Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The United States Minor Outlying Islands (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country? And you noticed that one of the country options was United States minor outlying islands. If you have, you might have wondered, what are those islands? Who lives there? And why are those islands considered so minor? Learn more about the United States minor outlying islands and how they ended up on almost every drop-down list of countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:49 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I'll start off talking about the U.S. minor outlying islands by explaining what they are not. These islands are not the populated U.S. territories. So in other words, it is not Puerto Rico, not Guam, not American Samoa, not the U.S. Virgin Islands, or not the Northern Mariana Islands. These territories are all categorized separately. The minor outlying islands specifically refers to nine islands, which are all U.S. territories.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Eight of them are in the Pacific, and one is in the Caribbean. These are sorts of the crumbs of the United States. The Caribbean island is called Navasa. It's about two square miles an area, and it's located roughly between Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba. There has never been a long-term human presence on the island. There are some guano mining in the 19th century and a lighthouse in the early 20th century, and that's about it. The other eight islands are all in the Pacific.

Starting point is 00:02:09 They are Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnson Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Aet, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island. All of these are separate individual territories of the United States. All eight of them are coral atolls, with the exception of Midway Island, all of them are located approximately west to southwest of Hawaii. Midway is actually on the Hawaiian Island Archipelago, but it's not part of the state of Hawaii. All of these islands came into the possession of the United States in the 19th century. I'll briefly go through all eight Islands. While they have similar stories, they all have slightly different histories. To start, Baker Island is located approximately halfway between Hawaii and Australia, and it's

Starting point is 00:02:53 13 miles north of the equator. It has an area of half a square mile. There was limited guano mining in the 19th century, and there was a small landing strip built during World War II. Howland Island lies about 42 miles north of Baker Island. It's one square mile in area, and it was the place Amelia Earhart was trying to find when she disappeared. appeared. There's evidence that early Polynesians visited the island, but it was uninhabited by the time Europeans discovered it. There was a brief attempt at settlement in the 1930s, and I'll get to that more in a bit. Jarvis Island is located to the east of Baker and Howland, and about halfway between Hawaii and the Cook Islands, and it lies 25 miles south of the equator. It's 1.7 miles in area,

Starting point is 00:03:36 and it's a coral atoll with a completely dry lagoon. It too was mined for guano in the 19th century, and was abandoned before World War II. Johnston Atoll is 750 miles southwest of Hawaii. It has one major island which is dominated by a runway. In the 1930s, it was a base for seaplanes that needed to refuel when crossing the Pacific. An airfield was built at the start of World War II, and it was also used as a submarine refueling base. After the war, there were regular civilian flights to the island. It's been used as a Coast Guard station, nuclear test site, a missile testing site,

Starting point is 00:04:09 biological warfare site, chemical weapons storage and decommissioning site, and it was also used for emergency landings for flights across the Pacific. Everything was closed down in 2003, and today the runway is still there, but it's not maintained. Kingman Reef is barely an island at all. The total amount of land above water at low tide is about a maximum of a few acres. Pan Am used it in the 1930s as a spot for seaplanes to stop, but that's the most the island was ever used. No, strong. structures have ever been built on the reef, as there is no place to put them. The Palmyra Atoll has the distinction of being the only incorporated territory currently in the United States. It used to be part of the Hawaii territory before Hawaii became a state,

Starting point is 00:04:53 but it was specifically omitted from the territory when it became a state. And I have no idea why this happened, and I've been researching it for years. And if anyone knows, please contact me. It briefly had a small naval base from 1939 to 1959, but it didn't get much of use. Today, it's owned by the Nature Conservancy. Midway Atoll, as I mentioned before, is technically part of the outer Hawaiian Islands, but it wasn't included with the state. It gets its name from being Midway between Hawaii and Asia. From 1941 to 1993 was the location of an important naval air base,

Starting point is 00:05:27 and in 1942 was the subject of the pivotal Battle of Midway. It was primarily used as a refueling base during and after the war. It was transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and is now part of the Papahunomoku-Wakea UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tourists haven't been allowed out of the island in years, which I know because I have been looking for a way to get to Midway Island for several years now. There's a small fish and wildlife service team on the island, which is rotated in and out every few months. The last island is Wake Island. At 5.3 square miles, it's the largest of the outline islands.

Starting point is 00:06:01 It has seen the largest human presence of all the islands on the list. It was the biggest Pacific base for early Pan Am flights it used to cross the Pacific. It was occupied by the Japanese soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it was held until September 4, 1945, two days after the general Japanese surrender. President Truman and General MacArthur met here during the Korean War. Wake Island has remained in the control of the U.S. military to this day. There's currently a small Air Force base on the island where it does missile testing. All of the islands I've just listed, except for Midway Island,

Starting point is 00:06:34 Island are part of the Pacific remote islands national marine monument. All of the waters around the islands are protected from commercial fishing and mining. I should also note that in 1935, the United States launched the American Equatorial Islands colonization project. The federal government tried to set up small communities on Howland Baker and Jarvis Islands. The idea was to set up landing strips and weather stations, as well as solidify American claims to the island. 130 people were a part of the program until it was abandoned in 1942 with the start of the war with Japan. All right, so the United States has a bunch of small islands in the middle of the Pacific. So why are these islands always listed when you have to fill out a form and select from a list of countries?

Starting point is 00:07:19 If you're from the United States or the United Kingdom, you might have seen this entry appear because you have to scroll all the way down to the U's all the time. If you're from Australia or Canada, you might not have seen it, but for the heck of it, try scrolling down to the U's the next time you see a country list on a form. Technically, the United States minor outlying islands isn't an actual legal term. It isn't used by the United States at all. It was created and is used by the International Standards Organization.

Starting point is 00:07:48 They're the group that comes up with the standards of codes for countries, and it's called the ISO 3166-1. There are 249 codes for countries and territories around the world. This includes everything you think of as a country like, Uzbekistan and Uganda, as well as territories such as Greenland-Jubraltar and French Polynesia. The list also includes some territories which have few to know permanent residents, specifically the French southern territories, which are the sub-Antarctic islands in the Indian Ocean, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which is a British territory above Antarctica

Starting point is 00:08:25 and between South America and Africa, and the United States minor outlying islands. When you fill out some form online and it requires you to select a country and you see an option for United States minor outlying islands, they're just using the ISO 3166-1 list. There is no one who permanently lives in the U.S. minor outlying islands. No one has these islands as an address and there is no mail service to these islands save for military post to Wake Island. It really makes no sense that people keep putting this on a list of countries for actual forms that people need to fill out. It can only be selected by accident. There's literally no one who could accurately select it. Moreover, when listed in an alphabetical order, it's right next to the United States, so it's easy for someone to accidentally select it. So, the United States, minor outlying islands are in fact very minor islands in the middle of nowhere that are a part of the United States.

Starting point is 00:09:24 but no one lives there, no one calls it home, yet somehow it ends up on a list of countries on the internet. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The United States Minor Outlying Islands (Encore)

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