Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
The reason that the United States has control of so many random islands has much to do with an odd law passed just a few years before the Civil War.
No surprise to anyone, but large countries have this way of splaying out all over the world, with lots of their territories in unexpected areas.
The United States is no exception, with its array of minor outlying islands, mostly in the Pacific Ocean. But there’s something weird about how many of these islands, mostly uninhabited today or used as minor scientific or military outposts, came under ownership of the United States.
See, in 1856, Preside
nt Franklin Pierce signed a piece of legislation into law which may rank up there as the most unusual. The Guano Islands Act, which still exists today in the U.S. Code, basically makes it legal for U.S. citizens to claim unoccupied land in the name of the United States … if there’s a guano deposit on it.
(Thank you, President Pierce.)
Why was guano—or as most people call it, bird or bat poop—such a big deal? To put it simply, it was a hugely useful form of fertilizer in the days before those ingredients were available commercially. As Smithsonian magazine notes, the law directly resulted from the fact…
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