Unnameable Media

Series

Made in Indiana

Cannabis Americana, Belgian draft horses, television for Tehran and the Wabash corridor: the state as a laboratory for standardizing things.

7 parts, about 1 hr 44 min of reading. Start with part 1

  1. 1
    How Wabash, Indiana Became the Capital of the Belgian Draft Horse

    There is something wonderfully improbable about the fact that one of the most important institutions in the history of the American Belgian draft horse did not begin in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, or one of the great livestock…

    11 min read

  2. 2
    From Hashish to Cannabis Americana: Paschal Beverly Randolph, Eli Lilly, and the Standardization of Cannabis

    The history of cannabis in nineteenth-century America becomes much stranger when its separate histories are placed beside one another. Long before Americans argued about “marijuana,” Cannabis sativa already occupied several…

    12 min read

  3. 3
    Cannabis Americana: Eli Lilly and the Forgotten American Cannabis Industry

    Long before cannabis became synonymous with prohibition, counterculture, dispensaries, or the modern medical-marijuana debate, it occupied an ordinary place inside American pharmacy. Major pharmaceutical houses manufactured…

    13 min read

  4. 4
    Hemp, Belgian Horses, and Eli Lilly: How Indiana Learned to Standardize Nature

    The rise of Indiana's pharmaceutical industry makes more sense when it is placed beside two older industries that at first seem to have almost nothing to do with medicine: hemp and horses. During the nineteenth century, American…

    19 min read

  5. 5
    Between Two Hanging Rocks: Hotels, Lodges, Newspapers and the Forgotten Wabash Corridor

    There is an odd symmetry along the Wabash River that becomes visible only when the valley is treated as a single landscape.

    14 min read

  6. 6
    The Bloomington–Tehran Circuit: RCA, Indiana, and the Television Modernization of Iran

    Bloomington, Indiana, and Tehran, Iran, do not immediately look like places that belong in the same technological history. One was a Midwestern college town dominated by Indiana University and a sprawling RCA factory. The other…

    10 min read

  7. 7
    The Bogus Kingdom of Kirtland: Wildcat Banking, Buried Treasure, and the Strange Economy of Early Mormonism

    In the autumn of 1836, the fields around Kirtland were acquiring a second existence as city lots. A farm could still produce a crop while its owner imagined the streets, houses, shops, and incoming families that would make the…

    25 min read