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Today in History
A piece of history in publishing. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a book about an academic named Humbert Humbert who falls in love with a little girl. It was published in the United States for the first time on this day August 18 in 1957. It had already been reviewed in The Nation by fiction writer George P. Elliott more than a year earlier.
“Lolita was published in English two years ago in Paris, but it has not yet come out in this country…. I suppose our publishers are afraid that Lolita would bring them lawsuits for being pornographic and immoral. And pornographers would, I am sure, find it fairly satisfactory for their lewd fantasies. But only fairly satisfactory, for, like Ulysses before it, Lolita by high art transmutes persons, motives and actions which in ordinary life are considered indecent, into objects of delight, compassion and contemplation. Lolita will turn no reasonable citizen into a pornographer; the indecency in it, like the crime, is always seen with a clarity which does not encourage the fabricating of fantasies….
The book’s chief offense, I guess, is that it presents a sexual pervert as a man to be known and pitied, a man of some essential dignity. Its other offense, perhaps as great, is that it satirizes in delighted detail our adman pandering to childishness, ease, vulgarity, titillation, mindlessness. Yet Lolita is not primarily a satire but a comedy of the exuberant Rabelaisian sort. It is superabundant in verbal energy (Nabokov’s command over American idiom is a marvel greater even than Conrad’s over literary English) and it heaps details of our daily life before us until it forces our wonder even more than our repugnance.
It preserves that strange doubleness of comedy which creates in many a discomfort they resist…for you identify with, feel familiar with, see yourself in, a character whom you at the same time know to have performed abominable deeds. It transmutes, as only a great book could, this diseased man and this banal girl into people whom we know so well that they becomes others—not symbols, not types of Man, not aspects of ourselves, but persons towards whom we are permitted and encouraged and at last obliged to exercise our highest charity.”
Source: https://www.thenation.com/ ( https://goo.gl/HGAnbV)
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook
Today is the birthday of Italian-born Viennese composer Antonio Salieri, born in Legnago, in the Republic of Venice (1750). Although he was quite popular in the 18th century, he probably wouldn't be well known today were it not for the movie Amadeus (1984). The movie was based on Peter Shaffer's play by the same name (1979), which was in turn based on a short play by Aleksandr Pushkin, which was called Mozart and Salieri (1830). These stories all present Salieri as a mediocre and uninspired composer who was jealous of Mozart's musical genius; Salieri tried to discredit Mozart at every turn, and some versions of the story even accuse him of poisoning his rival.But Salieri was a talented and successful composer, writing the scores for several popular operas. He had a happy home life with his wife and eight children. And because he had received free voice and composition lessons from a generous mentor as a young man, he also gave most of his students the benefit of free instruction. Some of his pupils included Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Franz Schubert. He was the Kapellmeister — the person in charge of music — for the Austrian emperor for 36 years. He and Mozart were competitors, but their rivalry was usually a friendly one; Salieri visited Mozart when he was dying, and was one of the few people to attend his funeral.
After the turn of the 19th century, Salieri's music began to fall out of fashion. "I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner completely contrary to that of my own times," he wrote. "Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity." He stopped composing operas and began to produce more and more religious pieces. He suffered from dementia late in his life and died in 1825. He had composed his own requiem 20 years earlier, and it was performed for the first time at his funeral.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera
A piece of political, criminal and literary history1936, Aug 18, Federico Garcia Lorca was shot and killed by a Francoist squad on the outskirts of Grenada and buried in an unmarked grave along with 3 other prisoners after being forced to dig his own grave.
The final hours of the executed poet Federico García Lorca's life have become known, reports The Guardian. A local historian from the southern city of Granada, Miguel Caballero Pérez, claims to have found Lorca's real grave--and after three years of sifting through police and military archives, he has "identified the half-dozen career policemen and volunteers who formed the firing squad that shot Lorca and three other prisoners, as well as the burial site." Furthermore:
"I decided to research archive material rather than gather more oral testimony because that is where the existing confusion comes from--with so many supposed witnesses inventing things," explained Caballero, who has published his results in a Spanish book called The Last 13 Hours of García Lorca.
Caballero said his original intention had been to verify information gathered in the 1960s by a Spanish journalist, Eduardo Molina Fajardo, who was also a member of the far-right Falange organisation that supported the dictator General Francisco Franco.
"Because of his own political stance, Molina Fajardo had access to people who were happy to tell him the truth," said Caballero. "The archives bear out most of what he said, so it is reasonable to suppose he was also right about the place Lorca was buried."
That spot was said to be a trench dug by someone seeking water in an area of open countryside near a farm called Cortijo de Gazpacho, between the villages of Viznar and Alfacar. The zone is only half a kilometre from the spot identified by historian Ian Gibson in 1971--which was controversially dug up in 2009, but where no bones were found.
"The new place makes sense because it is far enough from the villages to be out of eyesight and earshot, but you can also get there by car--as they would have needed headlights to shoot people at night," said Caballero. Caballero took a water diviner to the area, who employed the same divining technique using a twig that was common in Lorca's time. He detected a possible underwater stream. "It is reasonable, then, to suppose that someone might have dug a trench here looking for streams just below the surface," said Caballero.
An archaeologist, Javier Navarro, has identified a dip in the ground that could indicate a grave. "It is by no means unreasonable to think there is a grave there," said Navarro, who has found half a dozen civil war mass graves in other parts of Spain. "It would be very easy to find out. You only have to scrape away about 40cm of topsoil for an experienced archaeologist to say if the earth has been dug up before."
The half dozen men who formed the firing squad shot hundreds of suspected leftwingers in the summer of 1936, with Lorca just one of them. They were given a bonus of 500 pesetas and promoted as a reward for carrying out the dirty work of the nationalist forces of the future dictator, Franco. "I call them the 'executioners' rather than the 'murderers' because, while some were volunteers, others were career policemen who risked being shot themselves if they refused," said Caballero. One was said to have complained that the job "was driving him mad". Some of the squad probably did not even know who Lorca was. "These were not the sort of people who read poetry. . .".
Source: Poetry Foundation (https://goo.gl/oNCkC4)
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
Las trece últimas horas en la vida de García Lorca : el informe que da respuesta a todas las incógnitas sobre la muerte del poeta : ¿quién ordenó su detención?, ¿por qué le ejecutaron?, ¿dónde está su cuerpo?
Political HistoryAugust 20, 1940 - Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico.
Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, second only to Vladimir Lenin in the early stages of Soviet communist rule. But he lost out to Joseph Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death, and was assassinated while in exile.
Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Ukraine, then part of Russia. His father was a prosperous Jewish farmer. Trotsky became involved in underground activities as a teenager. He was soon arrested, jailed and exiled to Siberia where he joined the Social Democratic Party. Eventually, he escaped Siberia and spent the majority of the next 15 years abroad, including a spell in London.
In 1903, the Social Democrats split. While Lenin assumed leadership of the 'Bolshevik' (majority) faction, Trotsky became a member of the 'Menshevik' (minority) faction and developed his theory of 'permanent revolution'. After the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd in February 1917, he made his way back to Russia. Despite previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive role in the communist take-over of power in the same year. His first post in the new government was as foreign commissar, where he found himself negotiating peace terms with Germany. He was then made war commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White Russian forces in the civil war. Thus Trotsky played a crucial role in keeping the Bolshevik regime alive. He saw himself as Lenin's heir-apparent, but his intellectual arrogance made him few friends, and his Jewish heritage may also have worked against him. When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was easily outmanoeuvred by Stalin. In 1927, he was thrown out of the party. Internal and then foreign exile followed, but Trotsky continued to write and to criticise Stalin.
Trotsky settled in Mexico in 1936. On 20 August 1940, an assassin called Ramon Mercader, acting on Stalin's orders, stabbed Trotsky with an ice pick, fatally wounding him. He died the next day.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk (https://goo.gl/tMtGmd)
The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky
A piece of art robbery in today’s historyAugust 21, the day of the eclipse, is the same day in 1911 that the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911.
He made more money as a handyman than as an artist, but Vincenzo Peruggia is personally responsible for making the Mona Lisa what it is today. Leonardo da Vinci painted Lisa del Giocondo in the early 16th century, but Peruggia made her famous worldwide by walking out of the Louvre with the painting wrapped in his smock on August 21, 1911, one hundred years ago today. With that daring daylight robbery, the Mona Lisa began her ascent into the stratosphere of cultural fame, while Peruggia sank further and further into the hazy mists of vague infamy. How and why did Peruggia do it? More importantly, what would have happened if he hadn’t?
Peruggia came to Paris in search of a life in art, even if it was only as a part-time worker in the Louvre. Like many other Italians, Peruggia sought greater opportunities in the City of Lights only to find himself disparaged by the locals as “sale macaroni,” French for “dirty macaroni.” Wounded by prejudice and longing for home, Peruggia, as he later claimed, stole back what he
mistakenly thought Napoleon had stolen from Italy a century before. In reality, Leonardo sold the painting to Francis I after moving to France to become court painter. But why did Vincenzo really do it?
Whether it be the often-invoked patriotism motive or a more nefarious profit motive, one less-noble theory has Peruggia stealing the painting for a con man who planned to sell six copies to wealthy investors while the real work was missing. Sadly, Peruggia stole the Mona for the usual reasons, money and fame.
Noah Charney, international authority on art crime as founder in his new book, “The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting”, in addition to analyzing the how and why, goes into the pre- and post-Peruggia lives of La Gioconda. Even before the heist, da Vinci’s work drew praise ranging from contemporary Giorgio Vasari, who gave the painting it’s name, which means approximately “Lady Lisa,” to 19thcentury essayist Walter Pater’s prose poem to the “Lady of the Rocks.”
“Mysterious, beautiful, iconic, and the work of a true universal genius, the Mona Lisa was once again celebrated, already among the most famous paintings in the world,” Charney writes of the power of Pater’s paean. “And it hadn’t even been stolen yet.” Before Peruggia, the Mona Lisa stood among the greatest paintings in the world. After his act, followed by the search and recovery two years later, Mona left the rest far, far behind. Charney tells the tale with his trademark breathless flair and eye for fascinating detail, in this case episodes such as Picasso’s being questioned about the theft and Mona’s “missing years” during World War II when the Nazis may have taken her as part of their rape of Europa’s art treasures.
Peruggia held onto the painting for nearly two years before contacting art experts in Italy about selling her. During those two years, Mona-mania gripped Europe, ginning up the painting’s cultural cache. Peruggia served a short jail sentence while Mona toured Italy before triumphantly returning to France. While fighting for Italy in World War I, Vincenzo began answering to Pietro. After the war, Pietro Peruggia married, moved back to France, opened his own paint store, and lived in obscurity with his family until his death in 1925. Peruggia died believing that he’d live forever as the man who stole the Mona Lisa.
Source: BigThink (adapted) (https://goo.gl/YgR5By)
The Thefts of the Mona Lisa
Io Vincenzo Peruggia da Dumenza ho rubato la Gioconda e per 28 mesi l'ho tenuta tutta per me. Chi mai è stato più felice?
Today’s History in AstronomyOn Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun. Anyone within the path of totality can see one of nature’s most awe inspiring sights - a total solar eclipse. This path, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun's tenuous atmosphere - the corona - can be seen, will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun's disk. NASA created this website to provide a guide to this amazing event. Here you will find activities, events, broadcasts, and resources from NASA and our partners across the nation.
The total solar eclipse of June 8, 1918 crossed the United States from Washington State to Florida. This path is roughly similar to the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse and was the last time totality crossed the nation from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
The US Naval Observatory dispatched an expedition to Baker City, Oregon and successfully observed the eclipse. An artist, Howard Russell Baker, sketched the corona and made a fine painting of the eclipse. Baker City is also within the path of the 2017 eclipse.
The total solar eclipse of September 10, 1923 just grazed the southwestern corner of California, crossing Point Concepcion, the Channel Islands, and San Diego. Bad weather thwarted most observers in this area.
The total solar eclipse of January 24, 1925 was seen by perhaps millions of people in the New York metropolitan area and the northeastern United States. It was a brilliantly clear but very cold day in New York. This eclipse was notable for the number of observatories fortuitously placed in the path as well as the airplanes and dirigible dispatched for a better view.
The total solar eclipse of August 31, 1932 crossed over northeast Canada and the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and a small part of Massachusetts. Many people took trains to New England to witness this spectacle.
A total solar eclipse crossed over the northwest United States and Canada on July 9, 1945 as the second World War was winding down. Newspapers of the day splashed eclipse news along with news of bombing raids on Japan.
The total solar eclipse of June 30, 1954 began at sunrise in Nebraska and traversed South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin before crossing Canada on its way to Scandinavia, Europe, and South Asia.
The total solar eclipse of October 2, 1959 began over Massachusetts. The late Professor Donald Menzel of Williams College hired an airplane to view the eclipse with some of his students. One student, Jay Pasachoff, went on to become a prominent solar astrophysicist and credits this experience as a defining moment in launching his career studying the Sun's corona.
The northeast corner of the United States was again visited by the Moon's shadow on July 20, 1963. This eclipse is a plot device in a novel by Stephen King, Gerald's Game.
The total solar eclipse of March 7, 1970 crossed the state of Florida and much of the Atlantic seaboard. Many of today's veteran eclipse chasers began their pursuit with this eclipse as it was accessible to many on the East Coast.
The last total solar eclipse within the contiguous 48 United States was on February 26, 1979. Many of those who travelled to see this eclipse were successful but only because of relocating under partly cloudy skies.
The total solar eclipse of July 11, 1991 was the last to touch any of the 50 United States. Many flew to Hawai'i for this eclipse and sadly most were disappointed by unseasonably cloudy weather on the Kona coast of the Big Island. Many others flew or drove to the tip of Baja California and were rewarded with excellent views of an extremely long duration eclipse, up to 6 minutes and 53 seconds.
Source: https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/...
In the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses
The BBC began its own regular television programming from the basement of Broadcasting House, London, on 22 August 1932.The studio moved to larger quarters in 16 Portland Place, London, in February 1934, and continued broadcasting the 30-line images, carried by telephone line to the medium wave transmitter at Brookmans Park, until 11 September 1935, by which time advances in all-electronic television systems made the electromechanical broadcasts obsolete.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the magic of television..."
With those words Leslie Mitchell introduced Britain's first high-definition public television programme from Radiolympia. The date was 22th August 1936.
Ronnie Hill wrote a song for Helen McKay to sing called Here's Looking at You, which also became the title of the show. Acts booked to appear were a performing horse named 'Pogo', The Griffith Brothers and Miss Lutie, The Three Admirals and the Television Orchestra, which had been hurriedly put together by Hyan Greenbaum. Baird and EMI transmitted the show from the studios to Olympia on alternate days.
An estimated 123,000 visitors got their first glimpse of television in the viewing area at the show, with many more seeing it at Waterloo Station, which had been equipped with sets. The team had indeed been given a chance to do their experimenting. They just had to do it in front of a live audience...
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainm...
This day in History, August 23, A.D. 79 Mount Vesuvius begins stirring, on feast day of Vulcan, Roman god of fire (goes on to destroy Pompeii)After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupts in southern Italy, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing thousands. The cities, buried under a thick layer of volcanic material and mud, were never rebuilt and largely forgotten in the course of history. In the 18th century, Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered and excavated, providing an unprecedented archaeological record of the everyday life of an ancient civilization, startlingly preserved in sudden death.
The ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum thrived near the base of Mount Vesuvius at the Bay of Naples. In the time of the early Roman Empire, 20,000 people lived in Pompeii, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers who exploited the rich soil of the region with numerous vineyards and orchards. None suspected that the black fertile earth was the legacy of earlier eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was a city of 5,000 and a favorite summer destination for rich Romans. Named for the mythic hero Hercules, Herculaneum housed opulent villas and grand Roman baths. Gambling artifacts found in Herculaneum and a brothel unearthed in Pompeii attest to the decadent nature of the cities. There were smaller resort communities in the area as well, such as the quiet little town of Stabiae.
At noon on August 24, 79 A.D., this pleasure and prosperity came to an end when the peak of Mount Vesuvius exploded, propelling a 10-mile mushroom cloud of ash and pumice into the stratosphere. For the next 12 hours, volcanic ash and a hail of pumice stones up to 3 inches in diameter showered Pompeii, forcing the city’s occupants to flee in terror. Some 2,000 people stayed in Pompeii, holed up in cellars or stone structures, hoping to wait out the eruption.
A westerly wind protected Herculaneum from the initial stage of the eruption, but then a giant cloud of hot ash and gas surged down the western flank of Vesuvius, engulfing the city and burning or asphyxiating all who remained. This lethal cloud was followed by a flood of volcanic mud and rock, burying the city.
The people who remained in Pompeii were killed on the morning of August 25 when a cloud of toxic gas poured into the city, suffocating all that remained. A flow of rock and ash followed, collapsing roofs and walls and burying the dead.
Much of what we know about the eruption comes from an account by Pliny the Younger, who was staying west along the Bay of Naples when Vesuvius exploded. In two letters to the historian Tacitus, he told of how “people covered their heads with pillows, the only defense against a shower of stones,” and of how “a dark and horrible cloud charged with combustible matter suddenly broke and set forth. Some bewailed their own fate. Others prayed to die.”
Pliny, only 17 at the time, escaped the catastrophe and later became a noted Roman writer and administrator. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was less lucky. Pliny the Elder, a celebrated naturalist, at the time of the eruption was the commander of the Roman fleet in the Bay of Naples. After Vesuvius exploded, he took his boats across the bay to Stabiae, to investigate the eruption and reassure terrified citizens. After going ashore, he was overcome by toxic gas and died.
According to Pliny the Younger’s account, the eruption lasted 18 hours. Pompeii was buried under 14 to 17 feet of ash and pumice, and the nearby seacoast was drastically changed. Herculaneum was buried under more than 60 feet of mud and volcanic material. Some residents of Pompeii later returned to dig out their destroyed homes and salvage their valuables, but many treasures were left and then forgotten.
In the 18th century, a well digger unearthed a marble statue on the site of Herculaneum. The local government excavated some other valuable art objects, but the project was abandoned. In 1748, a farmer found traces of Pompeii beneath his vineyard. Since then, excavations have gone on nearly without interruption until the present. In 1927, the Italian government resumed the excavation of Herculaneum, retrieving numerous art treasures, including bronze and marble statues and paintings.
The remains of 2,000 men, women, and children were found at Pompeii. After perishing from asphyxiation, their bodies were covered with ash that hardened and preserved the outline of their bodies. Later, their bodies decomposed to skeletal remains, leaving a kind of plaster mold behind. Archaeologists who found these molds filled the hollows with plaster, revealing in grim detail the death pose of the victims of Vesuvius. The rest of the city is likewise frozen in time, and ordinary objects that tell the story of everyday life in Pompeii are as valuable to archaeologists as the great unearthed statues and frescoes. It was not until 1982 that the first human remains were found at Herculaneum, and these hundreds of skeletons bear ghastly burn marks that testifies to horrifying deaths.
Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944 and its last major eruption was in 1631. Another eruption is expected in the near future, would could be devastating for the 700,000 people who live in the “death zones” around Vesuvius.
I live just few miles from Pompei.
Source: www.history.com
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found
Today in the History of Printing. I was born into a family of traditional printers.On August 24, 1456, the Bible was printed for the first time.
The groundbreaking project was started four years earlier by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, marking the start of the "Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of the printed book.
Gutenberg's invention, the printing press, used movable components to applied ink on paper as a means towards producing text. Although not the inventor of such a device (the world's first known movable-type system was created in China around 1040 CE), Gutenberg revolutionized the process by enabling mass printing. The “hand mold” he created made possible for the first time the precise and rapid creation of “types” in large quantities, a key element in the profitability of the whole printing enterprise.
Originally a goldsmith, Gutenberg used his knowledge of metals to develop an alloy of lead, tin and antimony to forge his type pieces that would imprint clearer characters. In fact, that same alloy is still used today. Up until now, practically all movable-type printing ultimately derives from Gutenberg's original machine, which is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium.
Although the printing era was welcomed by most, the Catholic Church opposed the technological revolution. Ironically, the Bible was the source of the controversy; the Church feared that the spread of theological learning in the vernacular would result in a loss of power and influence. In 1515, Pope Leo X tried to introduce a censorship and a supervision of printed books. This measure had little effect.
It is believed that a total of 180 copies of the "Gutenberg Bible" were produced, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum, which is a high quality parchment. Widely praised for its high aesthetic and artistic qualities, the book has an iconic status in the West. Only twenty-one complete copies survived the five centuries since their printing, and are considered the most expensive books on the planet based on auction prices.
While no longer as popular as it was during the centuries leading up to the era of the Gutenberg press, the Bible is still the most popular book in the world with close to three billion copies printed in several hundred languages; the second most popular book being the Koran and the third – Mao Zedong's little red book.
Source: www.jpost.com (https://goo.gl/v97rHF)
Gutenberg and the Invention of Printing;: An Anniversary Review, With Special Reference to the Gutenberg Bible,
Antonio wrote: "Although the printing era was welcomed by most, the Catholic Church opposed the technological revolution. Ironically, the Bible was the source of the controversy; the Church feared that the spread of theological learning in the vernacular would result in a loss of power and influence. In 1515, Pope Leo X tried to introduce a censorship and a supervision of printed books. This measure had little effect."Well, as it turned out, they were right to be afraid!
Leslie wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Although the printing era was welcomed by most, the Catholic Church opposed the technological revolution. Ironically, the Bible was the source of the controversy; the Church feared ...""Knowledge is power", it is usually said, but others think that "the more we know, the more we don't know". Are dogmas any better?
I was almost missing out this interesting piece of History news. If you happen to visit this City these days, you might have the chance of getting into some modern Visigoths ...Rome was sacked by the Visigoths on this date in the year 410. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome was successfully invaded, and marked the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire.
Alaric, a chieftain in his mid-30s, was the leader of the Visigoths. They came from what is now Germany, and were one of the many tribes who were suffering at the hands of the Roman Empire. Roman leaders enforced higher and higher taxes on the people in their outer provinces, and corrupt local officials grew wealthy while the people stayed poor. Rebellions broke out, and the Visigoths started moving toward Rome.
The Visigoths began their siege of Rome in 408, and soon residents were starving. Alaric wanted land on which he and his people could settle. He also wanted a position of respect within the empire. He ended his first siege when the Roman Senate paid him off. But after his chief demands were repeatedly rebuffed, he returned to his siege on Rome, this time waging an all-out attack. Rebellious Roman slaves — many of whom had been captured from Germanic tribes — opened the gates to Alaric in the middle of the night. The Visigoths burned, looted, raped, and pillaged, but they treated Christian sites and relics with respect.
St. Jerome, one of the great Church leaders of the day, was living in Bethlehem when Rome fell. He wrote: "In one city, the whole world perished." At its height, the Roman Empire had stretched from Britain and the Atlantic to North Africa and Mesopotamia.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 A.D.: The History of the Event that Marked the Final Decline of the Western Roman Empire
Amelia Earhart completed the first non-stop transcontinental flight by a woman on August 25 in 1932 flying the same plane in which she soloed across the Atlantic. She also set a new long-distance record for women pilots.Enthusiastic crowds almost swept her off her feet when the slim, tousle-haired woman, clad in leather jacket and brown jodhpurs, landed at Newark Airport at 11:31 A.M. She had flown from Los Angeles to the eastern seaboard in 19 hours 4 minutes and 6 seconds. Miss Earhart, fatigued and thirsty, wanted only a drink of water. Then she motored to her home at Rye, N.Y.
The air woman who twice flew across the Atlantic, five years ago as a passenger and only a few months ago alone - shattered by approximately 500 miles the 2,000 mile-mark set by Ruth Nichols.
Although Miss Earhart established two women’s records, she failed to touch the non-stop transcontinental record of 17 hours 39 minutes and 59 seconds set by Capt. Frank Hawks, or the speed record - with stops - of 11 hours 11 minutes held my Major James Doolittle.
Miss Earhart, who flew most of the way at an altitude of 10,000 feet, said she averaged 125 miles an hour for the first third of the hop, and from then on approximated 160 miles an hour. In Texas she ran into thundershowers.
(Originally published by the Daily News on August 26, 1932.)
Source: www.nydailynews.com (https://goo.gl/6CTMCk)
I Was Amelia Earhart
On Aug. 26, 1906, Albert Sabin, the Polish-American doctor who developed the polio vaccine, was born.The Sabin Vaccine Institute is founded on the legacy and global vision of one of the pre-eminent scientific figures in the history of medicine, Dr. Albert B. Sabin. Best known as the developer of the oral live virus polio vaccine, Dr. Sabin not only dedicated his entire professional career to the elimination of human suffering though his groundbreaking medical advances, he also waged a tireless campaign against poverty and ignorance throughout his lifetime.
It was in this spirit of commitment and dedication that his longtime friends and colleagues, led by Heloisa Sabin, his widow, and Dr. H.R. Shepherd, the Founding Chairman, established the Sabin Vaccine Institute in 1993 at the time of Dr. Sabin's death.
Dr. Sabin was born on August 26, 1906, in Bialystok, Poland. He emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1921 in order to avoid the persecutions directed against Jews prevalent during that era. He received his M.D. from New York University in 1931 and immediately began research on polio, an acute viral infection that can cause death or paralysis and which had, at the time, reached epidemic proportions both nationwide and around the globe.
Dr. Sabin joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City in 1935. Four years later, he moved to the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his groundbreaking research demonstrated polio viruses not only grow in the nervous tissues, but also live in the small intestines. Introducing this new idea of enteroviruses - viruses that live "in the gut" - to the medical establishment, Dr. Sabin was able to prove poliomyelitis is essentially an infection of the alimentary tract and indicated polio might be prevented by an oral vaccine.
This early work on a poliomyelitis vaccine was interrupted by World War II. In 1941 he joined the U.S. Army Epidemiological Board's Virus Committee and accepted assignments in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific. It was during this phase of his career that Dr. Sabin developed vaccines for encephalitis (sleeping sickness), sand-fly fever, and dengue fever. At the end of World War II, he returned to Cincinnati and resumed his research on the polio virus which ultimately led to the development of the oral live polio vaccine, pioneered in collaboration with Russian scientists during the Cold War.
Convinced the polio virus lived primarily in the intestines, Dr. Sabin focused on isolating a mutant form of the polio virus incapable of producing the disease and thereby safe for introduction to the human body. This avirulent virus would reproduce rapidly in the intestines, displacing lethal forms of the polio virus and providing protection from the disease. Dr. Sabin's ultimate vision was to identify a live, safe variant polio virus that could be administered orally to combat poliomyelitis.
Dr. Sabin and his research associates first ingested the live avirulent viruses themselves before experimenting on others. The oral vaccine was first tested outside the USA from 1957 to 1959. Ultimately, a successful Sabin vaccine was used to eradicate polio throughout the world.
From 1970 until 1972, Dr. Sabin served successively as President of the Weizmann Institute of Science and then as a full-time consultant to the U.S. National Cancer Institute in 1974. He became Distinguished Research Professor of Biomedicine at the Medical University of South Carolina from 1974 through 1982, and Senior Expert Consultant at the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Studies in the Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health from 1984 until 1986. In 1986, at the age of 80, he retired from his full-time positions but continued part-time at the Fogarty International Center as a Senior Medical Science Advisor and a lecturer in the United States and abroad.
Dr. Sabin continued to be a powerful force in the international scientific community as medical statesman, consultant, and lecturer until the end of his life. His contributions were not just in the scientific realm but included a more global perspective of humanitarianism. He became an advocate for peace and fought the diseases of ignorance and poverty by espousing the same strategies of mutual trust and international cooperation which led to his conquest of polio.
Dr. Sabin died on March 3, 1993. His wife, Heloisa, died on October 12, 2016. Dr. Sabin and Heloisa are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.
Source: http://www.sabin.org/legacy-albert-b-...
People from Bia Ystok: Dziga Vertov, L. L. Zamenhof, Izabella Scorupco, Maxim Litvinov, Albert Sabin, Tomasz Frankowski, Ryszard Kaczorowski
The Guinness Book of Records was first published on August 27th, 1955.In its fifty years the book has sold more than a hundred million copies, which makes it the biggest selling copyright book in history, said to have been outsold only by the Bible, the Koran and Chairman Mao. Now called Guinness World Records, it sells about 3.5 million copies a year in twenty-three languages in a hundred countries. Meanwhile the world’s population has swelled from a mere 2.56 billion to 6.31 billion, but the latest edition points out that there are some records which still stand, even after fifty years.
Irving Berlin’s White Christmas is still the world’s best-selling song. The tallest man who ever lived is still an American named Robert Pershing Wadlow, who in 1940 was measured at 8ft 11.1 in. The world’s largest office building is still the Pentagon, completed in 1943 with a total of 17.5 miles of corridors and 7,754 windows.
The book’s story began at a shooting party in Ireland in 1951, when the managing director of Guinness Brewery, Sir Hugh Beaver, found himself in an argument about whether or not the golden plover was Europe’s fastest game bird. He looked for a book that would give him an authoritative answer, could not find one and thought it might be a good idea if one existed. The athlete Chris Chataway was working for Guinness at the time. He recommended the twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter, who had both won blues as sprinters at Oxford and were running a publishing company and fact-finding agency in London.
Norris McWhirter was the announcer at the track in Oxford in 1954 when Roger Bannister broke four minutes for the mile, which gave a fresh boost to the whole subject of records, and Guinness duly commissioned the book. It is said that what clinched it for the McWhirters was their instant correct response when asked which language has the fewest irregular verbs, the answer being Turkish.
Combining an obsessive interest in recondite details with prodigious memories, the two McWhirters were the editors, compilers and moving spirits of the enterprise. From 1972 they were familiar figures in Roy Castle’s Record BreakersTV programme for children, in which they were regularly put on the spot to show instant recall of obscure facts and figures, and were almost never caught out. Ross McWhirter was shot dead by the IRA on his London doorstep in 1975 after offering a reward of £50,000 for the capture of terrorist bombers.
Norris McWhirter continued as the book’s editor until 1986, and afterwards as assistant editor. He also busied himself with the Freedom Association and with attempts to rein back what he saw as the overweening power of governments and trade unions. He finally retired in 1996 and was seventy-eight when he died while playing a game of tennis in 2004.
The book combined meticulous accuracy with an enormously broad reach. It spread beyond sport, engineering, science and technology, the arts and entertainment to include wonderfully bizarre information, such as the largest kidney known to medical science, which weighed 13lb 4oz, or the name of the acrobat who performed a quadruple back somersault on to a chair at the New York Hippodrome in 1915.
Readers were encouraged to set new records of their own, however ridiculous, like the largest ever simultaneous yodel (by 937 people in Germany in 2002)or the most spoons balanced at once on a human face (13 in 2004). All claims are solemnly checked and authenticated.
Source: www.historytoday.com
Guinness World Records 2017
On this day in 1912, the character of Tarzan, King of the Apes, came to life in All-Story Magazine. Tarzan's creator,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, had failed the entrance exam to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and fared poorly in other occupations like cowboy, shopkeeper, gold miner, and railroad policemen. It was after devouring a lot of pulp magazines that he tried his hand at writing, believing "if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."He'd had success with his John Carter stories, which would later be novelized for the first time as The Princess of Mars (1912), but it was the creation of Tarzan, a white baby orphaned in the coastal jungles of Africa and raised by the she-ape Kala, that would make his legacy. Burroughs had considered naming his feral child "Zanter" or "Tublat Zan," but settled on "Tarzan," born John Clayton, son of Lord and Lady Greystoke of England. The name "Tarzan" means "white skin" in ape language. He teaches himself to read when he discovers picture books his parents left behind. And later, when an American gentleman and his daughter, Jane, arrive in the jungle looking for buried treasure, they find Tarzan, who falls instantly in love with Jane.
"Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle" was a hit. Two years later, in 1914, Burroughs' story of a tall, gray-eyed, athletic man who can swing from vines, kill an ape, fill out a loincloth, and wield a knife with expert precision was published as the novel Tarzan of the Apes and became an instant sensation, spawning 24 more Tarzan novels and more than 40 films. The first Tarzan movie was made in 1917 and grossed over a million dollars. Burroughs was a consummate businessman, controlling the rights and licensing to all things Tarzan-related, like television shows, comic books, radio shows, jackknives, and even multivitamins.
The Tarzan novels had a profound impact on pop culture and science. Anthropologist and primatologist Jane Goodall, renowned for her work with chimpanzees, began reading the books when she was 11 and credits them with inspiring her determination to work in Africa. She said: "I fell passionately in love with Tarzan — this glorious creature living out in the jungle doing all the things I wanted to do, and what did he do? He married the wrong Jane."
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury spent his childhood memorizing passages from the Tarzan novels and reciting them to his friends. He said, "Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the history of the world."
In the novels, Tarzan is well-spoken and thoughtful. Burroughs didn't care for the film versions, which made Tarzan out to be a rough-hewn semiliterate, reciting lines like, "Me, Tarzan, you, Jane," which he never says in the books.
In the course of 24 Tarzan novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan finds remnants of the Roman Empire hidden in the mountains of Africa; prevents Russian communists from looting the lost city of Opar; stumbles upon a real-life Jurassic Park filled with angry dinosaurs; travels to Baltimore, Maryland, to win Jane's hand in marriage; and runs afoul of the Veltopismakusian scientist Zoanthrohago, who reduces him to one-fourth of his normal size.
Edgar Rice Burroughs made so much money from the character of Tarzan that he formed his own publishing house and bought 550-acres of land east of Los Angeles and called it "Tarzana Ranch." Today, it is known as the city of Tarzana.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Fanny Brawne (1800-1865) was first Keats’s neighbor and later his fiancée. The eldest child of a widowed mother, she at first perplexed and exasperated the poet. They fell in love, though Keats’s friends were against the match. Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne are among the most famous love letters ever written. As next door neighbors, they exchanged numerous short notes, and occasionally more passionate ones.
None of Fanny’s letters to Keats survive. From his, however, it seems he was often unsettled by her behavior and uncertain of her affection. His illness brought them closer; when he left for Rome, they were engaged and deeply in love.
To Fanny Keats (Winchester, August 28, 1819)
Winchester, August 28, 1819
My dear Fanny
You must forgive me for suffering so long a space to elapse between the dates of my letters. It is more than a fortnight since I left Shanklin chiefly for the purpose of being near a tolerable Library, which after all is not to be found in this place. However we like it very much: it is the pleasantest Town I ever was in, and has the most recommendations of any.
There is a fine Cathedral which to me is always a source of amusement, part of it built 1400 years ago; and the more modern by a magnificent Man, you may have read of in our History, called William of Wickham. The whole town is beautifully wooded. From the Hill at the eastern extremity you see a prospect of Streets, and old Buildings mixed up with Trees. Then there are the most beautiful streams about I ever saw—full of Trout.
There is the Foundation of St. Croix about half a mile in the fields—a charity greatly abused. We have a Collegiate School, a Roman catholic School; a chapel ditto and a Nunnery! And what improves it all is, the fashionable inhabitants are all gone to Southampton. We are quiet—except a fiddle that now and then goes like a gimlet through my Ears—our Landlady’s son not being quite a Proficient.
I have still been hard at work, having completed a Tragedy I think I spoke of to you. But there I fear all my labour will be thrown away for the present, as I hear Mr. Kean is going to America. For all I can guess I shall remain here till the middle of October—when Mr. Brown will return to his house at Hampstead; whither I shall return with him.
I some time since sent the Letter I told you I had received from George to Haslam with a request to let you and Mrs. Wylie see it: he sent it back to me for very insufficient reasons without doing so; and I was so irritated by it that I would not send it travelling about by the post any more: besides the postage is very expensive.
I know Mrs. Wylie will think this a great neglect. I am sorry to say my temper gets the better of me—I will not send it again. Some correspondence I have had with Mr. Abbey about George’s affairs—and I must confess he has behaved very kindly to me as far as the wording of his Letter went. Have you heard any further mention of his retiring from Business?
I am anxious to hear whether Hodgkinson, whose name I cannot bear to write, will in any likelihood be thrown upon himself. The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest gratification I could receive—no chill’d red noses—no shivering—but fair atmosphere to think in—a clean towel mark’d with the mangle and a basin of clear Water to drench one’s face with ten times a day: no need of much exercise—a Mile a day being quite sufficient.
My greatest regret is that I have not been well enough to bathe though I have been two Months by the seaside and live now close to delicious bathing—Still I enjoy the Weather—I adore fine Weather as the greatest blessing I can have. Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know—not pay the price of one’s time for a jig—but a little chance music: and I can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of Wellington.
Why have you not written to me? Because you were in expectation of George’s Letter and so waited? Mr. Brown is copying out our Tragedy of Otho the Great in a superb style—better than it deserves—there as I said is labour in vain for the present. I had hoped to give Kean another opportunity to shine. What can we do now? There is not another actor of Tragedy in all London or Europe.
The Covent Garden Company is execrable. Young is the best among them and he is a ranting coxcombical tasteless Actor—a Disgust, a Nausea—and yet the very best after Kean. What a set of barren asses are actors! I should like now to promenade round your Gardens—apple-tasting—pear-tasting—plum-judging—apricot-nibbling—peach-scrunching—nectarine-sucking and Melon-carving. I have also a great feeling for antiquated cherries full of sugar cracks—and a white currant tree kept for company. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water lilied pond to eat white currants and see gold-fish: and go to the Fair in the Evening if I’m good. There is not hope for that—one is sure to get into some mess before evening. Have these hot days I brag of so much been well or ill for your health? Let me hear soon.
Your affectionate Brother
John.
Source: http://keats-poems.com/to-fanny-keats...
Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Today is the birthday of the American illustrator Tasha Tudor, born Starling Burgess in Boston (1915). She was originally named after her father, W. Starling Burgess, but he was a big fan of War and Peace, and decided to call her "Natasha," after the character Natasha Rostova, instead. Her mother was the portrait artist Rosamund Tudor. Tasha began using her mother's maiden name after her — Tasha's — second divorce.In the 1970s, Tudor moved to Vermont and lived in a house that her son Seth built for her using only hand tools. She often said she wished she had been born in 1830, and she lived as if she had been. She was skilled at candle making, knitting, and weaving. She also made her own cheese and ice cream. She went barefoot much of the time, and spun flax into linen. For years, she didn't have electricity. She didn't even have running water at her home until her youngest child was five years old. But as the kids grew up, they found it difficult to get their mother to talk about their real-world problems, and some of them became estranged from her.
She illustrated almost 100 children's books, including editions of classics like Mother Goose, Little Women, and The Secret Garden. She wrote her first story, Pumpkin Moonshine (1938), for her husband's niece. She also wrote a popular series about a village of corgi dogs; Tudor loved corgis and owned as many as 13 at once. When she wasn't at work on illustrations, she could often be found tending her lush, lavish gardens. Tudor died in 2008, and her home is now a museum.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
The Art of Tasha Tudor
Born and dead this same day in history, 29th August. My best loved actress of all times.Ingrid Bergman
Born: 29th August 1915 Stockholm, Sweden
Died: 29th August 1982 London, England, UK
Known For : Ingrid Bergman a Swedish born actress who takes you back to the times of some of the great Hollywood movies including “For Whom the Bell Tolls” starring opposite Gary Cooper, Gaslight with Charles Boyer, “Joan of Arc”, “Spellbound”, “Notorious” and Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca” with Humphrey Bogart. During her career she won Academy Awards/Oscars and Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress and is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute behind the other greats Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Audrey Hepburn.
Ingrid Bergman exemplified wholesome beauty and nobility to countless moviegoers, died of cancer Sunday at her home in London on her 67th birthday.
Miss Bergman had been ill for eight years. Despite this, she played two of her most demanding roles in this period, a concert pianist in Ingmar Bergman's ''Autumn Sonata'' and Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister in ''A Woman Called Golda.'' her last role.
Miss Bergman said in an interview earlier this year that she was determined not to let her illness prevent her from enjoying the remainder of her life. ''Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left,'' she said. Miss Bergman added that she had to push herself to play the role of Golda Meir: ''I honestly didn't think I had it in me. But it has been a wonderful experience, as an actress and as a human being who is getting more out of life than expected.''
Lars Schmidt, a Swedish producer from whom Miss Bergman was divorced in 1975, was with her at the time of her death. Incandescent, the critics called Ingrid Bergman. Or radiant. Or luminous. They said her performances were sincere, natural. Sometimes a single adjective was not enough. One enraptured writer saw her as ''a breeze whipping over a Scandinavian peak.'' Kenneth Tynan needed an essay before he distilled her quality down to a sort of electric transmission of ''I need you'' that registered instantly upon yearning audiences.
At the heart of the Swedish star's monumental box-office magnetism was the kind of rare beauty that Hollywood cameramen call ''bulletproof angles,'' meaning it can be shot from any angle. Her beauty was so remarkable that it sometimes seemed to overshadow her considerable acting talent. The expressive blue eyes, wide, fulllipped mouth, high cheekbones, soft chin and broad forehead projected a quality that combined vulnerability and courage; sensitivity and earthiness, and an unending flow of compassion.
It all seemed so natural that not until she was well into middle age, in Ingmar Bergman's taxing ''Autumn Sonata'' in 1978, did many of her fans fully realize the talent, work and intelligence that were behind the performances that won her three Academy Awards. She was honored as best actress for her roles in ''Gaslight'' in 1944 and ''Anastasia'' in 1956, and as best supporting actress in ''Murder on the Orient Express'' in 1974 …. (cont’d)
Source: www.newyorktimes.com (obituary)
Ingrid Bergman: A Life in Pictures
On August 30, 30 B.C. Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, takes her life following the defeat of her forces against Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome. Cleopatra, born in 69 B.C., was made Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, upon the death of her father, Ptolemy XII, in 51 B.C. Her brother was made King Ptolemy XIII at the same time, and the siblings ruled Egypt under the formal title of husband and wife.
Cleopatra and Ptolemy were members of the Macedonian dynasty that governed Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. Although Cleopatra had no Egyptian blood, she alone in her ruling house learned Egyptian. To further her influence over the Egyptian people, she was also proclaimed the daughter of Re, the Egyptian sun god. Cleopatra soon fell into dispute with her brother, and civil war erupted in 48 B.C.
August 30
The Death of Cleopatra
By Horace (65 B.C.–8 B.C.)
Translated by Sir Stephen E. De Vere
Ode XXXVII
(Died August 30, 30 B.C.)
DRINK, comrades, drink; give loose to mirth!
With joyous footstep beat the earth,
And spread before the War-God’s shrine
The Salian feast, the sacrificial wine.
Bring forth from each ancestral hoard,
Strong draughts of Cæcuban long stored,
Till now forbidden. Fill the bowl!
For she is fallen, that great Egyptian Queen,
With all her crew contaminate and obscene,
Who, mad with triumph, in her pride,
The manly might of Rome defied,
And vowed destruction to the Capitol.
As the swift falcon swooping from above
With beak unerring strikes the dove,
Or as the hunter tracks the deer
Over Hæmonian plains of snow,
Thus Cæsar came.
Then on her royal state
With Mareotic fumes inebriate,
A shadow fell of fate and fear,
And thro’ the lurid glow
From all her burning galleys shed
She turned her last surviving bark and fled.
She sought no refuge on a foreign shore.
She sought her doom: far nobler ’twas to die
Than like a panther caged in Roman bonds to lie.
The sword she feared not. In her realm once more,
Serene among deserted fanes,
Unmoved mid vacant halls she stood;
Then to the aspic gave her darkening veins,
And sucked the death into her blood.
Deliberately she died: fiercely disdained
To bow her haughty head to Roman scorn,
Discrowned, and yet a Queen; a captive chained;
A woman desolate and forlorn.
Source: www.bartleby.com
Source: https://goo.gl/YbWQPZ
Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt
August 31, 1888Jack the Ripper’s first victim murdered
Prostitute Mary Ann Nichols, the first known victim of London serial killer “Jack the Ripper,” is found murdered and mutilated in the city’s Whitechapel district. London saw four more victims of the murderer during the next few months, but no suspect was ever found.
In Victorian England, London’s East End was a teeming slum occupied by nearly a million of the city’s poorest citizens. Many women were forced to resort to prostitution, and in 1888 there were estimated to be more than 1,000 prostitutes in Whitechapel.
That summer, a serial killer began targeting these downtrodden women. On September 8, the killer claimed his second victim, Annie Chapman, and on September 30 two more prostitutes–Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes–were murdered and carved up on the same night.
By then, London’s Scotland Yard police had determined the pattern of the killings. The murderer, offering to pay for sex, would lure his victims onto a secluded street or square and then slice their throats. As the women rapidly bled to death, he would then brutally disembowel them with the same six-inch knife.
The police, who lacked modern forensic techniques such as fingerprinting and blood typing, were at a complete loss for suspects. Dozens of letters allegedly written by the murderer were sent to the police, and the majority of these were immediately deemed fraudulent. However, two letters–written by the same individual–alluded to crime facts known only to the police and the killer. These letters, signed “Jack the Ripper,” gave rise to the serial killer’s popular nickname.
On November 7, after a month of silence, Jack took his fifth and last victim, Irish-born Mary Kelly, an occasional prostitute. Of all his victims’ corpses, Kelly’s was the most hideously mutilated. In 1892, with no leads found and no more murders recorded, the Jack the Ripper file was closed.
Source: www.history.com
Jack the Ripper: The Casebook
AUG. 31, 1920: NEWS RADIO MAKES NEWS1920: A Detroit station airs what is believed to be the first radio news broadcast. The exact headlines of that day are of no historical significance, but with this local newscast a nascent medium finally conveys a message so compelling that it would soon capture the world’s imagination as only television and the internet would, many, many years later.
Radio had been around in a number of technical incarnations for decades, mostly for the enjoyment of hobbyists. Despite the general lack of public awareness – it was a technological contemporary of the telephone, mind you – radio was an obsession among an astonishingly large number of giant thinkers in the "Only One Name Is Necessary" club: Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Marconi, Tesla, Edison.
Radio’s commercial prospects were not yet fully appreciated, in part because wireless was considered primarily a "narrowcast" medium, a sandbox for the geeks of the day awed by the prospect of communicating over great distances over freely available spectrum. Radio communication was also standard aboard ships by the summer of 1920. Indeed, it was the unthinkable disaster that befell the unsinkable Titanic in 1912 which spurred widespread adoption of wireless at sea.
But on the cusp of the Roaring '20s the notion that radio would be a mass medium and huge business was still a ways off. Stations in these loosely regulated early days broadcast in a metaphorical vacuum almost as large at the literal one which carried their sounds invisibly through the air.
Programming, such as it was, didn’t even have advertisers in the modern sense. Radio shows – all live, of course, and heavy on the music – were created and operated by radio-set manufacturers as a means of drumming up business, an early example of "software" driving sales of the "hardware" necessary to use it.
Also on the leading edge were newspapers, afraid that the immediacy of radio might someday render irrelevant their next-day coverage of ... anything. (Why this history was not recalled later in the century when the internet actually was about to kill the newspaper business is anyone’s guess.)
Source: www.wired.com (https://goo.gl/p1AcVP)
Wwj the Detroit News: The History of Radiophone Broadcasting by the Earliest and Foremost of Newspaper Stations; Together with Information on Radio for Amateur and Expert
A piece of history in publishing a book which was rejected by more than 120 publishing houses before it was printed and became a bestseller on the art of living.Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974), is born on this day in Minneapolis. Pirsig, the son of a Minnesota law professor, rose rapidly to fame with his novel, which was based partly on his own experiences. The book chronicled the motorcycle journey of the narrator, a former philosophy professor who underwent involuntary electric shock treatment for alleged insanity, across the country with his 11-year-old son.
Along the way, the narrator ruminates on philosophical approaches to life, arguing that motorcycle maintenance is a metaphor for life. He also succeeds in healing a deep emotional rift with his son.
The book was rejected by more than 120 publishing houses before it was published by William Morrow and Company in 1974. Pirsig received only a $3,000 advance and was warned that the book would probably bomb. It became a cult classic, selling more than 4 million copies in the next 25 years. Tragically, Pirsig’s son was stabbed to death in a mugging 10 years after the book came out.
After the book’s publication, Pirsig spent several years living on a boat and traveling the world. In 1991, he published Lila, another deeply philosophical novel.
Source: www.history.com
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
September 2, 1666. The Great Fire of London, 351st anniversary. How did it start and what happened?As history would have it, the fire that engulfed London for four days began on Pudding Lane. A baker by the name of Thomas Farriner was blamed for the blaze - something he denied for the rest of his life. The small blaze spread between September 2 and 5 1666, leaving 436 acres of the city completely destroyed.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 2 1666, a small fire started on or close to Pudding Lane, in the centre of London. The shop where the fire is believed to have begun was that of Thomas Farriner, King Charles II's baker.
In the Museum of London's exhibition 'Fire! Fire!' - the blame is firmly placed on Mr Farriner's bakery. On display is a map which would have been used by those in charge of rebuilding the city. One point on the map reads: "Mr Farriner's grounde where the fyer began." However, the baker claimed for the rest of his life that his oven had been properly raked out before he went to bed and could not have been the cause.
It started in the bakery, all the evidence points in that direction. Some suggest it was the fault of his maid, who failed to put out the ovens at the end of the night. When the house caught fire, all of the family jumped out the window to save themselves, except the maid who was too afraid. She was one of the few victims claimed by the fire. Many in the city lived cramped, in wood and that houses built very close together. In such an overcrowded city, the flames spread quickly. To compound the issue, a strong wind from the east propelled the flames across the city.
The famous diarist Samuel Pepys provides the best recorded account of the tragedy. Pepys described the chaos as "ten thousand houses all in one flame, the noise and cracking and thunder of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm.
“The air all about so hot and inflamed that at last one was not able to approach it.” Pepys blamed the length of time taken to put the fire out on the lord mayor at the time, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, for not doing enough to stop the fire spreading.
"People do all the world over cry out of the stupidity of my Lord Mayor in general; and more particularly in this business of the fire, laying it all upon him," he wrote. It was eventually Pepys himself, who had the idea of blowing up buildings to remove a trail of wood for the fire to follow. It may well have prevented countless deaths. Though around 13,200 houses and 84 churches were destroyed, only six people are known to have died.
Yet as many as 100,000 people were left homeless, many forced to live in temporary fix shacks in surrounding fields for up to eight years. This may have been down to the quick thinking of Pepys, who has been credited with the idea of destroying buildings on the fire's path to impede its progress. However, the idea has also been attributed to the Stuart king at the time, Charles II, who took a lead role in the attempt to save the city. Charles also gave out navy rations stored in the East End of the city to those who had lost their homes.
There were some positives that emerged from the devastation: the fire wiped out the filthy areas the Great Plague had inhabited. The open sewers and slums were burned away.
It also offered the opportunity to rebuild large parts of the city in a more organised way. The architect Sir Christopher Wren oversaw a huge rebuilding project to restore the city, including the reconstruction of St Paul's cathedral, an iconic part of London's skyline to this day. As England was at war with France and the Netherlands, there was also suspicion that foreign enemies were behind the tragedy. A mad Frenchman confessed to having started the fire, but it was proved he could not have done it after he was hanged.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk (adaptetd) ( https://goo.gl/ijaUpz)
The Great Fire of London
Social history in publishing. This sort of history derives its vitality from its oppositional character. It prides itself on being concerned with 'real life' rather than fiction and abstractions, with 'ordinary' people rather than privileged elites, with everyday things rather than sensational events.On this day in 1963, Malcolm Gladwell, author of such non-fiction best-sellers as “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Outliers,” is born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. Known for taking a counterintuitive look at questions about modern life, Gladwell’s writing has explored everything from IQ tests to why people choose Coke over Pepsi.
Raised in rural Ontario, Canada, where his English-born father was a university math professor and his Jamaican-born mother was a psychotherapist, Gladwell graduated from the University of Toronto in 1984 with a degree in history. Starting in 1987, he worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, covering business and science, before being hired, in 1996, as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.
In 2000, Gladwell published his first book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” which examines the moment when an idea, product or behavior reaches the point where it tips, or spreads and gains critical mass. “The Tipping Point” used experts and academic studies to explain everything from the comeback of Hush Puppies shoes to the drop in crime in New York City in the early 1990s.
Gladwell’s next book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” debuted in 2005 and is about the role of snap judgments and intuition in decision-making. Like his first book, “Blink” also applied science to a range of topics, including speed dating and military war games. The same year “Blink” was published, its author was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.
Gladwell’s third book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” about what sets high achievers apart from the rest of society, debuted in 2008, and looks at the careers of Bill Gates and the Beatles, among others. Gladwell’s books have sold millions of copies, and sparked a second lucrative career for their author as a public speaker.
In addition to his books and speaking engagements, Gladwell remains a staff writer for The New Yorker. In 2009, “What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures,” a compilation of his articles for the magazine, was released.
Source: www.history.com (adapted)
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differencehttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
A piece of forgotten HistoryThis Date in Native History: On September 4, 1886, the great Apache warrior Geronimo surrendered in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, after fighting for his homeland for almost 30 years. He was the last American Indian warrior to formally surrender to the United States.
Born in June 1829 near the Gila River in Arizona, Geronimo was a mild-mannered youth, said Mark Megehee, museum specialist at the Fort Sill Museum in Oklahoma. His birth name was Goyalkla or “One Who Yawns.”
At age 17, Geronimo married Alope, with whom he had three children. His life changed in 1858 when a company of Mexican soldiers led by Colonel Jose Maria Carrasco attacked the Apaches and murdered Geronimo’s wife, mother and children.
“Carrasco said he struck and meant to rub out every man, woman and child of the Apaches, but the warriors by and large escaped while their families were the ones that were slaughtered,” said Megehee, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma. “That changed the personality of Geronimo. His friends noticed he was no longer mild and pleasant to deal with. He was unexpectedly violent and had a temper. He became very grieving, but he was going to settle the score.”
In his own words, translated in 1909 and published in the 1996 book Geronimo: His Own Story, Geronimo described the incident. “I found that my aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain,” he said. “There were no lights in camp, so without being noticed I silently turned away and stood by the river. How long I stood there I do not know, but when I saw the warriors arranging for a council I took my place.”
Only 80 warriors remained, so the chief directed survivors to return home to Arizona, Geronimo said. He had “no purpose left” because he “had lost all.” … “I was never again contented in our quiet home,” he wrote. “I had vowed vengeance upon the Mexican troopers who had wronged me, and whenever I came near (my father’s) grave or saw anything to remind me of former happy days my heart would ache for revenge upon Mexico.”
Geronimo went on to lead a band of Apache warriors throughout southern Arizona and New Mexico, successfully keeping white settlers off Apache lands for decades and becoming a “symbol of the untamed freedom of the American West.”
“He was not just a tough guy, but he had leadership abilities,” Megehee said. “He looked out for men, women and children in a way that all their needs were met. Geronimo did more with less. In today’s vocabulary, he multiplied his force by stealth, by firepower and by mobility.”
By 1886, however, Geronimo was tired. After leading 39 Apaches across the Southwest, running as much as 80 miles per day to stay ahead of 5,000 white soldiers, Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles on September 4. Miles, in his memoirs, described Geronimo as “one of the brightest, most resolute, determined-looking men I have ever encountered.”
After his trial, Geronimo was put to work as a prisoner of war, doing heavy labor for the South Pacific Railroad. This was in violation of the agreement he made with the U.S. when he surrendered. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of war and a scout for the U.S. Army, though he gained popularity as an attraction at the St. Louis World’s Fair and Wild West shows. He also was one of six Indians to march in the 1905 inaugural parade for President Theodore Roosevelt. He died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, still on the federal payroll as a scout.
Source: www.indiancountrymedianetwork.com/his...
American Legends: The Life of Geronimo
The city of Los Angeles was founded on this date in 1781. Its original name was either “the Town of the Queen of the Angels” or “the Town of Our Lady of the Angels of Porciúncula,” depending on which source is consulted. All can agree that the town was named after “los ángeles” — the angels — and that’s the name that stuck.On the orders of King Carlos III of Spain, Governor Felipe de Neve drew up the plans for a settlement on the bank of the Porciúncula — later known as the Los Angeles — River. De Neve followed the usual Spanish model: a central plaza, a town house, a guardhouse, and a granary. The corners of the pueblo were laid out at the four cardinal directions, so that strong winds would not blow up and down the town’s streets. De Neve sent out a call to Mexico for settlers. Eleven families took him up on the offer, and the original Spanish population of Los Angeles was just 44 people. The royal treasury issued each family two oxen, two mares, two mules, two sheep, two cows with one calf, one donkey, and one hoe — the cost of which was deducted from their pay in installments. The area was also home to an existing Native American village known as Yang-na, or Yabit. While the Europeans managed to sustain their colony, they also brought European diseases, which devastated the Native American population.
Flooding wiped out the original pueblo in 1815. Ten days of heavy rains caused the river to overflow its banks, and the debris the water carried with it created a dam that actually changed the river’s course. While its exact location has not been determined, many historians believe that the original pueblo was north of what is today downtown Los Angeles, near Chinatown. It was roughly bounded by the streets now known as Main Street, Spring Street, Paseo Luis Olivares, and West Cesar Estrada Chavez Boulevard. A parking lot sits on the site now, but there is a historic monument to the original “city of angels” nearby.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1,000 Words
September 5, 1997: Mother Teresa diesMother Teresa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to helping the sick and the poor, has died at the age of 87. She died of a heart attack at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta shortly before 1700 BST.
The nun from Skopje, Macedonia, had been battling ill health for some years, and in March stepped down as head of the order of nuns she founded. She was revered by many around the world as a living saint for her work with the dispossessed. The Pope often praised her work and a Vatican spokesman told reporters he was "deeply hurt" by the news of her death.
"The Pope believes she is a woman who has left her mark on the history of this century," he said. The head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, Cardinal Hume, said she was an "enormously significant figure - everyone knows who Mother Teresa is".
Born Agnes Bojaxhiu in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire later Macedonia, she took the name Sister Teresa in Ireland, where she began her training as a nun with the Loreto Sisters.
She founded her order in 1948 and went out to work in the slums of Calcutta.
She was sometimes accused by Hindus in her adopted country of trying to convert the poor to Catholicism by "stealth" and criticised by liberals who disliked her conservative stance on abortion and contraception. But her biographer and friend Navin Chana said she would be remembered as someone who "gave the word compassion a new dimension".
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Here are 10 powerful quotes about her faith and philosophy:
1. “If I ever become a Saint–I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from Heaven–to light the light of those in darkness on earth,” she said, according to Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, whose author described it as her "mission statement."
2. "I am everything. Every country I love and I am a child of God to love the humans," she said in a 1995 interview when asked about her nationality.
3. "I see somebody dying, I pick him up. I find somebody hungry, I give him food. He can love and be loved. I don't look at his color, I don't look at his religion. I don't look at anything. Every person whether he is Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist, he is my brother, my sister," she said in the same interview.
4. "Do ordinary things with extraordinary love," she often said, according to a priest who knew her through her Missionaries of Charity.
5. "Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do," she said in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1979.
6. "Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love," she also said in the lecture.
7. "We fear the future because we are wasting the today," she wrote in Where There is Love, There is God.
8. "The future is so much in the hands of God, I find it much more easy to accept today because yesterday is gone and tomorrow has not come and I have only today," she also wrote in the book.
9. "We have been created for greater things, to love and be loved," she wrote in the same book.10. "I do not agree with the big way of doing things. To us, what matters is an individual," she wrote.
Source: BBC on this day
Source: www.time.com
Mother Teresa
I'm a bit behind on this thread, but I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's books!
Evelyn wrote: "I'm a bit behind on this thread, but I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's books!"Thanks Evelyn! History is just like a Mississippi river, a ... Tipping point ...
September 6, 2016Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, died Thursday at his home near Modena, in northern Italy. He was 71.
His death was announced by his manager, Terri Robson. The cause was pancreatic cancer. In July 2006 he underwent surgery for the cancer in New York, and he had made no public appearances since then. He was hospitalized again this summer and released on Aug. 25.
Like Enrico Caruso and Jenny Lind before him, Mr. Pavarotti extended his presence far beyond the limits of Italian opera. He became a titan of pop culture. Millions saw him on television and found in his expansive personality, childlike charm and generous figure a link to an art form with which many had only a glancing familiarity.
Early in his career and into the 1970s he devoted himself with single-mindedness to his serious opera and recital career, quickly establishing his rich sound as the great male operatic voice of his generation — the “King of the High Cs,” as his popular nickname had it.
By the 1980s he expanded his franchise exponentially with the Three Tenors projects, in which he shared the stage with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, first in concerts associated with the World Cup and later in world tours. Most critics agreed that it was Mr. Pavarotti’s charisma that made the collaboration such a success. The Three Tenors phenomenon only broadened his already huge audience and sold millions of recordings and videos.
Source: www.nytimes.com
Pavarotti: My World
On this day in history, 7th September 1533, Anne Boleyn gave birth to a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I of England. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn finally consummated their relationship in around November 1532 after a successful visit to France, where Anne was treated as Henry’s consort. The couple had planned to sail back home from Calais on the 8th November but were held up by a storm and did not set sail until the 12 November, arriving at Dover early on the 14th. However, they did not arrive at Eltham until the 24th:
“And the explanation we can guess. Somewhere, sometime, perhaps as the wind tore through the Calais streets or in a manor-house in Kent, Anne at last slept with Henry.”
According to chronicler Edward Hall the couple secretly married on St Erkenwald’s Day, the 14 November, but other sources date the secret wedding as the 25th January. Whatever the date of the wedding, we know that the couple were discreetly co-habiting after their return from France and that if Elizabeth was born on time (i.e. 40 weeks after conception), she was conceived somewhere between the 11th and 19th December 1532. By February 1533, Anne’s pregnancy was common knowledge at court, with Anne herself joking about her craving for apples. On Easter Saturday 1533, Anne finally attended mass as queen, after Cranmer was made Archbishop and convocation had pronounced Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid. Anne had everything she wanted – the man she loved, the title of Queen and a baby in her womb.
Although it seems that Anne Boleyn’s early pregnancy was trouble-free, and she managed to cope with her exhausting coronation schedule when she was around 6 months pregnant, it appears that Anne had some trouble towards the end. Eric Ives cites de Carles when he writes of Henry VIII being “at his wits’ end, even hoping for a miscarriage if it would save Anne’s life” and we also know that there was no royal progress that summer and that Henry and Anne spent the summer at Windsor.
In August 1533, a chamber was prepared for Anne’s confinement at Greenwich Palace, the palace where Elizabeth of York had given birth to Henry. David Starkey writes of how the chamber was prepared: “The walls and ceilings were close hung and tented with arras – that is, precious tapestry woven with gold or silver threads – and the floor thickly laid with rich carpets. The arras was left loose at a single window, so that the Queen could order a little light and air to be admitted, though this was generally felt inadvisable. Precautions were taken, too, about the design of the hangings. Figurative tapestry, with human or animal images was ruled out. The fear was that it could trigger fantasies in the Queen’s mind which might lead to the child being deformed. Instead, simple, repetitive patterns were preferred. The Queen’s richly hung and canopied bed was to match or be en suite with the hangings, as was the pallet or day-bed which stood at its foot. And it was on the pallet, almost certainly that the birth took place… At the last minute, gold and silver plate had been brought from the Jewel House. There were cups and bowls to stand on the cupboard and crucifixes, candlesticks and images for the altar. The result was a cross between a chapel and a luxuriously padded cell.”
On the 26th August 1533, after a special mass at the Chapel Royal, Anne and her ladies then went to the Queen’s great chamber, which Starkey explains was the outermost room of Anne’s suite. There, they enjoyed wine and spices before Anne’s lord chamberlain led a prayer, praying that God would give the Queen a safe delivery. Anne then processed to her bedchamber, with only her ladies in attendance. Her chamber was to be a male-free world.
Less than two weeks after taking to her chamber, at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of the 7th September, Anne Boleyn gave birth to a baby girl: Elizabeth, named after her paternal grandmother Elizabeth of York, and possibly also her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Howard. The little girl had her father’s red hair and long nose, and her mother’s coal black eyes.
The birth was straightforward, the baby was healthy and so was Anne, but something was very wrong – the baby was a girl and not the promised son and heir promised by Anne, astrologers and doctors. A celebratory tournament had been organised and a letter announcing the birth of a prince had been written. The joust was cancelled and the word “prince” had an “s” added in the birth announcement letter, but it is easy to read too much into the cancellation of the festivities. As Eric Ives3 points out, the celebratory jousts were cancelled in 1516 too, when Mary was born, and it was traditional for the celebrations of the birth of a princess to be low-key. Although the joust was cancelled, Ives writes that “a herald immediately proclaimed this first of Henry’s ‘legitimate’ children, while the choristers of the Chapel Royal sang the Te Deum“4 and preparations were already underway for a lavish christening.
I am sure that Henry and Anne were disappointed that Elizabeth was not a boy, but I suspect that Henry was relieved that Elizabeth was healthy and that Anne had survived the ordeal. Anne had conceived quickly, within a few weeks, so there was every hope for the future, for a son. As her parents gazed down at little Elizabeth, little did they realise what and who she would become – one of the greatest English monarchs of all time, the Virgin Queen and Gloriana.
Source: www.theanneboleynfiles.com
The Life of Elizabeth I
Mod
LauraT wrote: "Queen Elisabeth is one of my favuorite historic character. I've always admired her pluck in such a period as that in which she lived"Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II are my favourite characters ...
The Catholic Church celebrates today the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary on its traditional fixed date of September 8, nine months after the December 8 celebration of her Immaculate Conception as the child of Saints Joachim and Anne.The circumstances of the Virgin Mary's infancy and early life are not directly recorded in the Bible, but other documents and traditions describing the circumstances of her birth are cited by some of the earliest Christian writers from the first centuries of the Church. These accounts, although not considered authoritative in the same manner as the Bible, outline some of the Church's traditional beliefs about the birth of Mary.
The “Protoevangelium of James,” which was probably put into its final written form in the early second century, describes Mary's father Joachim as a wealthy member of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Joachim was deeply grieved, along with his wife Anne, by their childlessness. “He called to mind Abraham,” the early Christian writing says, “that in the last day God gave him a son Isaac.”
Joachim and Anne began to devote themselves extensively and rigorously to prayer and fasting, initially wondering whether their inability to conceive a child might signify God's displeasure with them.
As it turned out, however, the couple were to be blessed even more abundantly than Abraham and Sarah, as an angel revealed to Anne when he appeared to her and prophesied that all generations would honor their future child: “The Lord has heard your prayer, and you shall conceive, and shall bring forth, and your seed shall be spoken of in all the world.”
After Mary's birth, according to the Protoevangelium of James, Anne “made a sanctuary” in the infant girl's room, and “allowed nothing common or unclean” on account of the special holiness of the child. The same writing records that when she was one year old, her father “made a great feast, and invited the priests, and the scribes, and the elders, and all the people of Israel.”
“And Joachim brought the child to the priests,” the account continues, “and they blessed her, saying: 'O God of our fathers, bless this child, and give her an everlasting name to be named in all generations' . . . And he brought her to the chief priests, and they blessed her, saying: 'O God most high, look upon this child, and bless her with the utmost blessing, which shall be for ever.'”
The protoevangelium goes on to describe how Mary's parents, along with the temple priests, subsequently decided that she would be offered to God as a consecrated Virgin for the rest of her life, and enter a chaste marriage with the carpenter Joseph.
Saint Augustine described the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an event of cosmic and historic significance, and an appropriate prelude to the birth of Jesus Christ. “She is the flower of the field from whom bloomed the precious lily of the valley,” he said.
The fourth-century bishop, whose theology profoundly shaped the Western Church's understanding of sin and human nature, affirmed that “through her birth, the nature inherited from our first parents is changed."
Source: www.catholicnewsagency.com
The Life of the Virgin Mary
On this day in 1976, Chinese revolutionary and statesman Mao Zedong, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other health problems, dies in Beijing at the age of 82. The Communist leader and founder of the People’s Republic of China is considered one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.Mao was born into a peasant family in the village of Shaoshan in China’s Hunan province on December 26, 1893. During the 1911 Revolution, he was a soldier in the revolutionary army, which eventually defeated the Qing Dynasty. After serving in the army, he resumed his education and eventually moved to Beijing, where he studied Marxist social and political thought. In 1921, he attended the first session of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which was held in Shanghai. He went on to found the Hunan branch of the CCP and organize workers’ strikes.
Marxism held that cultural revolution would be brought about by urban workers; however, Mao came to believe that China’s millions of peasants were the key to change.
In 1934, during his long civil war with Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalist government, Mao broke through enemy lines and led his followers on the Long March, a trek of some 6,000 miles to northern China. There, he built up his Red Army and fought against the Japanese invaders. In 1945, civil war resumed, and in 1949 the Nationalists were defeated. On October 1, 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Under Mao’s leadership, the Communist Party took control of China’s media and executed its political enemies, including business owners, landlords, former government officials and intellectuals. In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an economic initiative aimed at boosting the country’s agricultural and industrial production. The program involved the establishment of large farming communes, which would free up more workers for industrial jobs. Instead, the plan failed as grain production declined and millions of Chinese died due to famine.
In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in an attempt to wipe out China’s old customs and ideas, promote Mao’s teachings and purge the Communist party of his political enemies. Mao urged students and other young people to join the Red Guards, who in turn shut down schools, churches, temples and museums and tortured or killed academics and other authority figures who were viewed as capitalists and anti-revolutionaries. The Cultural Revolution resulted in widespread chaos and civil unrest.
Despite these failures, Mao maintained fanatical followers all across China and, as the founder of modern China, remains one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. After his death, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s leader. Today, Mao’s embalmed remains are housed in a mausoleum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Source: www.history.com
Mao Zedong: A Life
On the 10th September 1972 Hamida Djandoubi entered the history books as a footnote in the story of one of the world’s most infamous inventions. The Tunisian immigrant, a convicted murderer, was the last person to be executed by the guillotine in France. The decapitation took place at Baumetes Prison in Marseille, France.The guillotine is synonymous with the French Revolution. For many it is associated with ‘the Terror’ that engulfed France at the end of the eighteenth century. The guillotine became part of the ritual of revolution. Those perceived as enemies of the state were publicly executed, and the volatile climate in France in this period meant few were safe from this fate.
Joining Djandoubi on the list of Guillotine victims are a huge swathe of the eighteenth century French aristocracy, and the last king and queen of France, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In total over 10,000 people were killed by the Guillotine during the revolution, including its strongest advocate; Joseph-Ignace Guillotine.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotine was a physician and supporter of the revolution. He played an instrumental role in getting a law passed that required executions to be performed by “means of a machine”. Although perhaps hard to emphasise with now, this campaign was something of a human rights breakthrough. Mechanised execution was viewed as less barbaric than a firing squad or hanging. The idea was to remove the elements of severe pain, public humiliation and torture associated with other forms of capital punishment.
In 1789 the death penalty had been undergoing a rethink in France, with modifications proposed that would ensure the same punishment for all criminals sentenced to death, with the punishment limited only to the body of the guilty party. In 1791 the revised French legal code stated that “Every man condemned to death will have his head cut off.” It says a lot about the chaos and paranoia that enveloped revolutionary France that Guillotine himself would become a victim of the device. The revolution meant that the guillotine came to symbolise something far removed from what its advocates intended or predicted.
France was not the first country to apply mechanised techniques to its capital punishment. Decapitation machines had in fact had a long history in Europe. One of the first was the Halifax Gibbet, a machine that may have dated back as far as 1066, but was definitely in use by the thirteenth century. It was made from two fifteen feet tall wooden beams, connected at the top by a third beam. The blade was an axe head that slid up and down grooves carved into the vertical beams. Sources suggest that between 1280 and 1650 executions took place every Saturday in the town’s market place.
The picture ‘The execution of Murcod Ballagh near to Merton in Ireland 1307’ depicts another public execution with a machine similar to the Halifax Gibbet. Both of these medieval machines worked on a similar principle to that eventually used for the guillotine.
By the time of Djandoubi’s death, much had changed in the way the guillotine was used. During the revolution the Paris guillotine was located in the Palace de la National, a location that allowed the public to easily view the grisly spectacle. By the 1970s executions had moved behind closed doors, away from the public glare, although the means of execution still seemed a grotesque anachronism to many. The history of the guillotine reveals much about the French Revolution, but also the role of capital punishment in general.
Source: www.guillotine.dk
The Life and Times of Guillaume Dupuytren, 1777-1835
Despite the numerous warnings against possible assassination attempts, in 1898, the Empress Elisabeth (better known as Sissi) of Austria Hungary travelled incognito to Geneva. There, she went to the famous Beau-Rivage Hotel, yet it was a tragic coincidence that, at the same time, an Italian anarchist was chasing victims of royal blood on the streets of Geneva.Ever since her youth when she married Franz Joseph, Sissi avoided spending too much time at the Viennese Court. She felt suffocated by the imperial protocol and, initially, by her mother-in-law as well. Because of this, she made a habit out of travelling for a longer period of time in Europe. As the years passed, her journeys became even longer and more frequent and after her daughter’s marriage in 1890, Sissi rarely spent more than a few weeks per year in Vienna.
On the Saturday of September 10th, Sissi and her companion, Countess Irma Sztáray de Sztára et Nagymihály, left the Beau-Rivage Hotel at 13.35. They took a walk on the bank of the Geneva river, in order to get to the port to board the Genèveship to Montreux.At some point, the 25-year old Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni approached them and it seemedlikehe tripped hurting Sissi in the process as if he was trying to keep his balance. However, everything was a manoeuvre, in order not to arouse the suspicion of the passers-by. Nobody realised, not even the victim, that Lucheni had actually stabbed the Empress in the chest.
Source: www.historia.ro
Sissi: Elisabeth, Empress of Austria
“9/11” is shorthand for four coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist group, that occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001. The attacks killed 2,977 people. On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists from al-Qaeda, hijacked four commercial airplanes, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the upper floors of the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex and a third plane into the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. The Twin Towers ultimately collapsed because of the damage sustained from the impacts and the resulting fires. After learning about the other attacks, passengers on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, fought back, and the plane was crashed into an empty field in western Pennsylvania about 20 minutes, by air, from Washington, DC where we believe it was headed. The attacks killed individuals from 93 nations. 2,753 people were killed in New York, 184 people were killed at the Pentagon, and 40 people were killed on Flight 93.
The hijacked Flight 11 was crashed into floors 93 to 99 of the North Tower (1 WTC) at 8:46 am. The hijacked Flight 175 struck floors 77 to 85 of the South Tower (2 WTC) 17 minutes later at 9:03 am. When the towers were struck, between 16,400 and 18,000 people were in the WTC complex. Of those, the vast majority evacuated safely. As they rushed out, first responders - members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), New York City Police Department (NYPD), Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), and other agencies - rushed in trying to save those still trapped or injured. The fires from the impacts, intensified by the planes’ burning jet fuel, were incredibly hot. They weakened the steel support trusses, which attached each of the floors to the buildings’ exterior walls.
Along with the initial damage to the buildings’ structural columns, this ultimately caused both towers to collapse. The five other buildings in the WTC complex were also destroyed because of damage sustained when the Twin Towers fell. The collapse of the buildings left the site devastated, with ruins towering roughly 17 stories and spread beyond the 16-acre site. In addition to the first responders, thousands of volunteers came to ground zero to help with the rescue, recovery and clean-up efforts, and on May 30, 2002, the last of piece of WTC steel was ceremonially removed.
source: www.911memorial.org/ (adapted)
The 9/11 Report
A piece of Literary Love in HistoryOn this day September 12, in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning married secretly. For dark and unspoken reasons, Edward Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth's father, had forbidden any of his eleven children to marry -- one plausible theory being that he was ashamed of the family's Jamaican blood, and didn't want it perpetuated.
Until she received a fan letter from Browning, Barrett showed every sign of compliance; additionally, she was 39, and a tubercular, bed-ridden invalid. But over the next 20 months -- eventually, 575 letters and almost daily visits from Browning -- Barrett would gradually gain the strength to shed her "graveclothes" and walk out of the bedroom she hadn't left for six years except when carried.
The elopement plan did not have the two leaving for Florence for several days, so the romance by Royal Mail continued unabated, even through the marriage day. Browning's letter just after the ceremony shows no regrets: "I look back, and in every one point, every word and gesture, every letter, every silence -- you have been entirely perfect to me. . . . You have given me the highest, completest proof of love that ever one human being gave another." Barrett's response later that afternoon reports her rested, and having successfully deflected her sisters' "grave faces" and inquiries as to her whereabouts earlier in the day: "And so, to complete the bravery, I went on with them in the carriage to Hampstead . . as far as the heath, -- and talked and looked. . . . It seems all like a dream! When we drove past the church again, I and my sisters, there was a cloud before my eyes."
The sisters would soon forgive the deception, but Barrett's brothers refused to communicate for years; her father refused forever, returning her letters unopened, rejecting her son, and cutting her from his will. One of the last poems she wrote as Elizabeth Barrett was the sonnet to Browning in which she asks, "How do I love thee?" and then counts the ways; the first poem written in her miracle, second life as Elizabeth Barrett Browning must have been to her father: it was called "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point":
I stand on the mark beside the shore
Of the first white pilgrim's bended knee,
Where exile turned to ancestor,
And God was thanked for liberty.
I have run through the night, my skin is as dark,
I bend my knee down on this mark . . .
I look on the sky and the sea. . . .
Source: www.todayinliterature.com
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning
September 13, 1976. New book says war with Russia is greatest U.S. threat.A new book by two Brookings Institution scholars declares that the threat of war with Russia remains high and that the Soviet Union still poses the greatest danger to the security of the United States. The appearance of the study suggested that the period of “detente” between America and the Soviet Union was nearing its end.
Since the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had been locked in a contest for world power known as the Cold War. During the early 1970s, however, the administration of President Richard Nixon began to pursue a policy of “detente”-literally a lessening of tensions–toward the Russians. This was a policy strongly supported by both Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and their diplomatic overtures to the Soviet Union were climaxed by a summit meeting in Moscow that both attended in May 1972. At the meeting, the SALT-I agreement was signed, setting limits on a variety of nuclear weapons.
By 1976, however, the spirit of detente seemed to have evaporated. Since the SALT-I agreement, the United States grappled with its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, hostilities continued to simmer in the Middle East, and Africa (particularly Angola) was becoming a new site of Cold War confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In light of this change, the publication of the book Setting National Priorities in September 1976, by Brookings Institution scholars Henry Owen and Charles Schultze was not entirely surprising. Owen and Schultze argued that the Soviet Union remained “determined to continue to dominate Eastern Europe and to extend its influence in the world, whatever we may do.” The arms race, they declared, would continue.
Their conclusion was definite: “The worst threat to our well-being remains what it has been ever since World War II–a clash between U.S. and Soviet armed forces.” Only increased defense spending could protect the United States from disaster.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the last vestiges of detente continued to evaporate. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a successful Marxist revolution in Nicaragua, and the election of Ronald Reagan–who declared that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”–were all signs that the Cold War was back in full swing. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev took power in Russia and reawakened the dormant policy of detente in the mid-1980s that U.S.-Soviet relations notably improved.
Source: www.history.com/this-day-in-history
https://www.brookings.edu/about-us/
14 September 1982: Hollywood princess dead.Princess Grace of Monaco has died of the injuries she sustained in a car crash near Monte Carlo yesterday. The Hollywood actress Grace Kelly - who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock hits Dial M for Murder and Rear Window - suffered a brain haemorrhage.
A statement issued by the royal palace said she died at 2130 GMT after her conditioned worsened throughout the morning and become irreversible by the afternoon. It also said the former film star's husband, Monaco's head of state Prince Rainier, and her three children were at her bedside when she died. The US-born princess' youngest daughter Stephanie was in the car at the time of the accident, but suffered only light bruising.
The news of her death was unexpected as previous reports from the palace had indicated that despite broken ribs, leg and collarbone she was in a stable condition.The Monaco royal family also released an account of yesterday's accident and said the princess had lost control of the car when the brakes failed.
After leaving the road her 10-year-old Rover tumbled 100 ft (30.5 m) down a ravine, turning over several times before coming to rest in a garden. But a witness who was driving behind the two princesses said the car began zigzagging erratically some time before the crash happened. Two engineers from British Leyland are on their way to Monte Carlo to examine the wreckage.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk
High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly
What Happened On This Day – 15 september2008 Lehman Brothers file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection. This was the largest bankruptcy in US history.
1981 John Bull becomes the oldest operable locomotive
The steam locomotive manufactured by the British and operated in New Jersey, US became the world's oldest and still operable locomotive when the Smithsonian operated it on this day. It was first put to use on September 15, 1831.
1963 A Ku Klux Klan bomb kills 4 young African-American girls
4 members of the white supremacy group, set off a timed bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church, a predominantly black church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bombings marked a watershed moment in the Civil Rights Movement in America.
1935 Nuremberg laws instituted by the Nazi party are put into force
The laws revoked citizenship for Jews, forbade them from having relationships with people of non-Jewish origin and made the swastika the official symbol of Germany.
1894 Battle of Pyongyang ends with decisive Japanese victory
The battle was a major land battle took place between the forces of Meiji Japan and Qing China during the First Sino-Japanese War.
Births On This Day
1955 Renzo Rosso
Italian fashion designer, businessman, co-founded Diesel Clothing
1954 Hrant Dink
Turkish/Armenian journalist
1946 Oliver Stone
American director, screenwriter, producer
1890 Agatha Christie
English author
1254 Marco Polo
Italian explorer
Deaths On This Day
2007 Colin McRae
Scottish race car driver
1980 Bill Evans
American pianist, composer
1938 Thomas Wolfe
American author
1859 Isambard Kingdom Brunel
English engineer, designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge
1842 Francisco Morazán
Guatemalan lawyer, politician
Source: www.timeanddate.com
16 Sept, 1963 - Beatles "She Loves You"The Beatles release "She Loves You" in the United States. The song went to claim the Number 1 position on the charts on March 21st 1964 and remained there for 2 weeks. "She Loves You" helped set a record in the United States by being one of the five Beatles songs which held the top five positions in the American charts simultaneously. "She Loves You" had already been released in the UK on August 23rd.
On September 16, 1963, the Beatles were finally given a break in their schedule, allowing the members of the group to have some vacation time. As they headed off on holiday, their latest single, She Loves You, was finally getting its American release. The disc was issued by Swan Records, a small independent label out of Philadelphia, on or about September 16, 1963. The record ended up on Swan after a series of events that would seem quite strange knowing what we know now.
Although Vee-Jay’s licensing agreement with EMI’s Transglobal subsidiary gave the company a right of first refusal for all Beatles masters through January 9, 1968, EMI unilaterally terminated the agreement after Vee-Jay failed to account for or send royalties on the sales of the Please Please Me and From Me To You singles. The amount owed on the two discs was later determined to be $859. Next, Capitol Records, which was owned by EMI, was given the option to release She Loves You. Incredibly, the label decided to pass on the record. After a few other major labels also turned down the opportunity to issue the Beatles latest U.K. chart-topping single, a licensing agreement was reached with Swan.
The She Loves You single on Swan went virtually unnoticed upon its initial release. Philadelphia radio station WIBG may have given the disc a few courtesy spins, listing the single at number 81 in its September 23, 1963 survey. It would be nearly two months before the record charted again in a local American market and two more months before the single reached the national charts (by which time the single had been reissued in an attractive picture sleeve).
Source: www.beatle.net
The Beatles: The Biography
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On this date in 1620, the Mayflower set sail for America.
The 90-foot ship was chartered by a group of merchants known as “the London Adventurers,” and it carried 102 settlers — about half of them religious separatists — to the New World. There were supposed to have been two ships to carry the settlers, but the Mayflower’s sister ship, the Speedwell, proved to be unseaworthy, and eventually the Mayflower had to carry on without her, taking on some of her passengers. They were bound for a tract of land set aside for them in the colony of Virginia, which at that time was much larger than our current state; the Mayflower’s tract was along the Hudson River in what is now New York. Because their departure was delayed, they hit bad weather and were blown off course, making landfall on Cape Cod instead. Only about half of the original passengers survived the first winter, but none of them took the opportunity to return to England when the Mayflower departed in the spring.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
On this date in 1683, Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society, sharing his discovery of "animalcules," or what we know as bacteria. He was untrained in science, and had had no higher education at all, but he was acutely curious about the world around him. Starting in about 1668, he had been experimenting with lens grinding and making his own simple microscopes. He hired an artist to draw the things he saw through his lens, and he started writing informal letters to the Royal Society in 1673, describing things he'd discovered.
Ten years later, on this date, he wrote a letter describing his study of the plaque found between his teeth, and the teeth of other subjects. "I ... saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort ... had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort ... oft-times spun round like a top ... and ... were far more in number." Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to observe animalcules.
The Royal Society was skeptical of his discovery at first, and there was much discussion about his mental status, but today he is considered "the Father of Microbiology."
Leeuwenhoek never wrote any books, but he wrote letters to the Royal Society for more than 50 years. During that time, he shared his discoveries: blood cells, sperm cells, nematodes, muscle fibers, and algae. He wrote his letters in Dutch, which was the only language he knew, and his letters were translated into English and Latin before publication. He wrote right up until his death at age 90, and his last letters were detailed observations of his own final illness.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
People of the Dutch Golden Age: Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, Rene Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Cornelis de Graeff
On this day in 1917, 23-year-old Aldous Huxley, future author of Brave New World is hired as a schoolmaster at Eton. One of his pupils will be Eric Blair, who will later use the pen name George Orwell.Huxley was born into a prominent family. His grandfather was a famous biologist and proponent of Darwin, and his father was a respected biographer. Huxley hoped to become a scientist like his grandfather, but his dreams were shattered when a medical condition robbed him of most of his sight while he was a student at Eton.
Barely able to read, he nevertheless graduated from Oxford in 1916, the same year his first book appeared. The following year, he began teaching. His near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I. From 1919 to 1921, he edited a publication called Athenaeum. In 1919, he married and had one son. The family moved to Italy in 1920 and lived most of the next several decades there while traveling widely. His satirical novels Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) were successful, and he wrote full time for the rest of his life, churning out 47 books and many articles, essays, and screenplays.
His 1928 book, Point Counterpoint, became a bestseller, and in 1932 he published his masterwork Brave New World, which he wrote in four months. The book paints a dark vision of a future where individual emotion, creativity, and impulse have been completely subordinated to the tyrannical state.
In 1937, Huxley moved to California, where he became a screenwriter. His screenplays include Pride and Prejudice (1940), starring Laurence Olivier, and Jane Eyre (1944). In the 1950s, Huxley became a proponent of the controlled use of psychedelic drugs to liberate the mind. He wrote two books about his experiences using LSD and mescaline under supervision: The Doors of Perception (inspiring the name of the rock group The Doors) and Heaven and Hell. Huxley’s first wife died in 1955, and he remarried in 1956. His 1962 novel, Island, envisioned a utopian society where psychedelic drugs are used for religious rituals. Huxley died in Los Angeles in 1963.
Source: www.history.com
Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual
The Feast Day of San Gennaro is the most important religious festival in Naples, Italy. San Gennaro, the Bishop of Benevento and martyr who was persecuted for being a Christian and finally beheaded in 305 AD, is the patron saint of Naples and the city's 13th-century Gothic cathedral is dedicated to him. Inside the cathedral, or duomo, the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro is decorated with Baroque frescoes and other artworks, but most importantly it holds the saint's relics including two sealed vials of his coagulated blood housed in a silver reliquary.
According to legend, some of his blood was collected by a woman who took it to Naples where it liquefied 8 days later.
On the morning of September 19, the feast day of San Gennaro, thousands of people fill the Naples Cathedral and Piazza del Duomo, the square in front of it, hoping to see the saint's blood liquefy in what's known as the miracle of San Gennaro. In a solemn religious ceremony, the Cardinal removes the vials of blood from the chapel where they're kept and taken in a procession, along with a bust of San Gennaro, to the cathedral's high altar.
The crowd watches anxiously to see if the blood miraculously liquefies, believed to be a sign that San Gennaro has blessed the city (or a bad omen if it doesn't). If it liquefies, the church bells ring and the Cardinal takes the liquefied blood through the cathedral and out into the square so everyone can see it. Then he returns the reliquary to the altar where the vials remain on display for 8 days.
As with many Italian festivals, there's much more than just the main event. The ceremony is followed by a religious procession through the streets of the historic center where both the streets and the shops are closed. Stands selling toys, trinkets, food, and candy are set up in the streets. Festivities go on for eight days until the reliquary is returned to its place.
The miracle of San Gennaro's blood is also performed on December 16 and the Saturday before the first Sunday in May as well as special times during the year to ward off disasters, such as an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or for visiting dignitaries.
A San Gennaro festival is also held in September in many Italian communities outside Italy, including New York and Los Angeles in the US. Read more about it in Italian American Festivals.
Source: www.tripsavvy.com
The Royal Chapel Of San Gennaro's Treasure
SEPTEMBER 20, 1870 THE END OF THE PAPAL STATEThe outbreak of war between France and Prussia in July 1870 marked the end of the secular power of the Church, as the French occupation troops led by Napoleon III had to move back to their homeland. The Italian government assured the Pope compliance with the agreement of September 1864, allowed, however, when the fortunes of war turned for Napoleon III, to besiege the regions belonging to the church by the army of the Kingdom of Italy.
After the defeat at Sedan and the proclamation of the French Republic, the military siege was intensified, and on 20 September 1870 the royal troops stormed, after a brief gun fire, the "Porta Pia" and marched into Rome. Pius IX wanted to avoid bloodshed and ordered the commander of the Papal forces, General Chancellor, to limit the defence to an absolute minimum to prove that one would only avoid brute force. On the following day the papal troops were dismissed, and only the Swiss Guard remained in the Vatican.
Thus ended a centuries-long period, in which an army under the leadership of the Pope was required to secure the secular power of the church. From then on, the Swiss Guards’ only duty was to protect the life of the Pope and to ensure the safety of the Vatican and the Pope's summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. Therefore, Stalin’s question about how many divisions the Vatican required, made no longer any sense. It shows a too "realistic" and short-sighted view of the facts that determined the course of history.
Source: www.guardiasvizzera.va
The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825
Who is an Editor?Today is the birthday of Maxwell Perkins, the most famous American editor. He discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. His fellow editors at Scribner wanted to sign more experienced writers thinking they were a sure thing, but Perkins looked for new talent, and he struck gold.
Perkins became the model for a new kind of editor. He did much more than clean up a book for publication; he looked for a writer he believed in who still had a lot of work to do, and then nurtured the book until it reached its final form. He suggested changes to the plot, he came up with book titles, and was a friend to the writers he published.
Perkins was not good at spelling and punctuation, and he was a very slow reader. His gift lay in spotting talent, particularly in writers who didn’t have reputations yet. He was also talented at getting those writers to respond to criticism of their work. He said that Fitzgerald was very sensitive to criticism, that “he could accept it, but as his editor you had to be sure of everything you suggested.” Hemingway was a perfectionist, and claimed to have written parts of A Farewell to Arms over 50 times. Perkins said, “Before an author destroys the natural qualities of his writing — that’s when an editor has to step in. But not a moment sooner.”
But his biggest challenge by far was Thomas Wolfe, who was a chronic over-writer who struggled to delete a page. Wolfe would write his novel Of Time and the River (1935) standing up, using the top of a refrigerator as a desk (he was 6’6’’), and then he would throw each page into a box without editing or looking at it. Perkins had to go through the mess of papers and put the pages in order, based on his best guess. Over time, they became estranged. In 2016, the movie Genius came out dramatizing their relationship, with Colin Firth as Perkins and Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe.
Later in his career, he also published Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. Despite his huge success, he was a modest, idiosyncratic character who liked to stay out of the limelight. The way he thought about editing contrasts with how people thought of him. He was famous for having discovered so many important writers, but he thought editors shouldn’t draw attention to themselves for the work they did on other people’s books.
He said: “An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. […] An editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing.”
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Unshaken Friend: A Profile of Maxwell Perkins
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In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and five traveling scholarships. Initally, three of the scholarships were awarded on the recommendation of the Faculty of Journalism at Columbia to graduating students; two of the scholarships—in art and music, respectively—were administered externally by a jury comprised of faculty from the Columbia Department of Music and the Institute of Musical Art (music) and the National Academy of Design (art). Like the other awards, the latter two scholarships were open to all music and art students in America. (Currently, five scholarships of $7,500 are awarded to graduating students from the School of Journalism.)
In journalism, prizes were to recognize "the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year" (a gold medal worth $500 with no monetary component); "the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction" ($500); and "the best example of a reporter's work during the year, the test being strict accuracy, terseness, the accomplishment of some public good commanding public attention and respect" ($1,000). (A $1,000 prize for the best history of services rendered to the public by the American press in the preceding year was only awarded once; similarly, a $1,000 prize for a paper on the development of the School of Journalism was never awarded due to a dearth of competitors.) In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel ($1,000), an original American play performed in New York ($1,000), a book on the history of the United States ($2,000) and an American biography ($1,000).
But, sensitive to the dynamic progression of his society, Pulitzer made provision for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an overseer advisory board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time." He also empowered the board to withhold any award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. The assignment of power to the board was such that it could also overrule the recommendations for awards made by the juries subsequently set up in each of the categories.
Thus, the Plan of Award, which has governed the prizes since their inception in 1917, has been revised frequently. The Board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music, and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder's will and its intent.
Source: http://www.pulitzer.org/page/history-...