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Today in History
July 1 in HistoryOn this day in 1751, the first volume of Diderot’s Encyclopedia was issued. His publishers wanted him to translate Chamber’s Encyclopedia, published in Britain in 1723, but Diderot decided to embark on a bigger project. He set about to catalog all of human knowledge, and included illustrated articles describing the manufacture of common household objects, information that was considered beneath the dignity of educated inquiry. The scholar Voltaire liked the early volumes so much that he started to contribute articles to the project, but his irreverent treatment of religious subjects got the Encyclopedia banned. One night at dinner in the palace of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour confessed that she had no idea how her silk stockings had been made, and the king’s hidden copy of the Encyclopedia was fetched to answer the question. A servant told Voltaire later that the dinner guests fell upon the volumes “as if they were jewels.”
Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot
Today in HistoryJuly 2, 1923: Wislawa Szymborska is born. A Polish poet, essayist, and translator. She was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. I love this poem: "Astonishment," also translated as "Wonderment," is a simple, sixteen-line poem in which the poet asks a series of questions about why she exists in this world in the form that she does. The deeply philosophical poem poses ten questions about the human self, a person's place in the world, and the nature of existence, but it offers no answers to these puzzles. You can find them for yourself ...
Astonishment
Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star’s pin?
In spite of years of my not being here?
In spite of seas of all these dates and fates,
these cells, celestials and coelenterates?
What is it really that made me appear
neither an inch nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute nor aeons too early?
What made me fill myself with me so squarely?
Why am I staring now into the dark
and muttering this unending monologue
just like the growling thing we call a dog?
Wisława Szymborska
(from Could Have 1972)
Map: Collected and Last Poems
Today in HistoryA poem on July by Emily Dickinson [1830-1886]. She led a secluded and quiet life but her poetry reveals her great inner spontaneity and creativity. The poetry of Emily Dickinson is not easily categorized as she use forms such as rhyme and meter in unconventional ways; however, her poetry lucidly expresses thought provoking themes with a style that is a delight to read. Today her poetry is rightly appreciated for its immense depth and unique style. Emily Dickinson is widely regarded as one of the greatest female poets.
Answer July
Answer July —
Where is the Bee —
Where is the Blush —
Where is the Hay?
Ah, said July —
Where is the Seed —
Where is the Bud —
Where is the May —
Answer Thee — Me —
Nay — said the May —
Show me the Snow —
Show me the Bells —
Show me the Jay!
Quibbled the Jay —
Where be the Maize —
Where be the Haze —
Where be the Bur?
Here — said the Year —
A short poem by Emily Dickinson manages to reconstruct, through a sort of natural dialogue between the month of July and the month of May, the cycle of life. May turns to July, asking where the bee, the red and the hay are. July replies by asking him where the seed, the sprout are and the same month of May. The latter in turn replies asking him for snow, bluebells and jay. This is part of the dialogue asking in turn where the corn, mist and chestnut will be. To all he replies the year saying that he owns them all.
If there are no doubts about the months involved in this situation, I discovered that the doubt remains not only on the "jay" (jay) but also on the "chestnut" (bur). In English, the first refers to a type of bird belonging to the Corvidae family, a very talkative bird and very clever at pecking acorns. The second, the chestnut, can refer not only to the chestnut envelope, but also to a person who clings to something.
Beyond the game of assonances, rhythm and rhyme, I believe that the poet's intentions are above all to recreate the idea of the reproductive unity of nature in poetic form.
Everything revolves, as always, around his "me", her "I" which is an integral part of it.
These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
July 4 - Independence DayToday is Independence Day. It marks the day in 1776 when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The document was approved and signed on July 2, and was formally adopted on July 4; John Adams always felt that the Second of July was America’s true birthday, and wrote to his wife, Abigail, that the date “will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” He envisioned “Pomp and Parade [...] Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.” He reportedly refused to appear at annual Fourth of July celebrations for the rest of his life, in protest. He died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption — as did Thomas Jefferson, who had written most of the document.
It was traditional in the British Colonies to celebrate the king’s birthday every summer, with bonfires, parades, and speeches. During the summer of 1776, they held mock funerals for King George instead — with bonfires, parades, and speeches. They also read the Declaration of Independence aloud as soon as it was adopted. Philadelphia held the first formal Independence Day celebration in 1777, with bells and fireworks; in 1778, General George Washington called for double rations of rum for the troops, and in 1781, Massachusetts was the first to name July 4 an official state holiday. Congress declared it a national holiday in 1870.
Jefferson turned down a request to appear at the 50th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C.; it was the last letter he ever wrote, and in it he expressed his hope for the Declaration of Independence:
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be [...] the signal of arousing men to burst the chains [...] and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. [...] All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. [...] For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Today in HistoryJuly 6 is the birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama (1935), the spiritual ruler of Tibet. He was born Lhamo Thondup in Taktser, Tibet, to a farming and horse-trading family. His mother gave birth to him on a straw mat in a cowshed behind the family hut.
When he was two years old, a search team set out on foot to look for signs of the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Avalokiteshvara or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the patron saint of Tibet. Signs and visions led the search party to the boy’s home, where they posed as pilgrims and laid out drums and beads belonging to the 13th Dalai Lama. They asked him to choose which ones belonged to the Dalai Lama and which ones didn’t. He chose correctly each time and was soon ensconced in the 1,000-room Potala Palace in Lhasa, where he was tutored every day in wisdom, logic, medicine, and Buddhist philosophy. He had a fascination with clocks, watches, telescopes, clockwork soldiers, and toy motorcars and spent hours disassembling and reassembling them. He was lonely, but says, “I was very happy. I liked it a lot.”
When he was 15, Lhamo Thondup was enthroned and assumed his full duties. His name became Jetsen Jamphei Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, which means Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Compassionate, Defender of the Earth, Ocean of Wisdom.
Tibet had declared independence from China in 1912, but by 1951, Chairman Mao had invaded Tibet in an attempt to bring the country back under Chinese Rule, which led to years of unrest and violence. By 1959, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans had gathered around the Summer Palace, the Dalai Lama’s home, concerned for his safety. At 23 years old, he fled on foot to India, where he has lived as a refugee in Dharamsala ever since.
The plight of the Dalai Lama and Tibetans has been dramatized in films like Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997) and Seven Years in Tibet (1997), starring Brad Pitt. The Dalai Lama travels the world giving speeches and lectures on compassion, love, Buddhism, environmental practice, and human rights. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He has no passport; he travels with the yellow document of a refugee.
The Dalai Lama is the author of more than 100 books, including The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (2005) and Beyond Religion: Ethics for the Whole World (2012). He routinely posts words of wisdom on Twitter — advice like, “In order to help others, in order to serve others, the real motive is love.” The Dalai Lama has 12 million followers. The Dalai Lama says: “All problems must be solved through dialogue, through talk. The use of violence is outdated and never solves problems.”
Source: https://www.dalailama.com/
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
On this date July 7 in 1865, Mary Surratt became the first woman to be executed by the United States government. Surratt, a widow and Confederate sympathizer from Maryland, ran a boarding house in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, she had run a Maryland tavern that doubled as a safe house for Confederate spies. Her son John was friends with John Wilkes Booth, and often invited him to his mother’s boarding house. Authorities believed that Booth had plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln there, with Surratt’s knowledge and consent, if not active participation. Her son John had admitted to being Booth’s co-conspirator in a plot to abduct Lincoln and trade him for Confederate prisoners being held in Richmond, Virginia. When Booth assassinated the president, John Surratt fled to Canada and later to Europe. His mother was arrested along with four other conspirators.
Surratt went to the gallows with three other convicted traitors, all men. Even though she had been condemned in the court of public opinion as well by a military commission, people still became squeamish when they saw the news photos of a woman in a long black dress hanging from the gallows. Everyone, including the executioner himself, expected President Andrew Johnson to commute her sentence to life in prison. Five members of the commission that convicted her even asked him to commute. And Surratt’s 22-year-old daughter, Anna, pled tearfully to be allowed to talk to the president. She hoped he would pardon her mother because of her gender and her advanced age — which was 42 at the time. He refused all of these requests, saying, “She kept the nest that hatched the egg.”
Source:
Mary Surratt: The Life of the Alleged Lincoln Conspirator Who Became the First Woman Executed by the U.S. Government
It was on this day June 8 in 1822 that poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. He had spent the past four years traveling around Italy with his wife, and it was during this period that he wrote almost all of his most famous poems, including Prometheus Unbound (1820). He was living in La Spezia, on the west coast of Italy, at the time of his death.
Shelley had just bought a schooner two months earlier. The boat was twenty-four feet long, with twin masts, and it was called Don Juan, after the poem by his friend Lord Byron. He often spent mornings sitting on the boat as it lay anchored in the bay, reading and writing as he bobbed up and down with the waves. He worked on his last poem, "The Triumph of Life," which begins:
As in that trance of wonderous thought I lay
This was the tenour of my waking dream.
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to & fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why…
When the weather was nice, Shelley started taking his boat on short outings, and he was looking forward to making a few longer trips with his wife during the summer. He wrote in a letter to a friend, "[My boat] is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. . . . We drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world."
On July 1, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams left from La Spezia to Pisa. They started their return trip on July 7, and on this day, July 8, 1822, Shelley set off from Livorno to La Spezia, a trip of about fifty-five miles. There was a storm approaching from the southwest, and most of the Italian boats came into the harbor, but Shelley wanted to make it back that evening.
Shelley's friend Captain Roberts watched them sail away from a lighthouse, and as the storm got worse he began to grow worried. He took a large boat out to sea and offered to take Shelley and Williams on board, but Shelley refused the offer. A sailor said through a speaking trumpet, "If you will not come on board for God's sake reef your sails or you are lost." According to the sailor, Williams tried to lower the sails but Shelley grabbed him by the arm and wouldn't let him. The boat sank in the Gulf of Spezia later that evening. When Shelley's body washed up on shore ten days later, a copy of Keats's poems was found in his back pocket.
Source:
Shelley: The Pursuit
Mod
He had spent the past four years traveling around Italy with his wife, and it was during this period that he wrote almost..."
Beautiful the Golfo di La Spezia though!!!
Today in HistoryOn July 20, 1944, Hitler cheats death as a bomb planted in a briefcase goes off, but fails to kill him.
High German officials had made up their minds that Hitler must die. He was leading Germany in a suicidal war on two fronts, and assassination was the only way to stop him. A coup d’etat would follow, and a new government in Berlin would save Germany from complete destruction at the hands of the Allies.
That was the plan. This was the reality: Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, chief of the army reserve, had been given the task of planting a bomb during a conference that was to be held at Berchtesgaden, but was later moved to Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair, a command post at Rastenburg, Prussia. Stauffenberg planted the explosive in a briefcase, which he placed under a table, then left quickly. Hitler was studying a map of the Eastern front as Colonel Heinz Brandt, trying to get a better look at the map, moved the briefcase out of place, farther away from where the Fuhrer was standing.
At 12:42 p.m. the bomb went off. When the smoke cleared, Hitler was wounded, charred, and even suffered the temporary paralysis of one arm—but he was very much alive. (He was even well enough to keep an appointment with Benito Mussolini that very afternoon. He gave Il Duce a tour of the bomb site.) Four others present died from their wounds.
As the bomb went off, Stauffenberg was making his way to Berlin to carry out Operation Valkyrie, the overthrow of the central government. In Berlin, he and co-conspirator General Olbricht arrested the commander of the reserve army, General Fromm, and began issuing orders for the commandeering of various government buildings. And then the news came through from Herman Goering—Hitler was alive.
Source: www.history.com
Codename Valkyrie: General Friedrich Olbricht and the Plot Against Hitler
‘On My Birthday, July 21’: A Poem by Matthew PriorIn this poem, Prior (1664-1721) takes his birthday (July 21) as an opportunity to chastise the woman he loves for treating him with ‘scorn’ and denying him. A birthday poem that is also a love poem, albeit one about thwarted love.
On My Birthday, July 21
I, my dear, was born to-day—
So all my jolly comrades say:
They bring me music, wreaths, and mirth,
And ask to celebrate my birth:
Little, alas! my comrades know
That I was born to pain and woe;
To thy denial, to thy scorn,
Better I had ne’er been born:
I wish to die, even whilst I say—
‘I, my dear, was born to-day.’
I, my dear, was born to-day:
Shall I salute the rising ray,
Well-spring of all my joy and woe?
Clotilda, thou alone dost know.
Shall the wreath surround my hair?
Or shall the music please my ear?
Shall I my comrades’ mirth receive,
And bless my birth, and wish to live?
Then let me see great Venus chase
Imperious anger from thy face;
Then let me hear thee smiling say—
‘Thou, my dear, wert born to-day.’
Source:
The Queen's Pawn
Today in HistoryJuly 24, 1851 — This was the day when citizens of the United Kingdom were allowed light and air in their homes without having to pay for it. The long-hated Window Tax had finally been scrapped.
Imposed in 1696, it was a banded tax, so that the more windows a house boasted, the more its owner would pay in tax.
Inevitably, property owners and developers did what they could to avoid the levy. The rich built new houses with the minimum number of windows, while the poor in their tenement housing simply bricked up the windows, making their cramped, dark dwellings even more gloomy.
Another ploy by the rich was to apply only one layer of bricks in parts of their new homes where they thought windows could be added later when the tax was withdrawn. A simple job just to knock away a single layer of bricks and install a window in their place.
In the darkened tenements, the bricked-up windows came to be known as “Pitt’s Pictures” – a scathing reference to Conservative Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, who enthusiastically supported and extended the Window Tax.
Its abolition came after campaigners successfully argued that it was a “tax on health” and a “tax on light and air.” The medical profession in particular argued that the lack of windows tended to create dark, damp homes that were a source of disease and ill-health.
The taxman certainly saw glass as a handy source of income, even if the number of windows was being reduced. The Glass Tax, introduced in 1746, lasted 100 years until, once again, protests led by doctors caused its abolition.
The medical journal The Lancet protested against “the enormous tax on glass, amounting to more than three hundred per cent on its value,” and described the burden as “one of the most cruel a Government could inflict on the nation.”
It added that “the deficiency of light in town habitations, in a great measure caused by the enormous cost of glass, is universally admitted to be one of the principal causes of the unhealthiness of cities.”
Benjamin Franklin remarked in 1789: “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” He could perhaps have added that equally certain is the capacity of finance ministers to stretch their imaginations and dream up new taxes.
Before the Window Tax, for example, came the Hearth Tax, which was a levy on “every Fire Hearth and Stove within every House, Edifice, Chambers and Lodging" in England and Wales.
It was introduced in 1662 but was so unpopular and difficult to assess – officials had to enter homes and count the number of fireplaces – that it was scrapped about 20 years later.
A report by one of the officials became of interest to historians when it was noted that Thomas Faryner, a baker, of Pudding Lane, London, owned five hearths and one oven. A spark from this oven is believed to have started the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Other dreamed-up levies include the Wallpaper Tax, which was introduced in 1712, not abolished until 1836. And in recent times, ex-Chancellor George Osborne introduced an “under-occupancy penalty” which meant that tenants of local authority housing deemed to have a spare room would receive a cut in welfare benefits. It was quickly dubbed the “Bedroom Tax.”
Source: www.onthisday.com
Observations relative to the taxes upon windows or lights. A commutation of these taxes being also suggested, ... To which are added, observations on the shop-tax, ... a hint for the improvement of the metropolis, ... By John Lewis de Lolme, ...
Today in HistoryJuly 27 1835 Italian author Giosuè Carducci was born near Pisa. From early age he was attracted to ancient Classic and Italian authors, in particular Dante, Tasso, and Alfieri. After several years following his graduation from the University of Pisa, he was appointed to the chair of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna, a post he held until his retirement in 1904.
His strong revolutionary tendency expressed in his “Inno a Satana” (1865) “Hymn to Satan”, reflects his free thought and of modern ideas, imagination, and revolutions. Carducci was a translator of Goethe and Heine who influenced the development of his own poetry. He was also a noted literary historian and an eminent orator, leading an active political life. An honorary citizen of Bologna, Carducci was elected to the Senate, where he served as deputy in the House of Representatives.
Giosuè Carducci’s poetry inspired his compatriots in the war for Italian Independence, and he enjoyed an immense popularity both at home and abroad. He stands as the greatest Italian literary figure in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Carducci’s 1906 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded “not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces”.
Carducci’s second published poem is the still-famous “Hymn to Satan” (1857). It shocked Italy and reaped outcries of blasphemy from his continual enemy, the Catholic Church. The poem ascribes, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did half a century earlier in his Faust: Ein Fragment (1790; Faust: A Fragment , 1980), creative and constructive power to the revolutionary, fallen fourth archangel and invokes Satan as other poems had invoked the Muses. In the hymn, Carducci complains that Christianity is moribund and is carrying the world to destruction.
Hymn To Satan
by Giosuè Carducci
(fragment)
To you, creation’s
mighty principle,
matter and spirit
reason and sense
Whilst the wine
sparkles in cups
like the soul
in the eye
Whilst earth and
sun exchange
their smiles and
words of love
And shudders
from their secret embrace run down
from the mountains, and
the plain throbs with new life
To you my daring
verses are unleashed,
you I invoke, O Satan
monarch of the feast.
----
Inno a Satana
(frammento)
di Giosuè Carducci
A te, dell’essere
principio immenso,
materia e spirito,
ragione e senso;
mentre ne’ calici
il vin scintilla
sì come l’anima
nella pupilla;
mentre sorridono
la terra e ’l sole
e si ricambiano
d’amor parole,
e corre un fremito
d’imene arcano
da’ monti e palpita
fecondo il piano;
a te disfrenasi
il verso ardito,
te invoco, o Satana,
re del convito.
P.S. he Hymn to Satan is an occasional composition, written immediately for the toast at a friend's banquet in 1863, then published in a Bolognese magazine in 1869 under the pseudonym of Enotrio Romano. The composition closes the stage of the youth works and the author himself would later define it as "a vulgar chitarronata".
A Hymn to Satan & Other Translated Poems
Mod
He had spent the past four years traveling around Italy with his wife, and it was during this period that he wrote almost..."
He is buried in the A-catholic cimitery in Rome, along with his friend Keats. I'm planning to go and visit it nex wednesday, after having seen the Exhibition on Raffaello.
It is August 24, 1770. A seventeen-year-old boy lies lifeless in an attic in Brook Street, London. He took opium and arsenic and fell into an eternal sleep. Three days earlier he was walking in the cemetery of Saint Pancras with a friend and, absorbed in his own thoughts, he did not notice an open tomb and fell into it: the friend, playing down the incident, said he was happy to witness the resurrection of a genius. The boy's response was not in the same tone: "My dear friend, I've been fighting with the grave for some time now."The genius in question is the very young and talented poet Thomas Chatterton, known in those decades that preceded the full rise of Romanticism. He was one of the clearest examples of how a strong interest in the ancient poetic style was gradually growing. He was in fact obsessed with the Middle Ages and the poetry of that time. He strove to write in an English that could resemble the language of the fifteenth century as closely as possible, composing verses that one could believe belonged to three centuries ago.
Born in Bristol in 1752, Chatterton always had a certain fascination with the ecclesiastical and ancient world. He grew up in the aisles of the church of Saint Mary Redcliffe, learning to read from an old musical folio. He was always disinterested in purely childish activities. His sister in fact narrated how, when asked what he wanted painted on a bowl, he replied: "An angel with wings and a trumpet, so that he can make my name resound on the world." He spent his childhood locked up in the archive of Saint Mary Redcliffe, imagining that he lived in the Middle Ages, at the time of Edward IV (mid-15th century).
His literary work revolved around the name of Thomas Rowley, a 15th-century monk he imagined: this was the pseudonym he adopted in composing his own poems. Not finding a patron in Bristol, he turned to Horace Walpole, the famous author of the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, but when he discovered that the poet was sixteen, he chased him away.
In London he began to collaborate with some magazines, even if this activity did not allow him to live an economically serene condition. He wrote eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and in verse. In Holborn (London) he shared his room with a companion who was able to notice how he spent the night writing non-stop. He composed a novel that he pretended to have transcribed from a parchment, Excelente Balade of Charitie, which was rejected by the publishers.
He ended his days as already mentioned, between starvation and poverty, refusing the offers of food that were made to him by his neighbor. A couple of days after Chatterton's death, Dr. Thomas Fry was able to recompose (from some fragments found scattered on the floor of the room and collected by the owner in a box, with the hope that there might be a note written there before the suicide ) the piece from one of the poet's last lyric compositions: an alternative ending of Aella, A Tragical Enterlude, the tragedy that tells of Aella's battle against the Danes and the betrayal of her faithful knight Celmonda, who tries to abuse Birtha, wife of the protagonist. Aella, having returned to the castle wounded after the battle, and discovering that his wife has run away with a "stranger" (Celmonda had thus presented himself taking advantage of Aella's absence to kidnap Birtha), stabs himself, dying as soon as his wife - in meanwhile saved by the Danes - she crosses the threshold of the building. Birtha collapses on the body of her deceased husband.
This tragedy contains the song of a minstrel that seems to foretell the end of the couple. Here is a fragment:
"His hair is black like a winter night.
Her skin is white as snow in summer,
Vermilion like the morning light on her face,
Cold he lies down there in the grave:
My love is dead,
He went to his deathbed
Under the weeping willow "
Despite the sad end of the young poet, posterity has made his figure immortal: famous is the picture painted by the painter Henry Wallis, which portrays Chatterton in his deathbed. It was also an inspiration for romantic poets such as William Blake and John Keats, who was united to him by the untimely and tragic death of him and who dedicated Endymion to him in 1818.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever": this is how Endymion opens, to celebrate the beauty that never dies out.
The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton
August 31, 2005 Abdulrahman ZeitounHe woke in the tent on the roof of his garage and looked out over the flood around him. The waters from Hurricane Katrina had reached just a foot deep in his neighborhood during the storm and then receded, but on the 30th they had rushed back: the levees, he knew, must have broken. Now, after his first night on the roof, Zeitoun wondered what he would do until he saw his canoe floating nearby, nine feet above his yard. For the rest of the day, he paddled through his neighborhood, feeling a strange peace, and helped five trapped neighbors to safety, and when evening came he grilled chicken and vegetables on his roof, prayed, and went to sleep, exhausted, in his tent. The next six days, as Dave Eggers recounts in Zeitoun, he spent in much the same way, until, mistaken for a looter, he began another, more terrible, odyssey through the flooded city.
Zeitoun
Mod
July 27 1835 Italian author Giosuè Carducci was born near Pisa. From early age he was attracted to ancient Classic and Italian authors, in particular Dante, Tasso, and Alfieri. Af..."
Carducci wrote also about Perugia (he came often here, for the final exams at school, as president of commission) and against the Pope, who built the Fortress on half of the city center on top of the houses of the noble families who opposed him.
Nice and ironic poetry that one, even if not so "fundamental"
«O bella a' suoi be' dì Rocca Paolina
Co' baluardi lunghi e i sproni a sghembo!
La pensò Paol terzo una mattina
Fra il latin del messale e quel del Bembo.
– Quel gregge perugino in fra i burroni
Troppo volentier — disse — mi si svia.
Per ammonire, il padre eterno ha i tuoni.
Io suo vicario avrò l'artiglieria.
[…]
Aprite il Vaticano. Io piglio a braccio
Quel di sé stesso amico prigionier.
Vieni: alla libertà brìndisi io faccio:
Cittadino Mastai, bevi un bicchier».
Sunday September 15, 1963: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was savagely and viciously bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization dedicated to white supremacy and espousing violent terrorism. The predominantly African American church was having services when a tremendous explosion of dynamite ripped through the building at 10:22 am sending twenty-two people to the hospital. Four young Black girls were killed almost instantly-- Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Cynthia Wesley (14), and Carole Robertson (14). The incident galvanized the Civil Rights movement in the United States and gained an outpouring of grief and support from throughout the world. A week later Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke a Eulogy for the Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing at the funeral for three of the girls.I have a few of his words here--
"And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour (Yeah Well), we must not despair. (Yeah, Well) We must not become bitter (Yeah, That’s right), nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. (Yeah, Yes) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality." MLK, Jr.
September 15, 1935The German Reichstag passes the “Nuremburg Laws,” stripping German-born Jews of their citizenship and barring them from marrying Aryans or flying the German flag.The Nazi regime was characterised by the brutal oppression and persecution of Jewish people and other minorities. The Nazis aimed to completely exclude Jews and other minorities from everyday life. Whilst not the primary focus of the Nazi regime its first few years, persecution started from the moment that the Nazis entered power and almost continuously escalated.The Nuremberg Laws, announced at the Nazi Party annual rally in Nuremberg in late 1935, marked an escalation in the persecution of the Jews.
There were two main laws. The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only ‘ Aryans ’ were Reich citizens. As Jews were considered non-‘Aryan’, this law stripped them of their German citizenship and made them stateless in their own country. The Nazis defined anyone with Jewish ancestors as Jews, even if someone who only had one grandparent who had converted from Judaism to Christianity as a child. This made lots of people who had previously thought not thought of themselves as Jewish, or those who no longer practiced Judaism, potential targets of persecution.
The second Nuremberg law was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour. This law banned marriages and sexual intercourse between Jews and ‘Aryans’, and forbid the employment of ‘Aryan’ women under the age of 45 in Jewish households.
These two laws aimed to racially cleanse and protect German people of true ‘Aryan’ descent. For Jews and people of Jewish descent, they were terrifying. The laws marked a new period of persecution in Nazi Germany.
The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi
SEPTEMBER 16, 1932. Peg Entwistle Actress (1908–1932) The first of a long series of suicides. It’s a warm September evening in Los Angeles: the young 24-year-old Peg Entwistle leaves the house of her uncle, with whom she lives, crosses Griffith Park and slowly climbs Mount Lee, which lies behind the city. She wants to reach one of the most famous installations in the world: the big letters of the Hollywood sign. Arriving near the letter H, she places her purse on a stone, folds her jacket carefully and climbs the maintenance ladder behind the letter, which is 15 meters high: at the top, she Peg she lets herself fall into the void. She is the first of a sad series of suicides in this place. Promising theater actress, Peg was born in Wales in 1908 and at the age of 16 she got her first role in a Broadway show: from that moment, her name appears in several productions and her career continues in Boston and New York. The crisis of ’31, which caused the closure of many theaters, pushed her to go to Los Angeles, to pursue the dream of becoming a film actress. But the competition is stiff and she Peg does not emerge. In the summer of that year, she manages to get a part in a thriller, but then in the editing of the film her scene is eliminated. Left without money and without a plan B, the young aspiring actress does not hold up and a terror invades her; her dream becomes tragedy and her last words in a note read: “I’m afraid, I’m a coward. I’m sorry for everything. If I had done it a long time ago, I would have saved a lot of pain. “ Since that night of September 16, many witnesses say that a blonde woman, with a sad air and clothes from the thirties, is wandering on the path that leads to the very high letters. At sunset, the park rangers swear, the figure of Peg glides through the air and a scent of gardenia pervades the senses, Peg’s favorite perfume.
Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign Suicide
Such a sad, melancholic vignette. Thank you Antonio. RIP Peg.
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The German Reichstag passes the “Nuremburg Laws,” stripping German-born Jews of their citizenship and barring them from marrying Aryans or flying the German flag.The Nazi regime..."
And we still discuss about it, as if you could find something posive in that period...
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "September 15, 1935The German Reichstag passes the “Nuremburg Laws,” stripping German-born Jews of their citizenship and barring them from marrying Aryans or flying the German flag..."
We don't discuss, we remember ...
Today, October 1, 2022"October If you like fall, you like October. It’s the height of the season, the fieriest in its orange, the briskest in its breezes. “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” exclaims the irrepressible Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. “It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?” October at Green Gables is “when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson” and “the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths”: it’s a “beautiful month.” Katherine Mansfield would have disagreed. October, she wrote in her journal, “is my unfortunate month. I dislike exceedingly to have to pass through it—each day fills me with ter terror.” (It was the month of her birthday.) And Gabriel García Márquez’s biographer notes that October, the month of the greatest disaster in his family history, when his grandfather killed a man in 1908, “would always be the gloomiest month, the time of evil augury” in his novels. Some people, of course, seek out evil augury in October. It’s the month in which we domesticate horror, as best we can, into costumes, candy, and slasher films. Frankenstein’s monster may not have been animated until the full gloom of November, but it’s in early October that Count Dracula visits Mina Harker in the night and forces of their own the previous October by telling each other ghost stories, prove anything but immune to sudden terror themselves until they can trace their curse to a horrible secret they shared during an October fifty years before—just after, as it happens, another kind of modern horror, the stock market crash of 1929. In the odd patterns that human irrationality often follows, those financial terrors, the Black Thursdays and Black Mondays, tend to arrive in October too."
A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year
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OCTOBER 8 Teruo Nakamura Soldier was born (1919 - 1979) The last of the Japanese ghost soldiers In the history books it says that the Second World War ended in 1945, but not everyone went exactly like this. Enlisted in 1939 by the Japanese imperial army in the Takasago group of volunteers, he did not give up until the winter of 1974. A pilot accidentally spots his hut lost in the jungle of the island of Morotai and the Japanese embassy in Indonesia organizes a research mission. When he was found and asked for explanations, he replied that he had abandoned the group of survivors he had stayed with because he was being pursued by some enemy soldiers. After being hospitalized in Jakarta, he asks to be repatriated to Taiwan, where he dies of lung cancer five years later. His repatriation was the reason for a media clash between Taiwan and Japan. The two eastern countries did not fight to grab the image rights of the one who can be considered the last soldier in the bloodiest war of all time. Simply, neither of them was willing to pay him the modest pension he was entitled to.
Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan's Lost Soldiers
OCTOBER 14 Vernon Lee was born, the woman writer who became a man writer (1856 - 1935).Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget from an unconventional family of cosmopolitan English who practiced nomadism: they traveled around Europe stopping in various places for a few months, and then moved, until they stopped near Florence, in a villa called Il Palmerino . Violet, lively wit and predisposition for writing, decides, in 1878, at the age of 22, to take on a male identity: she will be Vernon Lee, not only in art, but also in life, adopting men's clothing.
What are the reasons for this choice? Perhaps she was convinced that culture and natural gifts were not enough: she could aspire to success as an author of novels, but the time had not yet come for women - we are in the second half of the twentieth century - to acquire credit in the field of non-fiction, genre " serious », reserved for men. Or she, more simply, she rejected gender identity. Like Vernon Lee, she will sign all her writings, philosophical, historical, aesthetic essays, as well as fantasy novels, a literary genre that she is among the first to cultivate. She works all that give her notoriety, today unjustly forgotten.
You have given the best in the description of villages or natural landscapes where you can find traces of ancient myths and mysterious presences (Genius loci, her most famous book), and in ghost stories. In love with Italy, she has always lived in Il Palmerino, with her two companions in her life, Clementine Anstruther Thomson before her, her and Irene Cooper Willis who will be next to her until her death, which took place in 1935.
She was an extravagant intellectual who met and associated with many famous men, with whom relations were not always easy due to sharp and merciless judgments against them that she distributed without any regard. We can see her in a beautiful portrait by John Singer Sargent: delicate face, very short hair, round intellectual glasses, masculine-style dress, distant gaze.
Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography
Today in History - October 20, 1962During a cultural thaw that had just a few months remaining, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev broke a decades-long taboo by approving the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, an unsparing novel by former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the brutal life in one of Stalin’s labor camps.
To those in the Politburo who feared its revelations about the camp, the premier retorted, as he proudly recounted on this day to Solzhenitsyn’s editor, “What do you think it was, a holiday resort?”
The novel was an immediate success in the USSR and in the West, but within two years Khrushchev was forced out of office by Brezhnev, within five Ivan Denisovich was quietly removed from Soviet libraries, and within twelve Solzhenitsyn himself was forcibly exiled to the West.
Literature Companion: One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich
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LauraT wrote: "I've never read it, even if, of course, I've heard a lot about it..."Read it and you'll discover old Soviet Union or modern and old Russia
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Read it and you'll discover old Soviet Union or modern and old Russia"
I'm afraid I don't have to discover such terrible place, still, it is something that has to be looked into the eyes, also if we want to comprehend the happenings of today
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "LauraT wrote: "I've never read it, even if, of course, I've heard a lot about it..."Read it and you'll discover old Soviet Union or modern and old Russia"
I'm afraid I don't have..."
"Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis" (Cicero)
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Historia magistra vitae: aphorism or apophthegm?
History cannot be magistra vitae because the model of perfection is the in "heaven", that is, the pursuit of a never-ending perfection; starting from the political-linguistic unity with the subsequent division of ethics - of the human race.
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Interesting theory
October 31 ....is a celebrated day in the calendar. There is the traditional Halloween feast at Hogwarts, with candy-filled pumpkins, decorations, masses of live bats, and, at Harry Potter’s fourth Hogwarts Halloween, the Goblet of Fire, which declares him the surprise fourth Triwizard champion. It’s also the anniversary of the incomplete decapitation in 1492 of Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, whose ghost was known forever after as Nearly Headless Nick. And of course it’s on this day that Lord Voldemort himself stepped into the Potter cottage and with the Killing Curse—“Avada Kedavra!”—murdered James and Lily Potter but failed to kill the baby Harry, nearly destroying himself in the process and leaving behind, in the lightning-shaped scar on Harry’s forehead, a part of his soul.
Harry Potter: A History of Magic
Today in History - November 1, 1755 Would it be too much to say that the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon, which leveled one of the great cities of Europe and killed a fifth of its inhabitants, laid equal waste to European philosophy? Hundreds of writers attempted to make sense of the quake, including the young Immanuel Kant, who, unlike most, blamed the upheaval on geological forces rather than God, and the popular, optimistic theory of God’s benevolence, summed up by Leibniz’s claim that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” could hardly hold against the arbitrary suffering of thousands, on All Saints’ Day, no less. Nor could it withstand the withering assaults of Voltaire, who wrote his skeptical “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” within a month of the calamity and made the earthquake central to his sarcastic masterpiece, Candide.
Wrath of God: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Today in History 1993 It is November 1, 1993, and somewhere in Britain Hazel Burns and Spencer Kelly are born. But it’s also November 1, 1993, when Hazel and Spencer, as young adults, wake up together in his bed after their first, life-changing night together. Using two narrative conceits for his story—all its events, past, present, and future, take place on November 1, 1993 (the day the European Union was founded), and all its nouns (with only twelve exceptions, he assures us) are borrowed from those used in the Times on that day—Richard Beard constructed Damascus, a serious and playful novel of time, fate, love, and chance; of crowds, countries, and a few individual lives.
Damascus
November 3, 1793The quotation for which Olympe de Gouges is best remembered—“Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they must also have the right to mount the speaker’s platplatform”—proved dismayingly prophetic. De Gouges transformed herself from a small-town butcher’s daughter into a wealthy and sophisticated Parisian socialite, playwright, and political activist, culminating in her “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” which, with pointed irony, exposed the absence of women in the French Revolution’s doctrine of universal equality, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” But on this day, for her stubborn public protests against the radicals who had taken over the revolution, she was guillotined by the Jacobins, who ridiculed her as an example of what could happen if women neglected the domestic duties given them by nature.
Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges
Today in History. Remember, remember, it all happened in November! Naturally, the twofold anniversary of these days will naturally pass almost unnoticed: the advent of communism in Moscow on November 7, 1917 and the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Yet, there would have been no world today without that double event. There would not even have been fascism without the advent of communism. And there would be no European Union without the fall of the Wall and therefore of the Soviet Union.
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today
Today in History - November 3, 1926 Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next morning made her disappearance the talk of England, drawing thousands, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, to search for her body before she was finally discovered residing under a pseudonym at a luxury spa, where she claimed temporary amnesia.
The mystery has never been definitively solved, though scholar Jared Cade has argued convincingly that she staged her disappearance—never suspecting it would cause such an uproar—to embarrass her husband, whose affair was ending their marriage, a scenario made only more plausible by the name under which she registered at the spa: Mrs. Teresa Neele, which borrowed a last name from Nancy Neele, the rival her husband soon married after their divorce.
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
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Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next..."
Always loved this "story"!
December 10, 1513 Overthrown as a Florentine statesman and then imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, Niccolò Machiavelli had to settle for a more contemplative political life at his estate in Tuscany. Writing to a friend in Rome, he described his daily life in retreat: overseeing his woodcutters, reading Petrarch by a spring, gambling with townspeople, and then in the evening entering his study: “On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients . . . and for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty,and I am not terrified by death.” He had, he added, “composed a short study, De principatibus,” a treatise known to us as The Prince.
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
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Machiavellian we always say...
LauraT wrote: "On eof the most quoted (and never read!) of Italian writers!!!Machiavellian we always say..."
“Machiavellians are sly, deceptive, distrusting, and manipulative. They are characterized by cynical and misanthropic beliefs, callousness, a striving for … money, power, and status, and the use of cunning influence tactics. In contrast to narcissists, Machiavellians do not necessarily have to be the center of attention and are satisfied with the role of puppeteer, unobtrusively pulling the strings."
The Florentine wasn't all this. Those who haven't read his book say that ...
All About Books
Books mentioned in this topic
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (other topics)Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (other topics)
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today (other topics)
Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (other topics)
Damascus (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Francesco Guccini (other topics)Paco Ignacio Taibo II (other topics)
William Shakespeare (other topics)
William Shakespeare (other topics)
Denis Diderot (other topics)
First there was the telephone, then the fax machine, and then social media — a revolutionary way of communicating. Since its creation, people have been able to connect with each other like never before. Friends and family can connect at any moment, and marketers have been able to reach consumers in an entirely new fashion. In fact, people use social media for an average of 144 minutes every single day. Because of its impact on society over the years, World Social Media Day was born on June 30, and it has continued to grow in popularity ever since ...
Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of “instant” communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new book, social media is anything but a new phenomenon.
From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the increasingly sophisticated ways people shared information with each other, spontaneously and organically, down the centuries.
With the rise of newspapers in the nineteenth century, then radio and television, “mass media” consolidated control of information in the hands of a few moguls. However, the Internet has brought information sharing full circle, and the spreading of news along social networks has reemerged in powerful new ways.
A fresh, provocative exploration of social media over two millennia, Writing on the Wall reminds us how modern behavior echoes that of prior centuries-the Catholic Church, for example, faced similar dilemmas in deciding whether or how to respond to Martin Luther's attacks in the early sixteenth century to those that large institutions confront today in responding to public criticism on the Internet.
Invoking the likes of Thomas Paine and Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, Standage explores themes that have long been debated: the tension between freedom of expression and censorship; whether social media trivializes, coarsens or enhances public discourse; and its role in spurring innovation, enabling self-promotion, and fomenting revolution. As engaging as it is visionary, Writing on the Wall draws on history to cast new light on today's social media and encourages debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.
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