden. It is unusual not to see Golden Eagles
in this part of the country. Anything that looked like it might fit on the dinner table
went. Pheasants, quail, we had a fellow at one time who raised “franklins” out there.
These are Partridges. They lasted about six months I think, before somebody got a hold
of them. You never saw a deer. I never saw a “coon” until I was probably sixteen years
old. Of course, Prairie Dogs have always had a place. They were more under control
then, than they are now. Really that’s about it.
MR. FRENCH: One time, years ago; Bill and I have known each other for many years;
[to listener] we were eating lunch of something and you were telling me how as a child,
your parents sent you out to the fields with two clapboards.
MR. MOBLEY: Yes.
MR. FRENCH: And you would go out there to keep the ducks of off the crops.
MR. MOBLEY: Yes, that’s right.
MR. FRENCH: Would you relate what that experience was like?
MR. MOBLEY: Well, years ago we used to cut our grain crops with a binder. This put
it in nice little bundles that weighed about twenty pounds apiece probably. We came out
and piled the bundles up into shocks. The shocks would have seven to nine bundles in
them depending on the kind of grain. And we always put a cap shock on the top, flat.
The ones that you put on the side, you stood upright, with the butt end down. You put
the cap shock on top to keep the hales from shelling it down. This was an ideal place for
mallards. At that time, at the tail end of the depression, money was short and nobody
had money enough to buy ammunition to scare these things off. They did come out with
a kind of a cracker shell that they used. They weren’t too effective. But I used to have
two boards about maybe six inches wide and about two feet long. And it was my job to
go down to the grain field at about sundown and whack these two boards together. It
made a sound like a gunshot to scare the ducks off. Then I got sophisticated. We hinged
the two boards together with a handle on the outside so all you had to do was put your
hands together.
MR. FRENCH: Just keep you thumbs out of it!
MR. MOBLEY: Yes, keep your thumbs out of it! You didn’t have to be told but once!
But anyway, that’s the way we would keep the ducks off. If you could keep them off
until after the sun went down, they didn’t seem to bother it much, but there was about an
hour before sundown that you had to keep them scared out. They would just clean a
grain field in two or three days.
MR. FRENCH: Aside from waterfowl, you talked about how there were no deer; tell me
about the coyotes and rattlesnakes and some of these other creatures that people are
always interested in.
MR. MOBLEY: I never saw a coyote or rattlesnake until I was probably about eighteen
years old. So that will tell you about how many we had. As I say, we saw prairie dogs
pretty regular, but I don’t know that I ever saw a coyote until I was eighteen. That
would have put it at about 1952 or somewhere in there.
MR. FRENCH: For the interest of the transcriber, Bill and I can go back and relate
stories that we have talked about before. Would you tell us a little bit about the country
following the dust bowl days of the 1930s?
MR. MOBLEY: I don’t remember all that much about the 1930s because I was born in
the mid 1930s. In the late 1930s we were just sort of recovered from the dust bowl days.
What made it hard here was that in 1941 we have an excessive amount of moisture in the
fall and it washed out several of the irrigation lakes, including the one at Hebron where our
irrigation water came from. That made us for several years there, dependent on
floodwater only. We didn’t have a storage facility and the only way we got any water
was when it would rain in the mountains, and a flood would come down. And you’d best
be ready for it when it came because they turned it out in large quantities, for a short time.
That’s kind of how I got broken in to irrigating I guess, the flood irrigating, through that
method. I can tell you quite a bit about the 1950s. I can remember three years with not a
tenth of an inch of rain. All of the fences that had any sort of weeds growing in then
collected blow dust and we would find a fence at original ground level, and another fence
on top of a sand dune, which covered up the original fence. That was quite a mess. It
took about twenty years to get all of that blow sand scattered out again. And in places on
the refuge, there are still sand dunes from that. Along about the winter of 1955 it started
to get some moisture again. It started to rain, and finally turned into snow. We had
pretty good years through the late 1950s, and early 1960s. You have to figure on periodic
droughts in this part of the country, it’s just a part of the ecology of this area. It has been
proved that about every twelve or thirteen years, you get a dry one and maybe more than
one, sometimes as much as five or six in a row. If you don’t have sufficient water in
storage to cover those dry times you’re out of luck. You don’t raise anything. During the
time that I farmed for the refuge, I can only remember one year when we had trouble.
One year we had one fortieth of an acre-foot of water allocated. Needless to say, we put
it all in one place, but we still didn’t raise very much! That would have been in the late
1970s.
MR. FRENCH: When Maxwell Refuge started, you were the only employee for quite
some time. I know that you answered to other people, but you were the only employee
on the ground. Would you like to relate some of those experiences and what it was like to
take this farmland, which had been so devastated by the 1950s and try to turn it around
and try to make it productive and restore it again?
MR. MOBLEY: Well, it was quite an experience. I’ll say that! The hardest thing about
those years that I was by myself, it was seven years; these were the years immediately
after the refuge opened. The hardest thing about that was trying to convince people that
they couldn’t do anything that they wanted to on the refuge. Their philosophy was,
“Well, the government owns it, and we own the government, therefore it belongs to us,
and we can do whatever we damn well please”! That was a little bit of a problem. Plus,
in those days we didn’t have a law enforcement Academy. When I went to work, the
Refuge Manager came up and he brought me a book about three quarters of an inch thick.
It said, Law Enforcement for the Fish and Wildlife Service Officer. He also brought me a
pistol and a badge and said, “Go to it”! I put in a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure
out if I was doing the right thing, or not! I think that was the hardest part of it. A lot of
the land had been over used. It had been over grazed. There were many places where
there were natural stands of grass and climax vegetation had occurred and been dry for so
long that that vegetation had died. And that all needed to be restored, mostly to keep it
from blowing away. We had an area around where the office is now located that was
particularly bad. It took a lot of manipulation to get that back to where it didn’t blow
away and to get a little grass started on it. We used several different methods on that.
We used a method of strip florigation. [Sic] The idea being, that if you rough it up a little
bit, it catches the sand and doesn’t have a chance to get started. We piled dead trees in
windrows to break up the wind so you didn’t just devastate the land. We used clover as a
cover crop whenever there was enough moisture for clover. That worked really well. We
finally got some grass started, and I think it’s pretty much grassed over now. It’s safe
now that I don’t think we have to worry about it blowing away. But when I first went to
work for them I put in many days at the office where you couldn’t see Lake 12, which is
about a quarter of a mile south of the office. You couldn’t see that lake at all, for the
blowing sand. That is not good advertisement for any land owning agency, regardless of
who they are. But like I say, it was interesting. It took a lot of work. For seven years, I
was here by myself. Anything that I couldn’t do by myself didn’t get done. In 1975 I
believe, we got an Assistant Manager up here, and he was able to do a lot of the office
work. That let me out into the field and I could get a lot more done. Plus, he could help
me with the things that took four hands instead of two.
MR. FRENCH: If you go out to the refuge now you would never be able to envision
what it looked like then. Most of the refuges anymore have lots of people, and nice
buildings. They have good equipment. Would you relate what your buildings and
equipment were like during your first few years?
MR. MOBLEY: We had seven farmsteads, I believe. The best one of those buildings
would have made a good outhouse. That’s about the best I can say for those. The houses
were all right. The barns and outbuildings had been left to go to rack and ruin. We
couldn’t do very much in the way of salvage but we finally managed to get rid of all of
those. Some of the old houses, which had not been occupied for several years, were
without windows, doors, roofs or floors and just a shell. Those had to be gotten rid of.
Where the office site is now; that was an old farmhouse. It had four rooms and a
bathroom, I believe. It served us very well until the new office was built. The shop was
a converted chicken house. At one time, the man that had lived there raised chickens on a
large scale for the eggs. He had this big building and it was all right except that it only had
about a six-foot plate on it, and you couldn’t get anything but a pick up into it. We had a
little problem with that. But we got it to where it had three bays in there where we could
park our pickups in. Our fire truck that we had at the time was parked in there and keep
it heated to that it didn’t freeze. It wasn’t the best, but it served its purpose.
MR. FRENCH: Would you describe some of your other equipment? I’ve seen pictures
of you on some pretty ramshackle old farm equipment. Relate some of your equipment.
MR. MOBLEY: During the early years we had what nobody else wanted. I think our
first tractor was an old Farmall. It was a pretty good machine, I guess, for the day it was
built. But it didn’t really serve our needs all that well. We got real prosperous along in
the late 1960s when we got a little Massey-Ferguson front-end loader with an box blade
on the back of it. We just worked the heck out of that thing. We had a lot of use for that.
We didn’t really get any real good equipment until the early 1970s. The bicentennial year
gave us funds for a lot of those. But the old equipment, we didn’t have much of it. The
first fire pumper we had was a fifty-five-gallon barrel mounted on a missile dolly with a
little pressure pump. It ran off of a gasoline engine. You could get about forty pounds of
pressure out of the thing. It was a little positive displacement pump. It could put out a
fire if it wasn’t any more than five feet across. At that time we had a lot of problem with
people smoking. Smoking was a popular thing, and throwing a cigarette out of the
window was the thing that everybody did. You could see a little column of smoke along a
public road, you would right quickly get the little fire pump in the back of your pickup
and see if you could put it out. As far as I know we never did have to call the fire
department during all of those years. We managed to get it done every time. It was
mostly luck though mostly luck.
MR. FRENCH: I’ve seen pictures of you pushing an old bulldozer around. What was
that?
MR. MOBLEY: Well that was a surplus. Actually we had two of them at different
times. One of them I got from Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Benford, and that was the
better of the two. One of them came from Lubuck, as surplus equipment. It didn’t last
very long. It had sat out for a while and down in that part of the country if full of red
sand when the wind blows. So it didn’t last very long. But with the one that we got from
Rocky Mountain Arsenal, I did a lot of that moving the blow sand out of the way. And
pieces of old buildings had been left there just rotting. I pushed them together and burned
a few, and buried a lot of them. Before I left, I tried to make a kind of a map with the
areas where these landfills were. I sure hope that somebody doesn’t go out there and try
and dig a well or something in one of those, because they have everything in them. There
are rocks, concrete, a little bit of wood. It’s not anything that would taint the water I
don’t think; it’s all just building scrap.
MR. FRENCH: During the time that I worked with you, I know we found several old
cisterns. I believe we dropped a tractor into one of them one day. Would you tell people
what it’s like to work around all of those old homesteads?
MR. MOBLEY: The first that you do is to walk about a three-foot grid through the
whole thing. And then if you don’t find anything that way, get on the equipment. You’ll
soon find it then. As Jerry says, I fell into several cisterns. I thought that I knew where a
lot of these areas were around these old farmsteads but apparently I had forgotten. It
used to be a popular thing for everyone to have a well house that was built underground.
When they left most of them just piled straw or something on top those well houses, so
when you moved the bale of straw, you went into the well house. If the well house was
of any size at all, you had a little trouble getting out. The wells here don’t produce the
quality of water that is potable. You can’t drink it. It is so hard that it bounces. So
people use these cisterns to either catch rainwater, or to haul water from the village for
their needs. Everybody had at least one cistern, sometimes two. Sometimes they would
fill one cistern from the irrigation water and another from the town water so that they had
water to cook and take a bath in. All of those had to be filled up. A lot of the old ones
were brick on the inside. It is quite a job to tear one of those things up. They are pretty
well constructed. They are made sort of like a Greek urn, about that shape. There are
curved sides and the top locked together on top. They usually had about an eighteen inch
round hole in the top. [Unintelligible] So when you hit one of those, you knew that you
had hit something. It seems like to me that I counted up one time, twenty-six of those
cisterns and wells out there. I think that there might have been maybe one or two that I
didn’t get covered up!
MR. FRENCH: I know of one that sits there just north of Lake 12. We went out to
cover it up one day and we sank the tractor on our way out there. In fact, not only did
we sink the tractor, but I think we sank the tractor that was going to go and rescue the
tractor.
MR. MOBLEY: We almost sank the Maintainer that we were trying to put the other
two out with! Yes, I remember that!
MR. FRENCH: Bill, one thing which we suffer in this part of the country; and I’m not
sure other people can particularly appreciate it, is being hit by hordes of grasshoppers.
You’ve seen them come all of your life. Would you like to relate a little bit about what
it’s like to farm around these things, and suffer these devastating hordes?
MR. MOBLEY: The Bible tells us about the swarms of locusts and it’s about the same
as that. It takes a certain type of year for the grasshoppers to hatch. Apparently the
eggs stay in the soil for several years. And when the conditions are just right, they hatch
out. When you’ve got them, you’ve got a lot of them. And there’s really not a whole lot
that you can do. When chemical insect controls first came out, everybody sprayed.
Chloredane was the insecticide of choice at that time. I believe that if Chloredane would
kill you, you ought to be dead by now because I ingested quite a lot of if from the time I
was probably fourteen years old up until it was banned in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
We had to spray about every third year for grasshoppers. In later years, they came out
with a biological control for them. It was protozoa that worked on their alimentary
system. It proved to be about at effective as the pesticides. I used to enjoy seeing the
salesmen that sold these pesticides. I enjoyed them coming around because they would
say; “Now this product is the answer to all of your prayers! You use this, and you
won’t have any grasshoppers”! I used to tell them that I had been spraying for twenty
years and we’ve still got grasshoppers, “So somebody’s not telling the truth”! One or
two of them got a little sore about it too! But that’s ok. Well, there’s just no way that if
you’ve got that many grasshoppers; if you can figure out a third of the crop and that’s it,
at best.
MR. FRENCH: Well, my first year at Maxwell was 1988, and it was a particularly hard
year for grasshoppers. Bill, maybe between us we can describe what it is like to have the
sidewalks, the sides of buildings crawling with them. They are eating every green thing
that they can get their hands on. Without seeing it, it’s hard to describe what it’s like to
live in those kinds of conditions.
MR. MOBLEY: It really is. There just isn’t a whole lot of ways to describe it, other
than “a plague of locusts”. I have seen them eat all of the leaves off of trees, even.
We Serve the People of Kansas [2025] / presented by Andrew J. French, Chairperson, Kansas Corporation Commission.
No full textMarch 4, 2025.
Presentation before the Kansas Legislature, Senate Utilities Committee, presented by Andrew J. French, Chairperson, Kansas Corporation Commission.
Presenter's name, presentation date and committee name taken from Kansas Legislature website.Presentation giving an overview of the Kansas Corporation Commission, its divisions and regulatory authority, as well as a summary of its activities and budget
Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War
No full textThis study investigates French images of women during the First World War, the feminine postures and roles captured by photographers, how female images were used in the wartime media and by the state, and how captions and other textual modes strengthened an overarching message of total consent. By analysing the three most prominent genres of female imagery during the period – women in distress, feminine devotion, and women toiling for the war effort – this book seeks to demonstrate how photography assisted in the gender work of the war. Photographers and publishers showed how traditional feminine traits could contribute to a male-designed and directed war effort, while also concealing instances of female dissent, which included feminist, socialist, popular and pacifist objections to the war. Yet, although the archives contain few wartime images created by French women themselves, this work also introduces a small group of period photographs, lithographs, articles and literary works that disrupted the visual narrative of subordination.Publisher PD
A francophone political culture? Similarities and differences among French speakers in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and France
No full textThis paper explores whether language shapes political culture by examining the case of French and a possible transnational francophone political culture. Using original survey data from Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and France collected in autumn 2020, we find only small within-country differences between francophones and non-francophones and limited transnational alignment. National patterns dominate even in multilingual federations with divided media landscapes and centrifugal politics. Only regarding feminism and drug policy do we find evidence of a common francophone orientation. In both domains, French mother tongue is correlated with the same distinct attitude regarding the role of the state compared to non-French speakers. These findings suggest that language is indeed related to political culture, albeit in a circumscribed manner. We thus contribute to scholarship on political behaviour and multicultural federalism by exploring how language shapes attitudes for individuals and groups alike
[Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author #1]
No full textReport to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author. The report contains a list of officers who gave depositions to the United States Attorney
[Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author #2]
No full textReport to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author. The report contains a list of officers who gave depositions to the United States Attorney
Rich Dad Poor Dad: An Entrepreneurial Approach to the Teaching of Business French
No full textUS higher education has focused on the development of new cadres of employees to the near exclusion of entrepreneurship as a career path. In this article, the authors describe an entrepreneurial approach to the teaching of Business French. The senior author served as the course instructor while the junior author was a student who completed the course. To provide an entry into the world of global entrepreneurship, the senior author selected the French translation of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. In parallel with the reading of Rich Dad, students completed a series of entrepreneurial course activities. Selected activities are described from the perspectives of both authors. The article ends with students’ feelings about (1) entrepreneurship, (2) future career plans, (3) the theme of the course, and (4) the use of Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad
French, J J, QX19566
No full textThis record was harvested from a previous catalogue system and will be withdrawn in 2025. Information in this record may be superseded or incomplete. Visit this record in UMA's new catalogue at: https://archives.library.unimelb.edu.au/nodes/view/386371Surname: FRENCH. Given Name(s) or Initials: J J. Military Service Number or Last Known Location: QX19566. Missing, Wounded and Prisoner of War Enquiry Card Index Number: 26487.208141
Item: [2016.0049.18664] "French, J J, QX19566
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