Hi, I'm Jake free felt I'm here with my co-author Richard Edwards. I'm the director of the Center for Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois Springfield He is the director emeritus of the Center for Great Plains studies at the University of Nebraska. And we're here with you today to talk about our recent book. The first migrants how black homesteaders quest for land and freedom heralded America's great migration. And I just want to start by thanking the National Archives for hand having us today. We did a lot of research at the National Archives all the homestead records or all the successful homestead records at least are at the archives. So we could not have done this work without them. So the story we're going to tell today begins in September 1877. When 308 black Americans left the verdant hills around Lexington Kentucky on a perilous journey, they hoped would bring them to their promised land. They were led by Reverend Simon Roundtree, a formerly enslaved man, as well as a white land developer named W. R. Hill. Their cannon was called Kansas. The group gathered at a train station near nightfall, men, women and children carrying their household goods, leaving a few cows and horses as well. They crowded together jostling each other as they boarded the train. Agents for competing railroads bugged them to buy a ticket from their line. The travelers retired, carrying crying babies, they sat for hours. And finally at midnight, the short line train started moving, departing Lexington for Louisville. More migrants joined along the way. They shivered and tried to keep warm in the noisy train car. At Louisville, they climbed down, unloaded their worldly possessions and changed the Louisville and Indianapolis line. On they went, changing trains several more times, unloading and loading their goods as they did it. Until they finally reached their destination, Ellis, Kansas. Done with their train travel, they still had miles to go. Now these folks, you might ask yourself, why are they leaving Kentucky for Kansas? Why are they considering Kansas their promised land? Well, these folks, like a lot of Black Southerners after the Civil War, had soaring hopes. It was a time of jubilee and the reconstruction was happening. The hope was, well, now we're free. We're going to get land. But by the mid 1870s, that promise had been replaced with anguish and horror. One of the bitterest memories from reconstruction was the defeat of freed people's ability to own land in the South. Congress had created the Freedman's Bureau to help Black Southerners construct lives as freed people. The Freedman's Bureau focused on about one million acres of confiscated lands from Confederates. But in 1866, Andrew Johnson betrayed the promise of giving those lands to freedmen and pardoned most Confederates for their treason, giving the land back to the traders. This left little land for the Bureau to settle Black people on. And so, white folks and former slave owners were the ones who retained the best Southern lands. When Congress acted, I mean, in 1866, they passed the Southern Homestead Act, opening 46 million acres of public land in the states where Congress owned public land. So that's Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Open that up for homesteading. So Black Southerners could go out to those lands and claim land to try to get it for free. This was largely a failure. First, because most of those lands are timber, so you need some capital or extra laborers or be able to hire labor to clear those lands. Also, they're often harassed by white Southerners when they try to claim this Southern Homestead Act land. So avenues to become independent landowners in the South just weren't open to freed people. So some, like our folks who are leaving Kentucky, went West. When I say West, I mean that swath, that green shaded swath on the screen, the Great Plains, often referred to as flyover country or flown over country. And why were they looking West? Well, W.R. Hill, the white town developer who accompanied Reverend Roundtree to Kentucky to recruit settlers assured the settlers that Black Hansons lived as equals to whites in western Kansas. And word was out that the government would give them free land through the Homestead Act of 1862. So when the Republican Party, we're going to rewind a little bit, right, when the Republican Party grows up in the 1850s, they come together mainly to stop the extension of slavery into this green shaded area, these new territories. And their goal, what they're going to do with this land, aside from a lot of slaveholders, not to settle it, is they're going to give it away in 160 acre plots to settlers that can keep it for free. And they actually end up passing one of these Homestead Acts during the Buchanan administration in 1860 and it's vetoed by President Buchanan. But when Abraham Lincoln gets the presidency, you know, the guy behind me, always over my shoulder, the most Southerners have left Congress after secession. And so Congress waste little time, they passed the Homestead Act of 1862. And this allows, exactly what I said, you to claim 160 acres of free land, as long as you're the head of a family, 21 years old, a US citizen, or announced your intent to become a US citizen. You have to build a dwelling on the land, cultivate 10 acres, or make improvements is the shorthand plant, and reside in the land for five years. And once those five years are up, you can go back to the land office with witnesses, saying that you did all those things, and you would prove up was the term your land, you'd have you could do it. You owned it free and clear you could do anything with it that you want, take loans out against it, sell it if you wanted to, or continue to cultivate it. And this is the reason our Kentuckians are headed to Kansas, this idea of free land. The land and opportunity for equality. Now, when they descended from that train at Ellis, it was near their destination, but they still had miles to go. They had trouble finding shelter as new arrivals, they overwhelmed the small white town of Ellis. They had another problem. W. R. Hill, that white land developer has assured them that when they bought their tickets, the cost of trading their goods would be covered. And now they found out different, and they had to spend a lot of their savings paying that bill. Of course, Ellis, I say nearby nearby to a 21st century person, they had to walk 37 miles further to their destination, their promised land at Nicodemus. So they set off across the prairie. There were no roads. They follow deer trails and Buffalo Wallows. They guided themselves by compass and the few terrain features they could spot. To them, which price like endless grassland, the really alien terrain in Kansas compared to what they're used to the blue grasses and trees of Kentucky. But the thought of their destination at Nicodemus buoyed their spirits. The town site company had circulated promotional information like this poster seen here. One poster suggested that Nicodemus when they got there would be teaming with wild game horses, easily tamed horses they could put to work on their farms. The Valley had limestone to build their honest and homes and abundant firewood as well. The Valley offered excellent water in rivers and numerous springs. A handbill advertising the town site suggested the colony would have already erected houses and mercantile business. Sounds like a city rather than a small colony. A church would have already been erected as well as a post office. Once they got to this marvelous town, they could then go off and claim land to the Homestead Act. Elvira Williams, a later migrant to Nicodemus, remembered that we never owned a home of our own. So when we talked of moving into our own home, it was a happy thought. So Nicodemus would be a fine sight when they saw this bustling metropolis that was described to them in the literature. When they arrived, there were no houses, no church, no buildings whatsoever. They're rolling hills covered by endless grassland. They're particularly distressed to find no trees to supply the timber they were promised to build their homes. Even more troubling, they arrived too late to plant the crops. They were furious at Hill. They chased him to his friend's house, his sod house. He hid in the sod house for a while. One report says behind the friend's wife's skirts, he ends up escaping under a load of hay to nearby Stockton to sort of wait until cooler heads prevail. 60 migrants immediately turned around and left back to Kentucky. But 200 stayed. Why did the 200 stay? The name of the town I think supplies us with a little bit of a clue. Nicodemus isn't just an accidental name. It means something. It's likely from the song that was popular at the time, Wake Nicodemus. And I'm not going to sing because we'll lose everyone from the Zoom webinar if I start singing, but I will read just one verse.  He was reckoned as part of the salt of the earth, but he died years ago, very old. Plus his last sad request. So he laid him away in the trunk of an old hollow tree. Wake me up was his charge at the first break of day. Wake me up from the great Jubilee. It's a song about an enslaved person who dies and is buried, but says he will rise again at the great Jubilee when slavery is over and slavery is over. And Nicodemus is there to give the promise of the Jubilee, their birthright. Despite the desolate era area, more settlers come. And despite the impressive name, the new settlers aren't impressed with what they see at Nicodemus. This is Reverend Hickman, his wife, Williana, and him come with that second group. And is there, and Williana Hickman tells the story of what, as they're approaching Nicodemus, she's not feeling well. She's in the bed of a wagon. Here is the man, her husband start whooping and collaring, and she says, well, what's going on? And they say, there's Nicodemus. And Williana Hickman says, I looked with all the eyes I have and said, where is Nicodemus? And when they pointed to some smoke coming from homes dug into the hill, Williana Hickman said she began to weep. But again, it was about this hope of the Jubilee. So more migrants followed, and not just at Nicodemus. They founded other communities that we talked about in the book in the Great Plains. And look at the names, we already talked about Nicodemus, but we have Empire, Wyoming, Deerfield, Colorado, named because the land was so dear to them. Blackdom, New Mexico, like a kingdom of black people. In DeWitty, that doesn't seem that exciting. Until you realize later they renamed the town Audacious. These folks were settling the Great Plains because they knew they were about big business. They knew that this was their birthright, and they were there to claim free land. They knew in their bones that land was the best way to get autonomy away from the violent white authority they faced in the south. But how could our Nicodemus folks exceed in such a harsh and unwelcoming place? And for that, I'm going to kick it over to my co-author, Rick Edwards. Thank you, Jake. As noted, the migrants to Nicodemus left Kentucky and arrived in Kansas and walked to Nicodemus, arriving in September of 1877. They arrived too late to plant gardens or dig up fields for crops. The first thing they did was to try to build homes. And what they discovered was the home building materials were the ground themselves. Next slide, please. Here is a half dugout. You build this by starting by digging into the ground about three or four feet, cutting through the dense maze of prairie grass roots down about three or four feet. Then you save the sod and build up the walls above ground another three feet or so. You cap it over with a roof made of sod or any materials you can find. And that's your home. This was such a different environment, such a different climate and physical terrain from what they had seen and known in Kentucky. As Jake mentioned, the towering forests, they were gone. There was nothing to make a shadow. They found no trees to shelter them and give them comfort under. And of course, some were so discouraged that they turned around and went back, but most stayed and they tried to figure out how to make a new life in this strange and alien place. Elvira Williams, one of the people who came in the second group, said, it was such an unusual place. There was nothing to arrest the site. And my eyes ached from looking so far and seeing nothing. Because they arrived so late in the year, they couldn't grow any crops. And so they had to live on the meager supplies that they had brought with them. They built their homes as dugouts. Next slide, please. Jenny Fletcher, the woman on the right here, opened the school in her dugout and had between 15 and 45 students crammed in to her little dugout. ZT Fletcher, the man on the left here, and Jenny's husband went off to Wichita to work. Because all of the migrants, including the Fletchers, desperately needed cash to buy the things, the supplies, and other things that they needed to purchase. So he went off to Wichita to work and he sent money back to Jenny. The problem was that Jenny had no place to spend the money. There were no stores. There were no vendors. There were no people wanting to sell supplies or blankets or warm winter jackets, except up in Ellis, 37 miles away. And in winter, deep snows and the frigid cold prevented people from traveling to Ellis to get supplies. So Jenny and many of the other women stayed in Nicodemus during that first winter, men off working in the cities, not all of them, but some of them. And they nearly starved. They had come to Kentucky, to Kansas, fearing wild animals, hostile Indians, and probably malicious whites. Well, they didn't have any wild animals to contend with. And during the time of famine that first winter, some Osage and Potawatomi Indians traveled past on their way back to their homelands from their annual hunt in the mountains. They saw how desperate the colony was, the residents were. And they gave them meat, maybe as much as half of their annual hunt, which allowed the colony to survive that first winter. So the hostile Indians that they feared turned out to be good-hearted neighbors. By 1880, the community had put down roots, both figuratively and actually. Elvira Williams remembered how her husband Thornton had spaded up a small garden the first summer. And every year he spaded up more land and pretty soon he had a field instead of a garden to tend to. Next slide, please. This is the Mitchell family on their homestead. This is the early 1880s. You can see that they now have a frame house, not a dugout. There is farm equipment. You can see the wheels in the background, the farm wagons and other equipment back there. They have a couple of horses, they have outbuildings, and they themselves look like they are healthy and prospering. The town of Nicodemus also developed. Of course, most people lived on the land because they had made this arduous and dangerous migration in order to own land, not to live in town. But some people lived in town and during these years the town gained a post office, a general store, generally out of everything store, disgruntled customer sometimes called it. Two stables, a couple of hotels, really just small sod buildings with an extra room attached. Other businesses, a church and a schoolhouse. The town had two newspapers. It also developed many civic and religious organizations. A literary society, a cornet band, the daughters of Zion, and many other organizations as people began to construct the civic and religious cultural life which they wanted for their community. The big celebrations in this community were the 4th of July and Emancipation Day. Here is a poster for the 52nd Emancipation Day celebration in 1939, somewhat later. And if you could read the writing on this poster, you can see that this is a big glorious event in the town life. There are games, there are races, there are food stalls, there are all sorts of things for children to have fun. There are also baseball games, boxing matches, there's platform dancing every afternoon and evening. There is a show to be put on by the Dixie Melody Entertainers and then in the evening there are celebrated orators who come to speak. This is often the highlight of the celebration. Orators who come to speak about the past troubles and oppression of black people and the glorious future of black people if they continue on the upward trend which they have recently gained. Baseball was a very fun and favorite entertainment. Here is the baseball team from Nicodemus in 1905. They were well known as a tough team to beat. They were good baseball players and it provided a great deal of satisfaction for the town and entertainment for the town. So the town of Nicodemus prospered in the 1880s. Next slide please. Here is a picture taken about 1885. In this photo we see a church in the background, the Williams General merchandise store. We see a bunch of people gathered on the street of Nicodemus probably for a Saturday market day visit to town from their homesteads. But the homesteading venture, this risky endeavor which they undertook and which they worked so hard on, struggled so long for, was not just about getting a farm and developing their own family's financial prosperity. It was also about freedom. An essential aspect of life in Nicodemus was the sense that people were free, free from the oppression, the pervasive violence, the damaged and limited aspirations allowed in the south. And these people could make their own decisions about how the town would be governed, about what they would do in their own lives and they exalted in it. One important area of freedom for Nicodemus and for most of the black homesteader communities was that they had control over their schools. Now in the south schools were largely controlled by white school committees or school boards that had little interest in having good schools for black children. But here they could control their own schools. This goes back to slave days when under slavery and slave people were prohibited from learning how to read and write. They were, people in Nicodemus were reminded of that almost every day because Reverend Roundtree, remember him, he was the leader of the first group out of Kentucky to come to Nicodemus. Reverend Roundtree when he was a boy and enslaved wanted to learn how to read and write and his owner's young son was teaching him. The owner discovered the two boys and was outraged and as punishment branded the cheek of Reverend Roundtree. Ever after Reverend Roundtree carried a scar on his cheek that reminded everyone how precious education was. In Nicodemus and in other black communities control over the schools was a precious part of freedom and of their aspirations for the future. Now unfortunately for Nicodemus, for the town of Nicodemus, it like other Great Plains towns depended on obtaining two things to ensure its survival. One was becoming the county seat. If a town became the county seat it got the courthouse. It got the business that brought people to the town. It created lots of businesses and jobs around the courthouse. Unfortunately Nicodemus lost the county election to become the county seat. The second thing they needed was a connection to the national rail network. They needed the rail line to come through Nicodemus so that they could bring in the supplies and farm equipment and other things they needed to purchase and send out the crops they grew to national markets. And after a time during which the railroads dangled the lure of a railroad connection before the town leaders in Nicodemus, the railroads decided on other routes and Nicodemus was left without a rail connection. So Nicodemus the town rapidly deteriorated during the 1890s. It declined as businesses moved out and moved to places that either had the county seat or a rail connection. And especially in the hard times of the 1890s, the Great Depression of the 1890s, people left the town of Nicodemus. But the homesteaders on their farms in the lands surrounding the town stayed. They persevered through those hard times. They continued to farm and they farmed well into the 20th century. Many of them only abandoned or sold their land in the desperate times of the 1930s and the Great Depression. But Nicodemus, even today, still has descendants and residents who live in Nicodemus. Jake. Thanks, Rick for talking to us about Nicodemus. But as I mentioned before, the only action wasn't in Nicodemus. There are other settlers as well became one of their black homesteaders. And not all of them settled in one of those six communities we talked about necessarily. This photo is a photo of the Spice family from the 1880s out in Nebraska. But it has deep roots back to the 1790s when Moses Shores was born into slavery. Moses Shores and his wife, Fanny, eventually had a child named Jerry Shores or Jeremiah Shores. And the family is separated through sale. Shores remarried and had at least two more children, one of whom was Moses Spice, who is seated here on the far left of this photo in Nebraska. And Moses Spice was born in North Carolina. He remained there after emancipation. He was one of these folks like those folks in Lexington who left Nicodemus, who celebrated emancipation. It seemed like a new world was opening. And in freedom, he turned to what he knew best, and that was farming. But he got caught in the exploitative systems of sharecropping and debt peonage. Sharecropping, the land he rented from a white landowner, he would have to pay the rent for it in part of his crop. Decreasing the amount he could make selling it. He had to buy his tools at the owner's store, hampering him with increasing amounts of debt. Spice had had enough of this. He didn't know how he was going to make his fortune, acquire his own land in the south with all this debt. So one day he mentioned to his owner that I think I'm going to go west. I'm really interested in this idea of free land, and his enslaver was outraged. He said, you ought not to go, but if you do, you're going to have to leave your wife, Susan Kirk, and your children behind as collateral against your debt.  So he hid under a pile of hay in a neighbor. We're not sure if he was white or black, but he was sympathetic. He got him out of town and he eventually made his way to Indiana where he worked several jobs trying to earn money so he could support his family once they joined him up there. Which they did through the same trick that Spice had used to get there, hid under a pile of hay. And it reunited him with his family. And then he reunited with his half brothers and brothers as well. Josiah Webb was his full brothers, half brothers, John Wesley Shores, and then Jerry Shores, who I mentioned earlier. And they all went to Nebraska in 1882 to claim homesteads. And this is one of those homesteads, right? And like the folks from Kentucky, they'd probably been shocked by this terrain. I mean, look at how far in the distance you can see compared to what they came from in North Carolina. They built their sod house behind them. I know it looks like brick, but it's Nebraska brick. It's sod. They don't need a special type of plow, which Rick mentioned, that slit holes in the soil instead of tilling it like an actual plow didn't turn it over to prepare for planting. So they set to work building their sod home in this grueling process, laying bricks of sod, cutting them small enough so they could lift them. Much like you would regular brick overlapping, you'd have to find some plank to support the roof. Notice the space home isn't a dugout, though, like the one Rick showed you that is often what folks would do early on build a half dugout because it's fewer walls you have to build. But you see, and this looks sort of bleak right to 21st century urban night, see the sod house, some bleak prairie grasses. We think, oh boy, they're living in poverty. That's, I would argue that's not the case. If you look in the background, there are horses photo bombing this photo. Perhaps put there on purpose to show them off because a horse and those carriages, the nice carriages, I don't think you can see that to the left of one of the horses. That's a statement of wealth at the time. You can use literal horsepower on the farm or as a means of conveyance that carriage costs a lot and see it behind their sod house, there is a windmill. And that means they dug a well, and that's not just any windmill to the top of the line holiday windmill, which would cost about one fourth of their crop revenue for the year. This is a family that's doing very well. And I mean, and again, to the point of us being a 21st century society for those who don't realize a windmill allows you to pump water without doing that work yourself. And this particular model was self regulated. So once the tank was full, it stopped pumping their technological early adopters this beast family. So they're doing very well themselves on their Nebraska farm, which 160 acres. I know we don't think in acres really often, but that's about I think it's about 120 American football fields. It's a lot of land. And the species have done well for themselves this land. And I mentioned they were joined by family members. This is the shores family. Jerry shores is the older looking gentlemen seated on the right. And again, to 21st century, I was like, Oh, boy, this is, this is tough. See Minerva sitting there with her infant, she might be either happy to get some time off from the farm labor or frustrated that she has to keep this child still while sitting for this photograph which takes longer than a 21st century photograph. Perhaps they're happy about this moments of mandatory rest sitting. We don't know. But like the species they have a sod house perhaps another side house not sure. There are four of them there so Minerva on the left and her husband Reverend marks, they might live in that other building that could be a barn as well though. And again you have horses in the background attached to a carriage again, showing off that well. But I think my biggest argument for them doing pretty well and then not being so depressed is a 20% re audience might see this photo is Jim shores on the right.  And the dog is cooperating with my argument of whimsy to appears to be smiling saying look, I'm a homestead or two. These are these are good times for the species insurers in Nebraska, they've made it they've gotten their free land they're away from this, this history of debt and violence in the south. And altogether the space shores family ends up with over 1500 acres in central Nebraska fertile land. And we're looking at those homesteads and these photos. Again, the 21st century add this looks bleak but I would argue the species insurers are a big success for 25 years these families prospered in Westerville Nebraska, coming parts of the broader community. And they end up. At first, not one of these larger communities I mentioned before, but they go from Western Nebraska, some of them end up going to found Empire, Wyoming, and some end up into witty Nebraska, and Charles space, a space descended ends up in Sully County, South Dakota, towards the end of his life. And so I argue the species are a successful homesteading family. But I guess the question is, what does success look like when a lot of these communities no longer exist. And I'm going to hand it off to Rick to talk to us a bit about what do we mean we think of a successful black homesteading community. And that is the question what what are we what is the history of these, what is the measure of success or failure. The common drill on this is well they tried. They tried to homestead and terrain that was not very favorable to farming, and they succeeded for a little while but basically they failed they, they went away. And the enterprise was a failure. Unfortunately for that theory, that's not how the homesteaders saw it, nor is it how the descendants of homesteaders saw this venture. They saw it in quite different terms. They saw it as providing a place or a space where the black homesteaders could rest up and recover somewhat from the trauma of life in the south. So that for a generation or so, they lived in places where they controlled their own fates, at least to the extent that humans control our fates, made their own decisions and succeeded. Joyce Joyce Ann Gray, one of the descendants of the witty Nebraska said, what black homesteaders most wanted was the peace to make a living piece to educate their children, peace to sit out on their porches and look over their land with confidence that it was truly theirs. No, knowing that no one was coming over the next null to take and destroy. Angela Bates, a descendant of Nicodemus and historian of that community said, Nicodemus was a place they could enjoy true freedom. So in the first instance, the homesteaders found these communities to be places where they could control the main events of their own lives. Second thing I would say is that in general, they found friendly or at least indifferent white neighbors. Now this was a time in our country, a terrible time in our country, when racism was on the rise nationally. This was a time when people were putting up statues to Confederate heroes all across the south and some places in the north as well. This is a time when Jim Crow laws were being passed, when violence was endemic in the south. This is a time when lynching reached its peak. So in general in the country, this is a time of growing and vicious racism. And of course in 1921, there was the Tulsa massacre, which killed hundreds and destroyed the Black Wall Street. But in general, not without exception, but in general, black homesteaders found their white neighbors to be helpful or at worst indifferent. There was no barn burning, there were no mutilated cattle, there were no attempts to drive out black homesteaders.  The black homesteaders found jobs and money that they desperately needed on the ranches and the ranchers found dependable workers much more dependable than Francians would have been. And the black homesteaders, if they didn't like the circumstances of working on the ranches, could walk away because after all, they owned land and they could work their own land. This was not without exception, empire Wyoming and black New Mexico in particular, faced hostile whites. But throughout most of this region, they found supportive white neighbors. And DeWittie in particular, they socialized together, they played baseball together, they had big feasts together after the baseball games and so on. Third, success in educating their children and grandchildren meant that the homesteaders had a different standard for what constituted success. Joyce Ann Gray again, the DeWittie descendant said, the driving force behind every plow, every nail driven, every sod wall built was with one purpose in mind, not to build a lasting farming town, but to be the stepping stone for their children. And we go back to this idea of how important education was, not only for its practical benefits, but for its link to freedom as well. And the homesteading generation in all of these communities sacrificed greatly to make sure their children and grandchildren were educated. They took some of that precious, hard-earned cash to build schools, to hire teachers, to buy books and do other things which supported education. Now, one of the ironies of this is that people who are educated as pharmacists or nurses or teachers or lawyers or doctors, generally do not return to the family farm to continue it into the future. The very success of the homesteading generation's commitment to education meant that it was unlikely that their children would return and run the farms. Next slide, please. Here is one of the DeWittie homesteaders, a young man who was a poet. He's about 16 here. He has that youthful arrogance. He's standing on his homestead showing pride in what they had accomplished. Next slide, please. Here are some people also from DeWittie. This is, I think, a remarkable photograph. At this time, people generally didn't smile for cameras. Here people are enjoying life, they're having a good time, they're smiling, and they're enjoying the benefits of what they have accomplished in DeWittie. So the real legacy of the homesteaders was not persistent or continuing farms. It was the successes of their children and grandchildren, of which there were many. Next slide, please. You remember Moses Spies, that man who hid under a load of hay to escape debt peonage in North Carolina, moved to Nebraska. The woman in the center of this picture is Norma Spies Owens, his granddaughter. She became a nurse, then she wanted to get a baccalaureate, so she did that. She decided to get a doctorate in nursing, and she did that, and she became a professor at New York University. She's surrounded here by international students who have come to study with her. She did research at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center. So in two generations, from hiding under a load of hay to becoming a world-renowned cancer researcher, once the restraints on talent had been removed, Norma Spies Owens shows the possibilities. Today, nothing remains at most of the places, most of the colony sites except historical markers on the roadside. Deerfield has a couple of historic buildings and a very energetic group that is seeking to recover and restore its history. Nicodemus is a national historic site, and it has a small continuing population. Next slide, please. It has restored its historic AME church, and every year, of course, hundreds or thousands of people come back to Nicodemus to celebrate Emancipation Day. And by the way, this summer will be the 145th Emancipation Day, and everyone is invited to come to Nicodemus and celebrate with Nicodemus. 2027 will be the sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of the founding of Nicodemus, and there will certainly be a big celebration that year. Thank you. Next slide. Thank you for listening to us. I was muted. I'm sorry. Thanks, Rick. I was saying that we don't have any questions yet, but I want to circle back to some of the things you're talking about, particularly racial violence in the Great Plains at this time. But I also want to zoom out to violence in general, but West is a violent place during this period. There's a lot of rancher on homesteader violence going on, whether you're black or white. And I know and we experienced some of that Nicodemus where there are some ranchers who are upset that homesteaders are arriving and they run their cattle through some Nicodemus fields. They steal some Nicodemus cattle. The Nicodemus folks, right, are able to take out one of the cowboys hostage and get their cattle back. And yeah, it's interesting trying to interpret racial violence, but when you have violence between ranchers and homesteaders going on anyway, I found it instructive though that EP McCabe a couple of years after these ranchers are sort of terrorizing the Nicodemus community. If EP McCabe a Nicodemus resident, a black man is elected to statewide office as opportunity in Kansas at a time when black Americans are just fighting for the right to vote in the South. And I think it's sort of an interesting look at it sort of the violence in the Great Plains to try to parse the violence that's already there with the racial violence that might exist. I think in general, I'd like to add as well that we mentioned there are not much exists. Aside from Nicodemus, there are some buildings at Deerfield and they're trying to preserve. There are still some folks who are descendants in. In Sully County, South Dakota, who are very helpful in talking with me during this project. But I mean, do you have anything else you'd like to add Rick, we have no questions as of yet. Well, I would just say that in talking about descendants, a sort of back of the envelope calculation suggests that there are about 250,000 descendants of the black homesteaders who are alive today. That's a pretty large group and they are increasingly interested in their history, their history of ancestors who homesteaded and in places like Nicodemus and Deerfield and DeWitty. Also, we know that based on our calculations, the black homesteaders claimed about 650,000 acres of land in the Great Plains by means of homesteading. They probably also gained control of other land, additional land through purchase, leasing and other means. So the homesteaders had success in finding land that they could own and call their own. And like we said on the National Archives houses the homestead records and their excellent sources because as we mentioned the homesteading process.  What the homesteaders have been doing on their land for five years, what they've been growing, what they built, usually down to the size of the home, how many barns and corn crypts. So their excellent sources and again the National Archives, none of this would have been possible without them. There is an ironic twist to that, which is in a great triumph for the country. The homestead records, the homestead forms that people had to fill out contained no indication of race was one of the first national laws, which did not require disclosing the race of the applicant, which was a major step forward. For researchers, however, trying to study black homesteaders, it means it's very difficult in the massive files of the National Archives to figure out which homesteaders were African American, and which were white or some other race. But it's a cost we're quite happy to put up with knowing that this was a major step forward in terms of racial equality. And for anyone looking to find black homesteader files National Archives, we took the step of using heads of household, black heads of household in the census and comparing those against land records of people homesteaded through the Bureau of Land Management Records, and then verifying to see if there was a white person with the same name in the area to see if we could identify that it was indeed a black homesteader. So it was a process that we had excellent research assistance to help us with that. There's one question do land records exist for the families of these towns. I'm not sure.  You can go to the National Archives and find those records and look at them and I believe the homestead MPS and the Homestead National Park in particular has made some of those files available for black homesteaders on their website. I hope I answered that question. Yes, those those records do exist. They're sometimes a little hard to find you have to figure out exactly who you're looking for or which parcel of land you're looking for, but they certainly are available. But we've hit our time so I just want to thank the National Archives and everyone who's viewing one more time for for joining us for this talk about our book, the first migrants. I'm sober at all fine booksellers. Thank you. Thank you.


Hey, my name is Nico and today I'm gonna do a giveaway and Q&A to celebrate 50,000 subscribers on YouTube This video is not sponsored all the stuff I'm giving away are things I bought myself to use for making videos in the past year on YouTube and now I'm giving Those things away to you. There are five prizes. You can choose to either win a sky adventurer Star adventurer pro pack This is a very nice star tracker set up and the only reason I'm giving this one away is I bought a new one that has the Wi-Fi control, but this one works just as well. Honestly, the Wi-Fi is pretty unnecessary I'm also giving away a stock Canon 6TD with two lenses Just a cheap zoom lens and a nifty 50 f 1.8 prime lens This is a great starter camera and lens so you could just get a tripod and start shooting a Ryan Nebula with it For the more experienced astrophotographers, I'm giving away three different two-inch light pollution filters We got the Optalong L Pro The Astronomix CLS and the Esfiboni CLS The full details and rules for the giveaway are in the description There's two links, but listen up right now for how to enter To enter you need to fill out the first link the Google form that's linked right below in the description That Google form is password protected and the password is going to be given out one letter or number at a time Throughout this video just like this in the corner So the first letter in the password is capital N Just open up a note app or some scratch paper and watch the video to get the full password If you try to share the password in the comments, I will delete your comment please fill out the form in the next week for a chance to enter and you only get to Enter to win one thing. So please pick what you will actually use One thing to consider is I'm guessing there's gonna be less competition To win a filter. So I'm just gonna because I'm just gonna pick randomly So your odds are based on how many people enter the giveaway and pick that item So your odds will probably go down if you choose the Star Tracker. Okay enough said about that Let's answer some of the questions you sent me. I got so many good questions So I'm just gonna have to pick some I'm gonna start with the question I got the most and I think mr. Krotowski summed it up well here How did you get started with astrophotography? What were your first gear and results and what were you struggling most at the beginning? Just give us a full Nico story. I'm gonna tack on one more question here Which is another comment when I got which is just sort of what's your best beginner advice? Because I think it's related to all of this So let's start back at the beginning I first got interested in the world of night photography in 2014 so seven years ago now I was visiting Iceland in the winter with the hope of seeing the Aurora Borealis the northern lights and at that time I was really into time-lapse photography as a hobby Here's some of my time-lapse shots from that trip And I was I was lucky enough to shoot their Aurora as a time-lapse to and it wasn't until Months later that occurred to me to actually edit a single photo from that time-lapse And when I was just playing around with that image in Photoshop So this was like the spring of 2015 now. I found wow There's so much here if I just brighten up the photo and play around with it And that was that light bulb moment for me that really got me hooked initially So I stuck with wide-angle stuff I was using Canon 5d looking on lenses on a tripod for about a year And I got some okay milky way shots like this But eventually in my research about this I stumbled on the deep-sky astrophotography Which I was intrigued me and I started hemming and hawing and delaying getting started because I wasn't sure I could afford it I didn't want to buy a telescope right away, but I found You know a tracker and that maybe I could do that and in January of 2016 I got a used astrotrack star tracker and on my first night out in January I got this picture of Orion and I was blown away the fact that I could see those colors from the city That was the moment where my mind was blown and I knew this hobby was what I was looking for Since then I really spent almost all of my free time and money towards getting better and better at it In terms of what I was struggling most at the beginning. I'd say the new equipment rabbit hole Basically, this is how this rabbit hole works.  You become frustrated. You give up on imaging that night You go online and some person trying to help from their experience says oh well You just need this new gadget auto guiding or whatever it is and your your problem will be solved so you go buy some more equipment you wait for another clear night and Even if that new gadget fixed your first problem, which it probably didn't you now have a bunch of new problems And you still haven't produced any images and so this is a pretty common experience for the deep-sky astrophotographer It's what happened to me and my advice to get out of that rabbit hole is is not that we can never buy Any new gear of course the gear is fun. It's part of the hobby But my advice is don't add anything new until you feel confident that you've mastered and reached the limit of what you have So if you're having a problem, I always first try to solve it creatively with what you have That's gonna allow you to build a good foundation for your astrophotography and teach you how to problem solve Which is way more valuable than owning a bunch of expensive equipment that you don't know how to use properly Okay, astronaut yet asks in some photos I see a few stars with a very spiky pattern while other stars in the same photo look like blobs Is that an optical effect of the lens or telescope or can we deliberately achieve something like that? Answer to that is yes, and yes, it is something that's caused by the telescope or lens, but you can also Create them. They're called diffraction spikes and they will appear on bright stars While they're also on dimmer stars They're usually too dim to see in the case of a Newtonian telescope like this one They're caused by these spider veins holding in the secondary mirror in the case of a camera lens They only appear when you stop down the lens using internal aperture blades because that that iris isn't perfectly round You won't see diffraction spikes on refractor telescopes typically or lenses when they are wide open when the aperture is wide open So if you want to create them in those cases you can tape Something really thin like dental floss or fishing line to the front of your lens or refractor telescope Okay, Marco asks how do you manage the change in sleep cycles when spending the nights outside? Well me personally not well I'm I'm the kind of person who just stays out all night working the whole time on various setups and things for YouTube or You know my personalized photography and then I just lose out on that night's sleep Or maybe I get home and I can get a couple of hours as the Sun is rising I really want to get better at this now that I'm you know getting older and Things but with my style of imaging. I'm just not sure realistically I'll get that much better at getting more sleep until Something really changes in my life like I get an observatory in a dark sky or something like that But not anytime soon Okay, Toshall asks I have a 60 millimeter refractor with an alt as mount which I use for astrophotography Along with my phone if I want to get better pictures. Do I change my telescope or my camera? If so any recommendation so in this particular case, I'd recommend upgrading the camera first I would recommend, you know, you can enter my giveaway or you can buy try to get a used Canon or Nikon DSLR With the lens and you can attach that to the alt as mount to do some basic tracking You know 20 30 second exposures and get much better deep-sky photos that way Phone cameras are getting better, but they're still very small sensors compared to a DSLR and by shooting through the eyepiece also Because you have the lens on the phone. You're losing a lot of potential light compared to Doing it other ways Now the caveat if you already own a telescope and you're thinking of attaching a DSLR to it in what we call prime focus Then not that doesn't always work on cheap telescopes I do a little bit of research on Google for some telescopes are really not designed to work with a camera in prime focus especially Newtonians like this one often don't have enough inward travel on the focus or to reach focus with the DSLR So before you buy a DSLR to work with your telescope make sure it will work Pullman watch tech asks how do you take astrophotos during wintertime when it is like negative 10 degrees Celsius and snow How to protect equipment is it necessary and is the settings different? okay, so mostly it's the same and You get free camera cooling from the the low temperatures which always helps with noise Especially if you're using a DSLR or mirrorless camera a couple tips I have is give yourself some extra time because everything takes longer in the snow and cold You don't want to rush because that's when you might make mistakes Put on way more layers than you think is necessary like just really overdo it because when you're just sitting out there in the cold not Generating any body heat you will get insanely cold All batteries, but especially in phones and laptops have noticed don't last as long So be prepared for that extra batteries external battery banks anything like that if setting up your tripod in the snow I'd suggest bringing a shovel and digging out little holes in the snow for where the tripod feet goes because snow will compress over time and It's just not very stable compared to solid ground So I'd always dig out the snow and put your tripod on that another reason to do that If I've had tripod feet come off in the snow and then they're basically impossible to find until snow melts Okay, JJ from Long Island, New York asks Do you have any suggestions for some wide field targets during galaxy season? Other than the more popular ones for those that don't know a galaxy season is roughly March through May in the Northern Hemisphere But the problem is and it's just means when the earth you know We in the Northern Hemisphere have this good view of a lot of galaxies But the problem is that most galaxies are very small. So they don't look that good in wide fields like with a camera lens and so my suggestion is to stay up late or Wake up early and start shooting the many great wide fields in one of my favorite constellations, Cygnus Which rises surprisingly high even as early as March for us in here in the north Yeah, you just need to be up at the right time, which is around 3 a.m. Or so, but that's my advice Okay, me. Hello asks, why are you doing YouTube? Basically just because I enjoy it pretty much every aspect of it I I most of all it's I really like the feeling of helping other people But also I have a lot of past experience with videography and editing and I like those things It's nice to keep those skills active and I hope to do more creative videos in the future Okay, I know I only got to a very small percentage of the questions But thank you very much if you submitted a question I have saved all of them and I'll be using them to help me generate new video ideas or Just to incorporate them into future videos So hopefully your question will get answered eventually just keep watching this channel Okay, this is the end of the video now, but remember to enter the giveaway you should hopefully have the full password now and Subscribe to this channel if you haven't till next time. This has been Nico Carver from Nebula photos calm


Our body is a pretty fantastic piece of engineering, but how does it work? How do all of the different components come together to keep us alive, keep us functioning and achieving our goals? In this video we're going to look at the levels of organization in organisms, from smaller than cells to bigger than organs. In unicellular organism, the single cell performs all life functions. However, multicellular organisms have various levels of organization within them. To learn more about the differences between unicellular and multicellular organisms, watch this video. All living things are made up of cells. This is what distinguishes them as living. Cells are the building blocks of life. Inside cells are little organelles. These are specialized structures that carry out particular jobs or functions. Like in this animal cell, the mitochondria provides energy to the cell and the ribosomes are involved in protein synthesis. Cells themselves are the basic structure that make up living organisms. In multicellular organisms, they are differentiated to carry out different roles. Here are few specialized human cells. Groups of cells then form together to form tissues. In humans we have four main types of tissue. Main plants, the xylem and phylum, are examples of plant tissues. When there are layers of tissue working together, they form an organ. Organs are specialized to carry out specific life processes. All animals contain organs. In fact mammals have five vital organs that they cannot live without. Lungs, kidneys, liver, heart and brain. Like plant-type organs too, these specialized organs work together in organ systems performing body functions. Organ systems keep the body regulated and in stable state. The human body has eleven organ systems. Organisms are entire living things that can carry out all basic life processes. Multicellular organisms are made up of organ systems but unicellular organisms such as bacteria or protists are made up of one cell. So they are the levels of organization in multicellular organisms.


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QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Process Payroll Forms. Let's do it within two weeks. QuickBooks Desktop 2023. Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop sample rock castle construction practice file provided by QuickBooks going through the set of process we do every time maximizing the home page to the gray area. Going to the view drop down noted we have the hide icon bar and open windows checked off where you can see the open windows on the left hand side. We're going to go to the reports drop down company and financials. Look at that profit and loss income statement tab. A one oh one two four twelve thirty one two four January to December the date range customize it fonts and numbers change the font twelve. Okay. Yes. Okay. Then we'll do the same thing with the reports drop down company and financial but this time the big balance sheet changing to twelve thirty one two four on the date. Customize in the report bringing it on over to the font size of twelve. Okay. Yes. And okay. There's our setup process we do every time going back to the home page and prior presentations we've been focusing in on the employee cycle or payroll cycle. We started out with the pay employees. We might take a look at the time entry later but remember that's not like a crucial component because we might track time elsewhere outside of the system or we might have salaried employees. Really the payroll process we're saying it's going to start here when we process the payroll which will be dependent upon the cycle that is on whether we pay weekly by weekly semi monthly monthly and so on. That will happen at the same interval we've talked about in prior presentations it being similar to basically paying a vendor entering basically a check right for a vendor except that we had to take away. It'd be like paying a vendor and saying hey we're going to take away all the stuff that you owe people and then we're going to pay them on your behalf because the people that you owe money to forced us to do that the people they are employees owe money to of course be in the government primarily and possibly we take out other stuff that are voluntary such as the benefits for health insurance and that kind of stuff. So we process the paycheck here and then after that all the stuff that we took out of their paycheck whether they be voluntary or involuntary we then have to pay to the people that we are required to pay it on their behalf to typically the government of course and possibly the benefit programs like a health insurance company that's when we pay the liabilities. These two things are really the cycle that is routine that will happen on a routine basis meaning we pay the employees biweekly semi monthly so on and then we pay the liabilities at some interval after that depending on our particular situations like within the next week or whatever to pay off the liabilities to the government. So that's the general process but then we have our reporting cycle now the reporting cycle isn't really tied in generally to our payroll cycle because it's got its own cycle it happens usually quarterly and yearly. So in other words we process our payroll weekly or semi weekly or whatever the forms that we process to the government and possibly to the state are typically on a quarterly basis or yearly basis. Now that's not always the case because if our liability is below a certain threshold the government might say hey look we'll let you process the forms just on a yearly basis or something like that but generally you want to be thinking of the general process being the liability forms are going to be processed quarterly and yearly. Now these forms you can think of as basically being similar to your individual form required to be processed that being the 1040 form that happens at the end of the year so normally when you look at a 1040 form the year ends and then by April 15th of the following year you filed the reform for the previous year that's how it usually goes and usually you do so and hope for a refund at that point in time. But note that what you normally would like to happen if everything was set up you know well or everything went perfectly you would say I wouldn't want to refund or to owe money it should just be an information report that's what the 1040 kind of should be or is designed to be meaning you're supposed to pay your taxes as you go as we've seen when we take when we take the money from our employees and pay it to the government they're paying their taxes as they go and then the W2 form that is filed after the year end. Should just be an information form telling the government look this is how much I earned this is how much tax is going to be on that based on my earnings I already paid it to you. I'm just verifying the fact that it's been paid no refund no about do that's how it should be you can't do that on the income taxes because income taxes are too complex because we have a a progressive tax system multiple tax rates and we have all these deductions and credits and so on. That is way too complex even for a basic tax return to get exactly the taxes correct when you pay them during the year even though you still have to do that. If you had a flat tax which is more like what we have on some of the payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare then you can actually do that generally or this closer to it right and that's what we're doing on the payroll side so you can think of the same kind of process. We're paying the payroll taxes as we process the payroll but then we have to file an information return the difference between it and the form 1040 as you typically have to process the information return on a quarterly basis as opposed to a yearly basis. The government typically saying I want to know what's going on now I'm not going to wait for a full year. I want to know what's going on on a quarterly basis. I want you to verify to me that you have been doing the process properly on a quarterly basis instead of a yearly basis that being the form 941. So if I click on this form then it's going to take me to this tab which is in the payroll center where we have the three tabs run the payroll tab run the third tab over here. Now it's not allowing us to process the forms here because we're in a practice file and the payroll forms are a little bit more tricky to look at because you can't really look at one cycle because the payroll forms will differ from quarter to quarter. You have four quarters that are kind of the same in that you process the form 941 and then at the end of the year you've got something totally different where you have to process the 941 but also the 940 and you've got to process the W2s and W3s. So you really have to go into a kind of like a course in and of itself to try to play out a full year of payroll to really get an idea of payroll. That's why payroll can be a little bit complex. But so let's just kind of consider the forms that will be filled out. And before we do so notice the reports that are going to be subsidiary to the subsidiary reports to the balance sheet in the income statement. In other words if I go to the balance sheet here we saw that we process the payroll and then we've got the payroll liabilities and then we paid off the liabilities. You have some supporting reports if you go to the reports drop down and you go to the employee and payroll these might be somewhat limited depending on what payroll you're paying for. Remember that payroll is an add on feature within QuickBooks. But if you look at the payroll summary report for example then let's make this as of 010124 to 123124. It gives you kind of some summary data breaking it out to kind of like you would see it on like a paycheck stuff. Right. So we've got the employees and you've got the earnings per per employee and you can also think about it in terms of the total for in all employees. As if you had one employee like all employees kind of combined together. You've got then the gross pay over the time frame above the taxes withheld which include the federal income taxes the Medicare the Social Security and so on. Which gets us to the taxes that we withheld then you got the other voluntary withholdings in this case the health insurance and then the employee or taxes. So this is a nice report that can be useful to kind of populate the or think about how to populate the reporting forms the 941s the 940 the W2s and the W3. Now note that these forms that the reporting forms are not having any impact typically on the financial statements unless there's something that is due at the end of the day unless we have to actually pay something. But usually we do not because they're just reporting forms. So QuickBooks is going to help us take the financial data and populate the reporting forms which aren't going to actually have a financial transactions into this into the system unless we have to write a check at that point in time. Which typically we do not if we list the reporting forms just to kind of get an idea and I found these on irs.gov. I'm just looking at the forms in general just to get an idea of them so you can see the task that needs to be taking place. Then you can just search for 941 on the irs website irs.gov. So the 941s you can see here are filed quarterly so the first quarter January February March every three months 12 divided by four every three months. January February March you're usually going to have to file that sometime by April right because you got the three months that passed. You got to file it by the end of the next month and then quarter two you got April May June and then quarter three and quarter four. So you got to tell which quarter they are in instead of a yearly reporting as is done with the like form 1040 and then basically you're going to have to populate this out. You've got the wages here and then you've got the three kind of federal income taxes that are going to be paid that you're going to be populating. We've got the federal income taxes that we have to deal with remembering that this is not our federal income tax as the company. We do have federal income tax as the company we will have to pay depending on the company structure that we are in for sole proprietorship. It'll be part of the schedule see the bottom line flowing into our taxes on the 1040. If it's a C corporation we have to pay at the C corporation level but this is the federal income taxes of our employees that we took from the employees withheld from them to pay on their behalf. Then we have the Social Security and Medicare and notice here when we do the calculation it's a little confusing because this calculation is based on the employee and employee error. So you'll recall when we did this kind of calculation in our paycheck we used the .062. Here we have .062 times 2 which is the .124 because we're including both the employee and employee or portion same with the Medicare which is .145 times 2. That's where they're getting the .029. So we're adding up then all of the taxes that are going to the federal government the federal income tax Social Security and Medicare in theory. Even though those are going all to the federal government in essence the federal government should be putting them in different funds and whatnot and treating them differently and whatnot. That's why we kind of have to break them out and even though they're going to the same you know place generally and then we're going to have to tell them how much we actually we actually withheld. And then the difference is going to be that the the taxes that are going to be paid or more taxes that are due right but it should be netting out so there's going to be nothing. That is going to be paid or due because it should be just an information reform. Now I won't go through all of it and basically more detail here but that's the general idea and then you've got the recap of the liabilities on a monthly basis that you may have to put down below. So it's a generally an informational reform. Notice it can get quite complex especially if you have other stuff going on such as like some of the laws that went in place with regards to COVID and whatnot with regards to payroll taxes and deferring when you have to pay them with all that kind of stuff can get quite confusing. Quite useful to have something to help to process that like a third party processor or like QuickBooks helping you to process the forms. Okay and then yearly you've got the form 940 so that form 940 you would think would be a summary of the 940 once right but it's not because really the 940 is there to calculate the FUTA tax Federal Unemployment Tax Act. So so it's basically a different tax it's another federal income tax this one only being the tax on on the employer side of things. So it's a smaller tax it's less known of a tax because it's smaller but it can actually be quite complex but because it's smaller the government doesn't require you I believe it's because it's smaller that's my idea. The government doesn't require you to report it on a quarterly basis but simply on a yearly basis. So then you've got this added thing you got to do at the end of the year at the end of the year you've got the you've got the last quarter that you're going to have to do for the 941s and you're going to have to file that form 940. And then of course you've got the W2 forms which are reporting forms that are going to go out to the employees. The summary of all the W2 forms will be at a W3 form which you can think of as if you're thinking about all of your employees as if they are one kind of employee. All these kind of tax forms should to some degree match tie out be able to be understood as complying with each other and they also should be able to tie out to in essence the reports in QuickBooks and the financial statement reports in QuickBooks on the balance sheet and on the profit and loss with regards to how much was paid and the payroll taxes to the employees down below. So all that should tie out and again it's a lot easier to get that stuff to tie out if you have like the paid payroll and you're helping and that's helping you to kind of populate everything so all your stuff matches out. If something doesn't match if something gets out of whack then that usually falls into line. You really usually realize that even though you do the quarterly 941s at the end of the year when you do the W2s and you try to tie everything together. That's when you usually find out if something went wrong that it went wrong and by that time it's kind of a problem.  So you want to get everything straight as you're entering the information into the system major twice cut once is the general idea with payroll as opposed to tinkering until you kind of figure it out is the general idea. I would recommend the theory to be going with with the payroll. So that's the general idea with payroll to go back to the home page. You've got you've got the payroll cycle weekly by weekly monthly. You got the liabilities you pay after you pay the employees and then you process the payroll forms which hopefully QuickBooks will help you to do which doesn't enter a transaction but helps you to give you the informational forms for the requirements necessary for your government requirements. You also might have state forms depending on what state you are in for the payroll forms that can help be processed as well. QuickBooks can is getting better at better at meeting state and local needs with regards to those kind of specialized reports as well.


I'm going to talk about 0D, particularly about 0D graphics. Who knows what is it? What is 0D? Amazing. I'm pretty surprised. It's my small plan about what I'm going to tell you today. It shouldn't be really big because I think it's the end of the day, and you are probably pretty tired, so let's get started. 0D is an open-source game, a real-time strategy about ancient warfare. We have a game about time around 0AD, obviously. The game is pretty old. Development started really a long time ago. First drafts were in 2001 or 2002, so we have already in our repository a pretty old core that we should support, and we try to improve it, but we still have it, so it makes sense. Let's talk about graphics in our game. We don't use any ready engine. We use our own engine that's pretty old, but we try to improve it each year, each release. It's called Pyroganesis. It's fully written in C++ with small C places, but it's really rare. So C++, and for rendering, it's OpenGL. As other stuff, we use SDL as most of, I think, free or open-source games, at least that I met, so it's pretty, I think it's not so complicated as QT, in example, but it's not bad for us, and we use SDL for a long time, so we're glad to have it. We use for most of the dependent things, like input-output events, like system calls, like window icons, so we don't want to depend on system calls, like from X-windows or Windows API, just set window icon, but it's small details, so don't care. The main thing that we still use OpenGL 1 and OpenGL 2 API. Yes, it's not modern, but we still use it, because, as I said on the previous slide, it's pretty old. We have to support these two versions, because I said it in other slide. So OpenGL 1 for people who don't support OpenGL 2 API. Yes, we have it. So in some places, we use old code, pretty old code, so I think that it's not really good in 2K19. We still use AIB shaders, so it's pretty assembler-ish shaders, and we use DLCLE, but still with really low version is 1.2 mostly, so not even 1.4. By the way, assembler shaders pretty equal age than compared to R. So what current problems? Old OpenGL, so we can't use modern OpenGL functions, because we use OpenGL libraries, old libraries that don't provide us stable, constant stable functions like del-doll instance, because they don't have it at all. For example, in Mac OS, mostly we don't have. Modern functions like del-doll instances, it really could help us, but currently we can't do this because we still support old players. Players with old hardware, I will see it later, but we have some players with OpenGL 1 and OpenGL 2. OpenGL 1 sounds like, hmm, I will show you. It's our feedback statistic that we started to collect from December of 2018, so you can see that this is our distribution, so you can see that we have pretty old versions. It's really our players, it's not magic players, so by numbers it's something like 25% of our real number of players, so we have currently of current stable version, we have something like 20,000 of downloads, and here we have 5,000 of feedback reports. So I think we can use this data to make some conclusions. So we still have 1.4, 1.5, and a lot of 1.1. I can tell to you that 2.1 is not only old hardware, it's also Mac platforms because as you probably know, that example for 10.14, Apple dropped their OpenGL support, so they never supported very well, so even on most of Mac platforms we have old OpenGL, so we can't use any useful for us modern functions, because of that we have sometimes really low VPS because really basic functions, sometimes we need to just draw each object, just bind VTX buffer and draw it. No optimization like single bind for VTX buffer and one bind for transform-matter cells, so it's not really good. Also we noticed amount of crashes of our application on Intel cards, especially it's not tested for particular version of drivers, so it's not old drivers. Also it's really not tested by our track system, so if you try to find something like Intel Crash, you may find a lot of tickets that we close with duplicate or doesn't have information. An example of Intel Crash, so this crash may happen even on pretty simple call, OpenGL call. An example, GL begin or GL end with simple parameters like you are drawing a triangle, simple triangle without any textures, normals or another complicated stuff. So why this is a problem for us? Because we open source game, it means that most of our developers are working on this project in free time, so most of our developers don't have this type of card at all and it's really hard to debug bugs like this because to find real reason of this, you need to spend a lot of time because what do you plan to do? You need to run, for example, debug version, you need to find call stack, also it's windows, so it's another lot of problems because you just can't go to driver and simply disassemble it, so you may use some already debug or either programs, but it really costs a lot of time. So yeah, legacy support of OpenGL drivers that I said before. It doesn't mean that OpenGL is not supported on macOS, it only means that some functions may don't work, but it probably means that we will lose the OpenGL at all at newer versions, that it's not good for us because we want to share our game with players on macOS too, but if they really drop the OpenGL, it would be bad for us in this situation, so we have to do about feedback. Currently we revived our feedback server, so now we actually collect data that users place will show you. When you start the game, you may see this button, you will see this button. It doesn't just send us some information, of course we don't enable it by default because it should be your decision to send your information. It's absolutely anonymous, but it may really help us to make some conclusion about our OpenGL version, about our drivers. So it's good if someone enables feedback. And we get some statistics here that we got from people who pressed the button. And we made the conclusion that it was 25% of all players of this version, Alpha 23 big. They released one, so if you go filter, you will see that actually about OpenGL extensions that we don't have many support of really cool stuff. So basically 100% support only really basic things, so shadows, textures, you know, nothing really interesting. So even frame buffer object, look. I think it's so good that it's really useful, especially if you are doing some post-partition. Very simple optionally, and so even frame buffer object, it's only 98%, so 2% it's OpenGL one point something. So currently what we have? We have already pretty long time we have in Krashtag that allows us to analyze really stack, crash stack that we got from Krashtag. So it helps us in some times that it helps to get real reason or real place where it crashed because sometimes it's not really obvious, especially Intel card crashes. And we try to connect with our players through track and forum. We have few really very active members who help us a lot. For example, one of our team members is Stan who really answer to each, most of each answer question of our forum. I think he does a really great job for us. So what do we plan to do with this kind of situation? We have feedback server, so we have some kind of statistics about our game, about our players and we need to understand what the audience we have. Do we really can drop OpenGL one? Because sometimes it can be really not real players. For example, you have Raspberry Pi and you just can run the game on it because you want to prove that you are able to run the game on Raspberry Pi, but you don't actually play it. So sometimes players with OpenGL one or OpenGL two are not real players and we should ignore them. So it's one of our steps to improve the graphics. Also, because the game is pretty old, we still have some places where we have got calls to OpenGL. We still have some really old stuff like JLBegin. So we should have to remove this and we should have to make more abstractions for this one to prevent a lot of places of low-level library calls. Also, after Apple news about that they dropped the OpenGL, we start to think about finding a new library that can collect JL or Vulkan calls and transform it, platform-dependent calls. For example, we continue to use OpenGL calls, but in some platforms, for example, all OpenGL calls are converted to metal. We have already, I mean, open-source, we could use Molchanvk library, but we didn't decide it yet. We just know about it. Also interesting things, white lists for drivers. For example, as I shown you, a list of cache, a simple, really simple solution for this kind of cache, just disable JL cell post-processing and cache has gone. So really simple solution, just add particular drivers or particular Intel card versions to blacklist or whitelist and automatically switch options to prevent one really incompatible stuff. So there is, for example, one library that's used in Hormium. It's called LeapAngle and it's pretty interesting for that kind of, but it's not really probably useful for us because it's used to convert OpenGL ES calls to platform-dependent calls. So it's really production-like, I think, because it's Hormium and it's home, but it's OpenGL ES and it has own limits so that we can't allow probably because we, I think, mostly PC-oriented game strategy. So thank you. I want to say that actually we find people who can help us to improve our code with graphics, with testing because there are a lot of reader cards where our application, our game may not work. So if you want to contribute in our game, you are welcome. Stan will always help you and I will try to help you too. Thank you. So how many people are actively working on the graphics part of the project in any average model? Actually, currently I am active graphic programmer of this project but also we have two semi-active, one team member and one man who makes patches for us. So it's not really much but we hope to increase the number of graphics programmers because I think graphics is really important for the game, for games at all. Also it helps artists to make the picture greater. Thank you. The feedbacks of how does it include if a hardware report is unique? Interesting question. Actually, we generate unique user ID for each copy that run, each copy of zero ID. So when you install zero ID and run it, it generates a unique ID pretty long to do not have any hash collisions. So after that the game sends hardware report and already our server is related that this report wasn't accounted before. So yes, currently we try to skip repeated reports and do not analyze them questions.