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Today in History
On this day in 1598, playwright Ben Jonson is indicted for manslaughter after a duel.Jonson’s father, a clergyman, died before Jonson was born, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather, a master bricklayer at Westminster. Jonson attended Westminster school, where he was educated by great classical scholars. He tried his hand at bricklaying, then joined the army and traveled to Flanders, where he killed a man in single combat.
Back in England by 1594, he became an actor and playwright. In the fall of 1598, he killed another actor in a duel and was arrested. He was very nearly hanged, but his ability to read and write saved him. He claimed “benefit of clergy,” which allowed him to be sentenced by the lenient ecclesiastical courts.
Jonson was also jailed twice for his writing and viewed with some suspicion for his conversion to Catholicism. However, he became a successful playwright with his comedy Every Man in His Humor, which was performed in 1598 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, featuring William
Shakespeare in a leading role. After several less successful plays, he again scored a hit with Volpone (performed in 1605 or 1606), a comedy about a wealthy Venetian who falsely informs several greedy relations and associates that each is sole heir.
In 1605, Jonson wrote the first of his many masques, a popular form of court entertainment involving elaborate and elegant spectacle. He won favor at court and in 1616 was given a royal pension, becoming England’s first unofficial poet laureate. Jonson was friends with William Shakespeare, John Donne, Francis Bacon, tutor to the son of Sir Walter Raleigh, and acquainted
with most of the important court figures of 17th-century England. His poetry was much admired by younger writers, including Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew, who called themselves “sons of Ben.” Known for his clever remarks and witty verbal battles at pubs like the Mermaid Tavern, Jonson was as famous in his time as Shakespeare. He died in 1637.
Source: www.history.com
Ben Jonson: A Life
Salvo D'Acquisto (17 October 1920 - 23 September 1943) was a member of the Italian Carabinieri during the Second World War. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor and is being considered for beatification for sacrificing himself to save 22 civilians from being executed by German soldiers.Modern Italy has few war heroes … Only one soldier from the period is honoured today; he has squares, schools and streets named after him, He is an NCO named Salvo D’Acquisto, who died aged 22. He has a simple tomb in Santa Chiara, the most beautiful church, in his native Naples, and in Italy they are waiting for him to be canonised; when that happens Salvo D’Acquisto will be the first soldier saint of the Second World War. He is one of many buried in beautiful Santa Chiara. By the altar there’s Robert of Anjou; on the other side of the nave lies Blessed Cristina, Queen of Naples, surrounded by a clutch of Bourbons.
Salvo D’Acquisto is in exalted company. He was the eldest of eight children: three died in infancy, one in childhood; the youngest brother is still alive and living in Naples, and is now in his late seventies. The entire family, including a formidable grandmother, all lived in one large room in the Vomero quarter. They were not particularly poor by the standards of the time. Their father worked in a chemical factory. Salvo himself was a studious child, even bookish, but still left school aged 14, as working-class boys did in those days.
At 18, the minimum age, having done a few jobs in the meantime, he enrolled in the Carabinieri, the oldest regiment in the Italian Army, which carries out the functions of a police force. Archbishop Giovanni Marra, Italy’s military bishop, describes Salvo as tall, athletic and with limpid eyes, “a true son of Southern Italy”; and so he was in more than just looks. No less than four of his immediate male relatives had enrolled in the Carabinieri a sure sign then that there were few alternative careers available for a talented but poor Neapolitan. He enjoyed the military life. There are facts all documented by the beatification process. In October 1939, as a young recruit, he stood guard outside Palazzo Venezia, where the vainglorious Duce was even then itching to enter the war.
He spent 18 months in North Africa on active service; he was recalled, promoted to NCO, and had his last posting in a little village north of Rome. But these are only facts: one gazes at photographs, reads his letters home, and speaks to his brother. From these pieces a mosaic emerges of the life of the man who now lies in Santa Chiara (.....)
His commanding officer had been called to Rome that day, and Salvo was thus, at the age of 22, the senior representative of the Italian state in Torrimpietra. At eight that morning a party of Germans arrived, wearing the uniform of the dreaded SS. Salvo, ever polite, went to greet them, holding out a hand only to be struck by a rifle and taken away without even time to put on his jacket. What had happened was this; the day before, the SS, in occupying a medieval tower at nearby Palidoro had caused an explosion. One German was dead, two wounded, and sabotage suspected.
Despite the fact that the explosion was accidental, the commander of the SS had decided on reprisals. Twenty two local men had been rounded up and were going to be shot unless Salvo could point out the person responsible for the supposed crime. It was to be a long day. The Italian prisoners were ordered to dig a trench, some of them with their bare hands. The process of digging their own mass grave reduced many of them to tears. Only Salvo kept calm and tried to reason with the SS.
In vain. It was only at 5pm that he at last succeeded in persuading the SS to let their prisoners go. One of the prisoners stayed to see the outcome, while the others fled in gratitude. He was a 17-year-old boy, and the sole witness of Salvo’s death at the hands of the SS firing squad. For Salvo had convinced the Germans that he was responsible for the imaginary crime, and saved the lives of the 22 hostages in so doing. “You live once, you die once,” he had told the boy while they had been digging the trench that afternoon.
These are the facts, but behind them lies a story of generosity, bravery and Christian charity. Here is one Italian who did not run away; one man who, in the sorry history of the war, did something immediate to save victims of unjust oppression. He had been to Holy Communion early that morning; he made his thanksgiving by offering his life for his brethren. But unlike so many on the way to canonisation, the dust of the cloister does not hang heavy upon him. He lived in terrible times, but by his action of giving up his life for his friends, he redeemed them.
Source: www.catholicherald.co.uk (adapted)
Storia di un eroe. Salvo D'Acquisto
On this day in 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as a justice in the Supreme Court of the United States, becoming the first woman to hold that office. O'Connor was born to a ranching family in El Paso, Texas (1930), and as a young girl remembers shooting coyotes that threatened the family herd. Determined not to have the same fate as her father, who dreamed of attending college but never made it, O'Connor moved in with her grandmother in the city to attend school. She went on to Stanford University, graduated in 1952 at the top of her class, but she couldn't find a law firm that would give her a job. "It was very frustrating," she said, "because my male classmates weren't having any problems. No one would even speak to me." Not one to give up, she tracked down an attorney in Northern California whom she'd heard once had a female staffer, and she convinced him to let her work four months for free until a paying job opened up.
She married and later moved to Arizona where she opened up her own law practice with a male partner, taking low-paying cases, until she got involved with the Republican Party. She rose through the ranks quickly and within a few years found herself Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate, the first American woman to ever hold such a position.
In 1979, O'Connor was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals, and two years later, when President Reagan needed to fulfill his campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, O'Connor was tapped. She had deep reservations about accepting the position. She later said, "If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine [...]" Pro-life and religious conservatives vehemently opposed her appointment, fearing that she wouldn't vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but she was confirmed by unanimous vote.
O'Connor often voted with the conservative wing of the court, but built a reputation for being pragmatic, and through the latter part of her career often cast the swing vote in undecided cases, including the controversial Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. Upon retiring in 2006, she set up a popular online curriculum called ourcourts.org to foster understanding of civics among young people.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org (adapted)
Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World
Mod
I do remember his story; it was told at the "Elelmentary school" when we were kids. Not anymore I'm afraid ...
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Salvo D'Acquisto (17 October 1920 - 23 September 1943) was a member of the Italian Carabinieri during the Second World War. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Va..."Thanks LauraT. A story we should all remember ...
Mod
Thanks LauraT. A story we should all remember ... "
Indeed we should
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Salvo D'Acquisto (17 October 1920 - 23 September 1943) was a member of the Italian Carabinieri during the Second World War. He was posthumously awarde..."Man is ready to remember all the evil he has got to suffer, he easily forgets all the good he has received ...
September 26, 2017The European Day of Languages, celebrated every year on the 26 September, is a festival of linguistic diversity, a day to encourage language learning for young and old; a day to come together and marvel at the beauty of all of Europe’s languages.
Against the current backdrop of rising populism, xenophobia and intolerance where language is used to exclude and divide, this year’s European Day of Languages on September 26 gives us a much-needed opportunity to highlight all that is positive and enriching in today’s increasingly multilingual and culturally diverse Europe.
Sixteen years after its inception, the Day continues to represent a force for unity as it reaches out a welcoming hand to new cultures and languages. It is one of many examples of the Council’s pioneering work to promote linguistic diversity, tolerance and respect.
Other successful current initiatives include; the development of a Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture; the No Hate Speech Movement campaign as well as the Action Plans on the fight against violent extremism and radicalisation leading to terrorism and on Building Inclusive Societies.
Such initiatives are strengthened through the Council’s cooperation with the European Commission, as exemplified through the joint action of the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) and the European Commission, notably in the area of multilingual classrooms.
So let us use our celebrations on and around 26 September 2017 to send a clear message throughout Europe and beyond: linguistic diversity is an important resource to be used and cherished, not just today, but every day.
We must support the children fleeing from war and terror. We must recognise and value all of the languages they bring to our schools. We must continue to strive for unity in diversity, harnessing the positive power of linguistic diversity to enrich our democracies and create safer, more cohesive and inclusive societies.
The European Day of Languages (EDL) is a day to encourage language learning across Europe. At the initiative of the Council of Europe, the European Day of Languages has been celebrated every year, on 26 September, since the European Year of Languages in 2001.
The specific aims of the Day are to:
- alert the public to the importance of language learning in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;
- promote the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe;
- encourage lifelong language learning in and out of school.
The dedicated website for the Day is available in 35 languages and hundreds activities are registered in the events’ calendar of the site.
The EDL activities which take place in Europe and increasingly on other continents are organised mainly by schools, universities, language and cultural institutes, associations and also by the European Commission’s translation field offices.
Source: Council of Europe
Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe
Mod
The European Day of Languages, celebrated every year on the 26 September, is a festival of linguistic diversity, a day to encourage language learning for young and old; a day to..."
I didn't know such recurrence exhisted!
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "September 26, 2017The European Day of Languages, celebrated every year on the 26 September, is a festival of linguistic diversity, a day to encourage language learning for young a..."
http://edl.ecml.at/
Mod
The European Day of Languages, celebrated every year on the 26 September, is a festival of linguistic diversity, a day to encourage language learn..."
Thanks!!!
On this day September 27, 1968: Musical "Hair" opens as censors withdraw. The American hippy musical "Hair" has opened in London - one day after the abolition of theatre censorship.Until yesterday, some of the scenes in the musical, written by out-of-work actors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, would have been considered too outrageous to be shown on a stage in Britain.
The show, billed as an American tribal love-rock musical, first opened in New York on 2 December last year. Many were angered by scenes containing nudity and drug-taking as well as a strong anti-war message at the height of the Vietnam conflict and the desecration of the American flag on stage.
The show's transfer to London's West End would not have been possible before the new Theatres Act which ended the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship dating back to 1737.
Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole introduced play censorship to silence shows like "The Beggars' Opera" which contained biting anti-government satire.
The new "Theatres Act" does not give playwrights a completely free hand. Strong language and obscenity will still be liable for criminal prosecution. "Hair" does contain some blasphemous and sexually explicit language. But the scene that has aroused most controversy in the musical so far is where the cast appears on stage in the nude, emerging from beneath a vast sheet.
The director of the London production of "Hair", Tom O'Horgan, said: "I think that the famed nude scene has been greatly over-emphasised. It has very little importance in the show itself and much of the publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play, which are also perhaps shocking to people because they deal with things as they are. We tell it the way it is."
Asked whether the timing of the opening was significant, he said: "We couldn't have done the play the way we're doing it prior to this time without drastic modifications."
The cast of the West End production appeared on Eamonn Andrews Independent Television show last night but decided against performing the nude scene. Mr O'Horgan said it would have given the wrong impression of the show.
"Hair" had a shaky start in New York. Its first two runs were cut short before producer Michael Butler became involved. He brought in Tom O'Horgan as director. It took three months to re-vamp the musical - and when it finally appeared at the Biltmore on Broadway it had 19 songs in the first act compared with just nine in the original production.
Source: BBC on this day
Good Hair Days: A Personal Journey with the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Hair
Mod
Its soundrtack has been with me all my life, I was last year in New York with my daughter and I walked with her to that "monument" where they spend the first night ...
This my favourite song - but many more are so beautifull!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCs1r...
LauraT wrote: "I've seen only as the film by Milos Forman. I loved it; I saw it with my father, who explained me the Vietnam war, the burning of the cards, the Hippy movement, the peace manifestations, etc...Its..."
After half a century, we can realize how much things, people, places and ideas have changed ... I like the French sentence: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" ...
British national anthem 'God Save The King/Queen' is sung on this day for the first time at Covent Garden, London. Like so much of our heritage, the provenance of “God Save the King/Queen” is open to debate, and surrounded by myth and legend. On September 28 1745, following a performance of The Alchemist at Drury Lane Theatre, a setting of the song by Thomas Arne was sung for the first time in public, giving us the version we hear today. In fact the original tune was probably written by Dr John Bull in the previous century, and others have spotted similarities between it and various hymns and other church music.
The version we know now doesn't include the line from verse six of the original, Rebellious Scots to Crush, perhaps understandably. Although there is no doubt that God Save the Queen is our national anthem (and strangely enough Liechtenstein's, albeit with different words), it is by custom rather than through official recognition. And after nearly three hundred years as our anthem, there are still regular calls for something else to be adopted, especially in the light of the stirring unofficial anthem of Scottish teams, Flower of Scotland, that seems to give them a head start in every game.
Source: www.information-britain.co.uk
Today in Historical BiographyMiguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is born this day near Madrid. Cervantes led an adventurous life and achieved much popular success, but he nevertheless struggled financially throughout his life. Little is known about his childhood, except that he was a favorite student of Madrid humanist Juan Lopez, and that his father was an apothecary.
In 1569, Cervantes was living in Rome and working for a future cardinal. Shortly thereafter, he enlisted in the Spanish fleet to fight against the Turks. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, he took three bullets and suffered permanent damage to his left hand. Later, he was stationed at Palermo and Naples. On the way home to Madrid in 1575, he and his brother Roderigo were captured by Barbary pirates and held captive in Algiers.
Cervantes was ransomed after five years of captivity and returned to Madrid, where he began writing. Although his records indicate he wrote 20 to 30 plays, only two survive. In 1585, he published a romance. During this time, he married a woman 18 years younger than he was and had an illegitimate daughter, whom he raised in his household. He worked as a tax collector and as a requisitioner of supplies for the navy, but was jailed for irregularities in his accounting. Some historians believe he formulated the idea for Don Quixote while in jail.
In 1604, he received the license to publish Don Quixote. Although the book began as a satire of chivalric epics, it was far more complex than a simple satire. The book blended traditional genres to create a sad portrait of a penniless man striving to live by the ideals of the past. The book was a huge success and brought Cervantes literary respect and position, but did not generate much money. He wrote dramas and short stories until a phony sequel, penned by another writer, prompted him to write Don Quixote, Part II in 1615. He died the following year.
Source: www.history.com
No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes
On this day in 1928, Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel, the human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize-winning author of more than 50 books, including “Night,” an internationally acclaimed memoir based on his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is born in Sighet, Transylvania (present-day Romania).In May 1944, the Nazis deported 15-year-old Wiesel and his family to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. Wiesel’s mother and the youngest of his three sisters died at Auschwitz, while he and his father later were moved to another camp, Buchenwald, located in Germany. Wiesel’s father perished at Buchenwald just months before it was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945.
Following the war, Wiesel spent time in a French orphanage, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and went on to work as a journalist in France. In the early 1950s, he broke a self-imposed vow not to speak about the atrocities he witnessed at the concentration camps and penned the first version of “Night” in Yiddish, under the title “Un di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Remained Silent”).
At the encouragement of Nobel laureate and prominent French writer Francois Mauriac, Wiesel reworked the manuscript in French. However, even with Mauriac’s help in trying to land a book deal, the manuscript was rejected by multiple publishers, who believed few people at the time were interested in reading about the Holocaust.
The book was eventually released in 1958 as “La Nuit”; an English translation, “Night,” followed in 1960. Although initial sales were sluggish, “Night” was generally well reviewed and over the decades gained an audience, eventually becoming a classic of Holocaust literature that has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. In 2006, TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey selected “Night” for her famed on-air book club, and traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz for an episode of her show.
Since the publication of “Night,” Wiesel has written dozens of works of fiction and non-fiction, lectured widely and crusaded against injustice and intolerance around the world. A professor at Boston University since the 1970s, he was instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and has received numerous awards, including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
Source: www.history.com
Conversations with Elie Wiesel
“A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Winston Churchill's first wartime broadcast 1 October 1939. He gave his first wartime broadcast, on the recently created BBC Home Service. Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, delivered his assessment of the first month of hostilities. He did not like the BBC - which had defied the government to carry statements from strike leaders during the 1926 general Strike - and had only broadcast infrequently before the war. However, he understood the power radio gave him to speak to the nation.
The speech is not as famous as the ones Churchill delivered as Prime Minister during the summer of 1940, but did contain his opinion of Russian intentions as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Churchill spoke of the defence and fall of Poland against the onslaught of Germany and Russia. He suggested that Russia’s natural interests would not coincide with those of Germany. He also asserted that the Germans were not winning the U-boat war, despite initial success. Churchill said the nation should prepare for a long conflict of 3 years and ended by likening the struggle against Nazism to the American Civil War fight against slavery.
It is hard to quantify the significance of Churchill’s wartime speeches in bolstering national morale during the long years of the war. But more than half the adult population tuned in to them and the nation came to a virtual standstill as utility companies reported a fall in demand while he was on air.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
A History of Russia
The comic strip Peanuts made its debut on this date in 1950. Its creator, Charles “Sparky” Schulz was born in Minneapolis in 1922, and grew up across the Mississippi River in St. Paul, where his dad owned a barbershop near the corner of Snelling and Selby Avenues. Sparky was an indifferent student, shy and awkward, and he always failed at least one class every year he was in high school. But he kept going, because he wanted to become a cartoonist. After he graduated high school, he took some correspondence courses in art; he served as a machine gunner in World War II, and when he came home, he returned to the school — Minneapolis’s Art Instruction, Inc. — as an art teacher. While there, he became romantically involved with a redheaded woman who worked in the accounting department. She ended up dumping him, but she later served as the inspiration for the Little Red-Haired Girl whom Charlie Brown had a keen crush on.
In 1947, Schulz sold a comic strip called Li’l Folks to his hometown paper, the Pioneer Press. It was a flop, but he kept drawing, and in 1950 he submitted a collection of his strips to United Features Syndicate. They liked his work, and bought the strip, but they insisted on changing the name to Peanuts, which Schulz didn’t like at first. “I wanted a strip with dignity and significance,” he later said. “Peanuts made it sound too insignificant.”
The strip ran in seven newspapers when it debuted on this date in 1950. It got off to a slow start its first year, but it picked up steam after a book of reprints was published. By 1960, it ran in hundreds of papers, and Schulz had won the most prestigious award in the cartoonists’ pantheon: a Reuben. And in 1969, NASA named its command module “Charlie Brown” and its lunar module “Snoopy.” At its peak, the strip ran in more than 2,600 papers, and was read by more than 350 million people in 75 countries. Peanuts grew into dozens of original books and collections, Emmy Award-winning television specials, full-length feature films, Broadway musicals, and record albums. Schulz’s 1963 book, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, sold more that year than any other hardcover book for children or adults.
Charlie Brown’s dog first appeared in the third installment of Peanuts. Snoopy was inspired by a black and white dog Schulz had had as a kid. His dog’s name was Spike — the name Schulz eventually gave to Snoopy’s desert-dwelling cousin. The strip wasn’t explicitly political, but its creator was clearly aware of the changing times, and commented on issues like New Math, the Battle of the Sexes, and trends in psychotherapy. Peppermint Patty, an athletic tomboy from a single-parent household, made her debut in 1966. Schulz introduced Franklin, the strip’s first African-American character, in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; Franklin’s father was a veteran of the Vietnam War. The 1960s counterculture also inspired another beloved character: Snoopy’s friend Woodstock, the little yellow bird, whose speech bubbles contain nothing but a series of vertical lines.
Schulz suffered a stroke in November 1999; he was also diagnosed with colon cancer. He announced his retirement in December, and died at home on February 12, 2000 — the night before the final Peanuts strip appeared in the papers. Charlie Brown and his friends are still beloved by young and old alike. When Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, showed his two-year-old son a drawing of the famous fat tabby cat, the boy promptly and joyfully cried out, “Snoopy!” Last year, a new 3-D Peanuts feature film hit the theaters to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the strip, and the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first animated Peanuts special.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.
Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.
On September 27, almost a week earlier, Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding.
Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again, and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds", a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.
Poe's death, shrouded in mystery, seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas, a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball (58 cm.or 22.8 inches in diameter), weighed only 83.6 kg. or 183.9 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.
The story begins in 1952, when the International Council of Scientific Unions decided to establish July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, as the International Geophysical Year (IGY) because the scientists knew that the cycles of solar activity would be at a high point then. In October 1954, the council adopted a resolution calling for artificial satellites to be launched during the IGY to map the Earth's surface.
In July 1955, the White House announced plans to launch an Earth-orbiting satellite for the IGY and solicited proposals from various Government research agencies to undertake development. In September 1955, the Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard proposal was chosen to represent the U.S. during the IGY.
The Sputnik launch changed everything. As a technical achievement, Sputnik caught the world's attention and the American public off-guard. Its size was more impressive than Vanguard's intended 3.5-pound payload. In addition, the public feared that the Soviets' ability to launch satellites also translated into the capability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. Then the Soviets struck again; on November 3, Sputnik II was launched, carrying a much heavier payload, including a dog named Laika.
Immediately after the Sputnik I launch in October, the U.S. Defense Department responded to the political furor by approving funding for another U.S. satellite project. As a simultaneous alternative to Vanguard, Wernher von Braun and his Army Redstone Arsenal team began work on the Explorer project.
On January 31, 1958, the tide changed, when the United States successfully launched Explorer I. This satellite carried a small scientific payload that eventually discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth, named after principal investigator James Van Allen. The Explorer program continued as a successful ongoing series of lightweight, scientifically useful spacecraft.
The Sputnik launch also led directly to the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In July 1958, Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (commonly called the "Space Act"), which created NASA as of October 1, 1958 from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and other government agencies.
Source: www.history.nasa.gov
Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age
October 5 is the birthday of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, born in Langres (1713). He was a prominent thinker during the French Enlightenment, and he was good friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The two men met regularly at cafés in Paris to discuss music, philosophy, and their troubles with women.From 1745 to 1772, Diderot was the chief editor of Encyclopédie, a book meant to replace the Bible as the source of knowledge. It was the first book of its kind to subject all the entries to rational analysis, debunking a lot of ancient wisdom along the way. For instance, it included an entry on Noah's ark that tried to estimate how many man-hours Noah and his sons must have spent shoveling manure off their boat.
Previous encyclopedias restricted themselves to serious topics like theology and philosophy and science, but Diderot tried to cover everything he could think of: emotions, coal mines, fleas, duels, bladder surgery, stockings, the metaphysics of the human soul, and how to make soup.
This was Diderot who said, "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Source: www.writersalmanac.org (adpted)
The Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles
Euridice, the earliest surviving opera, received its premiere at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence on this date in 1600. Euridice was performed for the wedding celebrations of Henry IV of France and Maria de' Medici. It was written by Jacopo Peri, a beloved composer and singer. He had already written Dafne a few years earlier, which is considered to be the first opera, but that music has been lost.
Euridice is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the gifted musician Orpheus falls in love with the beautiful Eurydice, but just after their wedding, she is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus is heartbroken, and he journeys to the underworld to try to bring her back.
He charms Hades, the king of the underworld, and his wife, Persephone, and they agree to return Eurydice to Orpheus on one condition: he must get all the way back to the upper world without looking back to see if Eurydice is following. He almost makes it, but right as he is walking out into the sunlight, he turns back, and Eurydice is still in the underworld, so he loses her forever. Peri not only wrote the opera, he also sang the role of Orpheus.
Peri wrote a long preface to Euridice, in which he explained the new musical form he was working in, which we now call opera. He said that he was trying to write the way he imagined the Greeks would have, combing music and speech into the ultimate form of drama. One of the people who came to Florence to see Euridice was Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. And he probably brought his servant, Claudio Monteverdi.
A few years later, in 1607, Monteverdi premiered his first opera, L'Orfeo, which was also a retelling of the legend of Orpheus. Monteverdi elevated the opera form to new heights, and L'Orfeo is considered the first truly great opera.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
La storia di Orfeo ed Euridice
On this day, poet Alan Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later.Ginsberg was born in 1926 to a high school English teacher father and Marxist mother who later suffered a mental breakdown. Her madness and death were the subjects of Ginsberg’s poem “Kaddish.”
Ginsberg’s father raised Allen and his older brother to recite poetry by Poe, Dickens, Keats, Shelley, and Milton. Ginsberg attended Columbia University, intending to study law. At Columbia, he met Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, who would become central figures in the Beat movement. Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia in 1945 for a series of minor infractions, then bummed around, working as a merchant seaman, a dishwasher, and a welder. He finally finished Columbia in 1948 with high grades but was arrested when a drug-addict friend stored supplies in his apartment. He successfully pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity and spent eight months in the psych ward at Columbia.
After his arrest and trial, Ginsberg went through a “straight” period, working as a successful market researcher and helping to develop a successful ad campaign for toothpaste. He moved to San Francisco and soon fell back in with the Beat crowd. In 1955, over a period of a few weeks, he wrote his seminal work “Howl.”
“Howl” was printed in England, but its second edition was seized by Customs officials as it entered the country. City Lights, a San Francisco bookstore, published the book itself to avoid Customs problems, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested and tried for obscenity, but defended by the ACLU. Following testimony from nine literary experts on the merits of the book, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty.
Ginsberg was center stage at numerous milestone counterculture events during the 1950s and 1960s. His name made it onto J. Edgar Hoover’s list of dangerous subversives. He wrote about his own experiences as a gay man, experimented with drugs, protested the Vietnam War, was clubbed and gassed at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, studied Buddhism, toured with Bob Dylan, and recorded poetry and music with Paul McCartney and Philip Glass. He became a popular teacher and lecturer at universities across the United States. He won the National Book Award in 1973 and was a runner-up for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He wrote and read poetry in New York until his death from liver cancer in 1997.
Source: www.history.com
Howl and Other Poems
John Lennon releases his song “Imagine” on October 8, 1971. Released in 1971 on the album of the same name, “Imagine” quickly rocketed to the top of the charts in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia. Its conscious message for unity has made the song a staple in antiviolence protests from 1971 to present. Countless artists, from Diana Ross to Elton John, Neil Young to Lady Gaga, have performed covers of the revolutionary song at benefits and protests. Ranked third in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, “Imagine” is a universal anthem for world peace that rings true for each generation.
Upon its release in 1971, “Imagine” became an instant anthem for world peace. It dominated the radio streams and inspired other artists as well as the public to protest war and violence. The poetic lyrics coupled with rhythmic piano, gentle string ensemble, and subtle drumbeat makes the song brilliant aurally and intellectually. The beautiful melody provides the perfect backdrop for romantic lyrics; this combination magnetized audiences across the globe and continues to attract listeners today.
“Imagine” preaches a universal message of global peace and unity that engages and inspires most people, the lyrics are deceptively simple. Lennon suggests an ideal world is one devoid of heaven or hell, boundaries or religion, possessions or greed. The message for oneness with ourselves, our world, our fellow man is simple, but attaining it would require moral, political, social and economic sacrifices.
The message itself is simple; if only achieving it could be the same. Some people interpret the song as anti-religious and anti-patriotic but the point is not to condemn what is, rather to dream what could be. What I appreciate most about this song is Lennon’s passive optimism. He wasn’t aggressive, nor did he demand listeners to change.
He asks us to visualize a different world, a united world, and hopes this visualization motivates us to progress toward it. There is no anger, no frustration; just concern, patience and hope for humanity. If we continue to spread Lennon’s vision of hope, peace and love, maybe someday “the world will live as one.” A magnificent utopia.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine: The True Story of a Music Legend
October 9, 1997Dario Fo, an iconoclastic Italian playwright-performer known for mixing wacky social farce with sharp political satire, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature today, to the guarded amazement of Italy's literary establishment and the outright dismay of the Vatican. In its announcement of the $1 million prize, the Swedish Academy likened the 71-year-old Mr. Fo to the ''jesters of the Middle Ages'' who relied on wit, irreverence and even slapstick humor to poke fun at authority while ''upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.''
Critics have praised Mr. Fo's rare abilities as both writer and performer. ''Imagine a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Lenny Bruce, and you may begin to have an idea of the scope of Fo's anarchic wit,'' Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times in 1983. His one-man tour de force, ''Mistero Buffo'' (''Comic Mystery''), written in 1969, finally had its United States premiere at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan in 1986. It has its stylistic roots in the strolling players and minstrels of the Middle Ages. But it was also a timely satirical blast at religion and politics, delivered in Grammelot, a kind of double-speak masquerading as a language, wholly invented by Mr. Fo himself.
The Roman Catholic Church has been a frequent target of Mr. Fo's satire, and the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said it was flabbergasted by his selection. ''Giving the prize to someone who is also the author of questionable works is beyond all imagination,'' the paper said.
Mr. Fo, a longtime member of the Communist Party, and his wife, the writer and actress Franca Rame, were refused entry into the United States in the 1980's under longstanding laws denying visas to people who took part in antigovernment activities or belonged to the Communist Party.
But the State Department twice granted them waivers, the first in 1984, for the premiere of his play ''Accidental Death of an Anarchist'' on Broadway, where it failed. (The 1970 play had already been a hit in Italy and Britain.) The couple were again allowed to visit the United States in 1986. In 1990, the United States Congress rewrote the laws, eliminating many of the prohibitions on entry, including those that applied to Mr. Fo.
In 1962, Mr. Fo, then a young actor, provoked his first major controversy with a sketch about Italian workers that was censored by Italian television. His politics became increasingly radical, and he did not appear again on television in his country until 1977, when ''Mistero Buffo'' was first broadcast there. The Vatican called it the ''most blasphemous show in the history of television.''
Twelve years later, Mr. Fo unveiled another impertinent play, ''The Pope and the Witch,'' featuring a news conference at which the Pope confuses a children's gathering in St. Peter's Square with an abortion rights rally. The play again became a lightning rod for anger when it was staged in San Francisco in 1992.
In Italy, where his popularity peaked in the 1970's, Mr. Fo remains a well-known personality whose strong political views win him both friends and enemies. Not long ago, at a rally in Milan called to defend Italian unity against the threats of northern secessionists, he criticized the adulation given Italy's flag of red, white and green, which he said had been used to cover up ''thefts, private interests and the blood of innocents.''
Source: www.nytimes.com
My First Seven Years
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Euridice was performed for the wedding celebrations of Henry IV of France and ..."
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October 10, 1980 - Margaret Thatcher's 'not for turning' - the first female British Prime Minister makes a memorably defiant speech at her party's conference in Brighton.The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has made a defiant speech to Conservatives at the party conference in Brighton. In it she stressed her determination to stick to tough economic policies despite doubts expressed within Tory ranks.
Responding to recent expectations of an about-turn on counter-inflationary policies, Mrs Thatcher declared to widespread cheers: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!" Outside in the rain, 'Right to Work' protesters demonstrated, two of whom managed to breach security and make their voices heard in the hall.
But her speech did acknowledge the plight of the country's two million unemployed. "Let me make it clear beyond doubt. I am profoundly concerned about unemployment," she said. She added: "Human dignity and self-respect are undermined when men and women are condemned to idleness."
The Prime Minister expressed her commitment to reducing inflation which she said was beginning to fall, reminding delegates it was the "parent of unemployment". She also claimed a number of measures imposed by her government in its first 17 months in office as successes.
This included the "first crucial changes" in trade union law, the breaking down of monopoly powers and allowing council tenants the chance to buy their homes. Mrs Thatcher condemned Soviet foreign policy and in particular its present occupation of Afghanistan. In response to the recent demonstrations by Polish ship-workers, she praised their resolve to "participate in the shaping of their destiny", and their actions as testament to a crisis in Communism.
Her closing words were reserved for criticism of Labour and votes cast at its party conference in favour of withdrawal from NATO and the EEC. "Let Labour's Orwellian nightmare of the Left be a spur for us to dedicate with a new urgency our every ounce of energy and moral strength to rebuild the fortunes of this free nation," she said.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk/onthisday
The Path to Power
PARIS, OCTOBER 11, 1963Jean Cocteau, writer, film producer, and painter, died in his home at Milly, near Paris, today aged 73. The death of Cocteau at one o'clock today seems to have been directly linked with that of Edith Piaf, the popular singer, who died at seven in the morning in a Paris nursing home. A representative of the Paris State Radio, who was also a friend of Jean Cocteau, rang him up to ask him if he felt well enough to take part in the commemoration of Edith Piaf's death in some form on the air.
M. Cocteau was convalescing after a severe heart attack earlier in the summer, but had resumed working and was, in fact, this morning engaged on drafting a new stage set for "Pelléas and Mélisande." Jean Cocteau replied that he had had an extremely bad feverish night and had a temperature. He had felt last night that his unease was due to the death of some near and dear friend. Now he knew this was Edith Piaf. He then added that he felt the same stifling sensation as when he had his original heart attack. A few minutes later he was dead.
Although he was born in 1889, Jean Cocteau never ceased to strike the amazed public as a young writer. There were several reasons for this – he had the all-round quality of versatility more common to the writer trying his hand everywhere than to the established man.
His friendships covered the whole artistic world of France – and of much of the world – and often reverberated into the newspapers. He explored the ballet, conquered the films and kept up a stream of freshness (though not always a refreshing stream) in the modern French theatre.
He was not, on the whole, a dramatist whose work was likely to last or was even designed to last. Where it typified the hopes and fears of his times it did so by brilliance rather than by depth. The classical tradition in the French theatre fascinated him, as it has done writers from one generation to another, so in his list of works are adaptations of an Antigone, an Oedipus, and an Orpheus.
He distributed his talents almost equally between the stage and the screen in his later years, and sometimes it appeared that if he had concentrated them both in form and in subject his mark would have been a firmer one. But his humour was sharp enough, his use of a dream-world solid enough to ensure that his plays and films would never be dull even when they were difficult.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Jean Cocteau: A Life
No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf
Today in 1609, ‘Three Blind Mice’ was published in London. The song is considered to be the first printed secular song. Many historians believe the song’s lyrics refer to Queen Mary I blinding and executing three Protestant bishops, who were burned at the stake.
Plague, medieval taxes, religious persecution, prostitution: these are not exactly the topics that you expect to be immersed in as a new parent. But probably right at this moment, mothers of small children around the world are mindlessly singing along to seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes that, if you dig a little deeper, reveal shockingly sinister backstories.
Babies falling from trees? Heads being chopped off in central London? Animals being cooked alive? Since when were these topics deemed appropriate to peddle to toddlers?
Since the 14th Century, actually. That’s when the earliest nursery rhymes seem to date from, although the ‘golden age’ came later, in the 18th Century, when the canon of classics that we still hear today emerged and flourished.
The first nursery rhyme collection to be printed was Tommy Thumb's Song Book, around 1744; a century later Edward Rimbault published a nursery rhymes collection, which was the first one printed to include notated music –although a minor-key version of Three Blind Mice can be found in Thomas Ravenscroft's folk-song compilation Deuteromelia, dating from 1609.
The roots probably go back even further. There is no human culture that has not invented some form of rhyming ditties for its children. The distinctive sing-song metre, tonality and rhythm that characterises ‘motherese’ has a proven evolutionary value and is reflected in the very nature of nursery rhymes. According to child development experts Sue Palmer and Ros Bayley, nursery rhymes with music significantly aid a child's mental development and spatial reasoning.
Seth Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University California – San Diego, has also emphasised the ability of nursery rhymes to foster emotional connections and cultivate language. “It is a way of completing the world through rhyme,” he said in an interview … “When we sing [them], we're participating in something that bonds parent and child.”
Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture (adapted)
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
Event Date: October 14, 1855Location: London, England, United Kingdom
A carpenter mounted his soapbox on this day complaining about high food prices – and became the first recorded amateur orator to address a crowd at what was to become Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park.
Writer George Orwell later described the place as "one of the minor wonders of the world", where he had listened to "Indian nationalists, temperance reformers, Communists, Trotskyists, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Catholic Evidence Society, freethinkers, vegetarians, Mormons, the Salvation Army, the Church Army, and a large variety of plain lunatics".
The freedom of speech that they all enjoyed was won formally in the mid-18th Century when the Chartists held mass protests in this area of Hyde Park to press for the rights of working people, including the right of assembly.
At the same, the Reform League, which fought for the right to vote for every adult male, organised rallies nearby.
Finally, the Government bowed to popular pressure and passed a law granting the fundamental right of citizens to gather together to hear and be heard – and Speakers’ Corner was born.
Its origins, though, go back centuries. Here stood the notorious Tyburn Hanging Tree, which had been used for public executions as early as 1108.
Hanging days were declared a public holiday and caused much excitement. The condemned were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn on a cart and had to ride with the hangman and the prison chaplin.
Raucous crowds gathered along the two-mile route and windows overlooking it were crowded. Cheering, jeering, preaching and shouting accompanied the procession on its three-hour journey.
It was said that the execution of 22-year-old highwayman Jack Sheppard in 1724 attracted a crowd of 200,000. Londoners, it seems, had always considered it “quite an outing” to see a “good hanging”!
To cope with demand, a six-metre high triangular-shaped gallows had replaced the Hanging Tree in 1571. Each beam could accommodate eight people, and so – before an enthusiastic crowd – twenty-four victims could swing to their deaths in one go.
Before departing, however, they were allowed to speak to the crowd and often argued with onlookers as they denounced the State, or the Church, or simply protested their innocence.
So the principle of free speech and public debate, even if it was watched over by officers of the law, was established. It continues in similar fashion to this day at the same spot – Speakers’ Corner.
Source: www.onthisday.com
Speakers Cornered: Debate, Democracy and Disturbing the Peace at London's Speakers' Corner
Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is executed on this day October 15, 1917 for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.She first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of exotic Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe, telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, meaning “eye of the day” in Malay.
In reality, Mata Hari was born in a small town in northern Holland in 1876, and her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She acquired her superficial knowledge of Indian and Javanese dances when she lived for several years in Malaysia with her former husband, who was a Scot in the Dutch colonial army. Regardless of her authenticity, she packed dance halls and opera houses from Russia to France, mostly because her show consisted of her slowly stripping nude.
She became a famous courtesan, and with the outbreak of World War I her catalog of lovers began to include high-ranking military officers of various nationalities. In February 1917, French authorities arrested her for espionage and imprisoned her at St. Lazare Prison in Paris. In a military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details of the Allies’ new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing squad at Vincennes.
There is some evidence that Mata Hari acted as a German spy, and for a time as a double agent for the French, but the Germans had written her off as an ineffective agent whose pillow talk had produced little intelligence of value. Her military trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and it is probable that French authorities trumped her up as “the greatest woman spy of the century” as a distraction for the huge losses the French army was suffering on the western front. Her only real crimes may have been an elaborate stage fallacy and a weakness for men in uniform.
Source: www.history.com
Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari
On this day October 16 in 1991, the actress Elizabeth Taylor marries her seventh husband, the construction worker Larry Fortensky, in a ceremony held at the pop singer Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in California. Taylor, a Hollywood screen legend known for her violet-eyed beauty and her roles in such movies as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Cleopatra, reportedly met the two-decades-younger Fortensky at the high-profile Betty Ford Center for Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation. The pair divorced in 1996.
Taylor was born on February 27, 1932, in London, England, and began her acting career after moving to California with her family as a young girl. Her early credits include There’s One Born Every Minute (1942), Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), which made her a star. She went on to appear in hit films such as Father of the Bride (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956) and Raintree County (1957), for which she received her first Best Actress nomination. She solidified her sexy image in 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which earned her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination.
After receiving a third Academy Award nomination for 1959’s Suddenly Last Summer, Taylor took home her first Best Actress Oscar for her performance in 1960’s Butterfield 8. She was paid a then-record $1 million for playing the title role in Cleopatra (1963), a heavily hyped box-office bomb that also featured Richard Burton, her future husband and frequent co-star. The pair appeared together in 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which marked Mike Nichols’ directorial debut and garnered Taylor her second Academy Award in the Best Actress category.
Taylor continued to make movies throughout the 1970s. During the 1980s, she turned to theater and also devoted herself to fighting AIDS, which killed her close friend, the actor Rock Hudson, in 1985. She also became a fixture in the tabloids for her battle with weight and her stormy romantic life.
Taylor tied the knot for the first time at the age of 17, with the hotel heir Nicky Hilton. The union was short-lived and in 1952, Taylor wed the actor Michael Wilding. That marriage, which produced two sons, officially ended in 1957, the same year in which Taylor married husband number three, the producer Mike Todd.
The couple had a daughter before Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958. The actress later found herself at the center of a scandal when she was blamed for the breakup of the marriage between the popular entertainers Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Taylor and Fisher were husband and wife from 1959 to 1964; she left him for Richard Burton. Taylor and Burton’s famously tempestuous union lasted from 1964 to 1974. A year later, the couple remarried and divorced for a second time.
Taylor was wed to U.S. Senator John Warner from 1976 to 1982. Following the dissolution in 1996 of her five-year marriage to Larry Fortensky, Taylor has remained single.
Source: www.history.com
Liz Taylor
On Monday 17th October 1814, a terrible disaster claimed the lives of at least 8 people in St Giles, London. A bizarre industrial accident resulted in the release of a beer tsunami onto the streets around Tottenham Court Road.The Horse Shoe Brewery stood at the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Road. In 1810 the brewery, Meux and Company, had had a 22 foot high wooden fermentation tank installed on the premises. Held together with massive iron rings, this huge vat held the equivalent of over 3,500 barrels of brown porter ale, a beer not unlike stout.
On the afternoon of October 17th 1814 one of the iron rings around the tank snapped. About an hour later the whole tank ruptured, releasing the hot fermenting ale with such force that the back wall of the brewery collapsed. The force also blasted open several more vats, adding their contents to the flood which now burst forth onto the street. More than 320,000 gallons of beer were released into the area. This was St Giles Rookery, a densely populated London slum of cheap housing and tenements inhabited by the poor, the destitute, prostitutes and criminals.
The flood reached George Street and New Street within minutes, swamping them with a tide of alcohol. The 15 foot high wave of beer and debris inundated the basements of two houses, causing them to collapse. In one of the houses, Mary Banfield and her daughter Hannah were taking tea when the flood hit; both were killed.
In the basement of the other house, an Irish wake was being held for a 2 year old boy who had died the previous day. The four mourners were all killed. The wave also took out the wall of the Tavistock Arms pub, trapping the teenage barmaid Eleanor Cooper in the rubble. In all, eight people were killed. Three brewery workers were rescued from the waist-high flood and another was pulled alive from the rubble.
All this ‘free’ beer led to hundreds of people scooping up the liquid in whatever containers they could. Some resorted to just drinking it, leading to reports of the death of a ninth victim some days later from alcoholic poisoning.
‘The bursting of the brew-house walls, and the fall of heavy timber, materially contributed to aggravate the mischief, by forcing the roofs and walls of the adjoining houses.‘
The Times, 19th October 1814.
Some relatives exhibited the corpses of the victims for money. In one house, the macabre exhibition resulted in the collapse of the floor under the weight of all the visitors, plunging everyone waist-high into a beer-flooded cellar. The stench of beer in the area persisted for months afterwards. The brewery was taken to court over the accident but the disaster was ruled to be an Act of God, leaving no one responsible.
The flood cost the brewery around £23000 (approx. £1.25 million today). However the company were able to reclaim the excise duty paid on the beer, which saved them from bankruptcy. They were also granted ₤7,250 (₤400,000 today) as compensation for the barrels of lost beer.
This unique disaster was responsible for the gradual phasing out of wooden fermentation casks to be replaced by lined concrete vats. The Horse Shoe Brewery was demolished in 1922; the Dominion Theatre now sits partly on its site.
Source: www.historic-uk.com
London Beer Flood
It was on this day in October 18, 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics, a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable. During World War II, there was a big funding push to try to update vacuum tubes, since they were used in radio-controlled bombs but didn’t work very well. A team of scientists at Bell Laboratories invented the first transistor technology in 1947. But the announcement didn’t make much of an impact, because transistors had limited use for everyday consumers, they were used mainly in military technology, telephone switching equipment, and hearing aids.
Several companies bought licenses from Bell, including Texas Instruments, who was determined to be the first to market with a transistor radio. Radios were mostly big, bulky devices that stayed in one place — usually in the living room — while the whole family gathered around to listen to programming. There were some portable radios made with vacuum tubes, but they were about the size of lunch boxes, they used heavy non-rechargeable batteries, they took a long time to start working while the tubes warmed up, and they were fragile.
Texas Instruments was determined to create a radio that was small and portable, and to get it out for the Christmas shopping season. They produced the transistors, and they partnered with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, who manufactured the actual radios. Their new radio, the Regency TR-1, turned on immediately, weighed half a pound, and could fit in your pocket. It cost $49.95, and more than 100,000 were sold.
Texas Instruments went on to pursue other projects, but a Japanese company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to make transistor radios their main enterprise. They were concerned that their name was too difficult for an American audience to pronounce, so they decided to rebrand themselves with something simpler. They looked up the Latin word for sound, which was sonus. And they liked the term sonny boys, English slang that was used in Japan for exceptionally bright, promising boys. And so the company Sony was born. Soon transistor radios were cheap and prevalent.
With transistor radios, teenagers were able to listen to music out of their parents’ earshot. This made possible the explosion of a new genre of American music: rock and roll.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
The 100 Most Significant Events in American Business: An Encyclopedia
Today October 19, is the birthday of motion picture pioneer Auguste Lumière (1862). He was born in Besançon, France, and his father was a former painter who had taken up photography. Auguste and his younger brother Louis studied science in Lyon, and opened a successful business producing photographic plates. Their father returned home from a trip to Paris in 1894, full of descriptions of Thomas Edison's new Kinetoscope: a peephole machine that pulled strips of film in front of a light source, creating the illusion of movement.
The Lumière brothers began work on a device that would project the images, and in February 1895, they patented their cinématographe, which was an all-in-one camera, developer, and projector. A month later, they shot their first footage of workers leaving their factory in Lyon. They held their first public screening that December, showing 10 short films — each of them about a minute long — depicting scenes from everyday life.
One film in particular provoked a strong reaction: the Lumières had filmed a train pulling into a station head-on, and the audience members screamed and scrambled out of their seats, believing the train was about to plow through the screen into the theater.
Auguste Lumière wasn't much interested in pursuing further developments in motion picture technology, being more interested in medical research. He reportedly said, "My invention can be exploited ... as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever."
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Film History: An Introduction
Arthur Rimbaud, in full Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, was born today October 20, 1854, in Charleville, France, and he died November 10, 1891, Marseille. He was a poet and an adventurer who won renown in the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.Rimbaud wanted to serve as a prophet, a visionary, or, as he put it, a voyant (“seer”). He had come to believe in a universal life force that informs or underlies all matter. This spiritual force, which Rimbaud referred to simply as “l’inconnu” (“the unknown”), can be sensed only by a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to “see” this spiritual unknown and allowing his individual consciousness to be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument. He should then be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social progress.
Rimbaud had not given up his social ideals, but now intended to realize them through poetry. First, though, he had to qualify himself for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method: “le dérèglement de tous les sens” (“the derangement of all the senses”). Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of his senses so that he could attain visions of the “unknown.” In a voluntary martyrdom he would subject himself to fasting and pain, imbibe alcohol and drugs, and even cultivate hallucination and madness in order to expand his consciousness.
In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine the form of his poems, and if the visions were formless, then the poems would be too. He began allowing images and their associations to determine the structure of his new poems, such as the mysterious sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”).
Vowels
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
which buzz around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
in anger or in the raptures of penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
the peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
silences crossed by [Worlds and by Angels]:
–O the Omega! the violet ray of [His] Eyes!
-------
Voyelles
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes d'ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;
U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;
O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des [Mondes et des Anges]:
—O l'Oméga, rayon violet de [Ses] Yeux!
Source: www.britannica.com (adapted)
Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography
The most significant events in the history of publishing on the 21st of October.1687: Edmund Waller dies. He was an important figure in the development of the English heroic couplet (perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope) and was at one time hugely admired, though he is now best remembered for just one poem, ‘Song‘ (‘Go, lovely rose’).
1772: Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born. He is credited with coining the words bipolar, bisexual, psychosomatic, and selfless. His most enduringly popular poems are probably ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and ‘Kubla Khan’.
1777: Playwright Samuel Foote, known as the ‘English Aristophanes’, dies. He lost one of his legs in an accident but took it good-humouredly, and often made jokes about it.
1833: Alfred Nobel is born. The inventor of dynamite, he would later set up the Nobel Prizes as a way to offset the destruction done by his invention.
1921: The film The Sheik premieres, starring Rudolph Valentino. It was based on a novel by Edith Maude Hull. It helped to make Valentino world-famous, one of the first superstars of the silver screen. The novel, meanwhile, has not lasted, despite being a bestseller at the time.
1929: Ursula K. Le Guin is born. (The K., by the way, stands for Kroeber.) A prolific author of fantasy and speculative fiction, Le Guin has influenced a whole raft of writers in those genres. One of her best novels is the 1971 dystopia, The Lathe of Heaven, about a man whose dreams can have an impact upon the real world. (It’s set in 2002, and like so many futuristic dystopias set in the near future, it was wildly inaccurate in many of its prophecies.) The title is taken from Chuang Tzu, though it’s a mistranslation of a phrase more accurately rendered into English as ‘the scourge of heaven’, as Le Guin later discovered.
1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. Taking its title from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, it centres on Robert Jordan, a young American who is fighting for the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
1969: Jack Kerouac dies. The cult that grew up around the Beat Generation writer would lead to Johnny Depp buying a raincoat once owned by Kerouac for $15,000.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
Inside Book Publishing
4004 BC - The world was created at approximately six o'clock in the evening, today October 22 according to the Ussher chronology.The Ussher chronology is a 17th-century chronology of the history of the world formulated from a literal reading of the Old Testament by James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh (Church of Ireland). The chronology is sometimes associated with young Earth creationism, which holds that the universe was created only a few millennia ago by God as they believe is described in the first two chapters of the biblical book of Genesis.
The full title of Ussher's work is Annales Veteris Testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, una cum rerum Asiaticarum et Aegyptiacarum chronico, a temporis historici principio usque ad Maccabaicorum initia producto. ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, the chronicle of Asiatic and Egyptian matters together produced from the beginning of historical time up to the beginnings of Maccabees")
Ussher's work was his contribution to the long-running theological debate on the age of the Earth. This was a major concern of many Christian scholars over the centuries.
The chronology is sometimes called the Ussher-Lightfoot chronology because John Lightfoot published a similar chronology in 1642–1644. This, however, is a misnomer, as the chronology is based on Ussher's work alone and not that of Lightfoot. Ussher deduced that the first day of creation fell upon, October 23, 4004 BC, in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox. Lightfoot similarly deduced that Creation began at nightfall near the autumnal equinox, but in the year 3929 BC.
Ussher's proposed date of 4004 BC differed little from other Biblically-based estimates, such as those of Jose ben Halafta (3761 BC), Bede(3952 BC), Ussher's near-contemporary Scaliger (3949 BC), Johannes Kepler (3992 BC) or Sir Isaac Newton (c. 4000 BC). Ussher's specific choice of starting year may have been influenced by the belief (then widely held) that the Earth's potential duration was 6,000 years (4,000 before the birth of Christ and 2,000 after), corresponding to the six days of Creation, on the grounds that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter 3:8). This view was held as recently as AD 2000, more than six thousand years after 4004 BC.
Source: www.en.wikipedia.org
Annals of the World
The New Penguin History of The World
On this day October 23, the Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 was awarded to Boris Pasternak "for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition". Boris Pasternak first accepted the award, but was later caused by the authorities of his country to decline the prize.----
Announcement by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen:
This year's Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded by the Swedish Academy to the Soviet-Russian writer Boris Pasternak for his notable achievement in both contemporary poetry and the field of the great Russian narrative tradition.
As is well known, Pasternak has sent word that he does not wish to accept the distinction. This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.
From Les Prix Nobel en 1958, Editor Göran Liljestrand, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1959
Source: www.nobelprize.org
---
Moscow, October 29.
Boris Pasternak, the Russian author, said to-day that he had "voluntarily" changed his mind about accepting the Nobel Prize and had done so without having consulted even his friends. He told me at his villa ten miles outside Moscow that he had thought over the reaction to the award and decided fully on his own to renounce it.
This morning he wrote in pencil a brief telegram of explanation to the Swedish Academy, carried it himself to the local post office, and so informed the world. The telegram read:
"Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure. - Pasternak."
There was no immediate official report of this ultimate decision by Pasternak, who was yesterday expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union. Indeed Moscow Radio is to-day relaying a fresh condemnation of Pasternak as an "internal expatriate" who had turned against his country. Explaining his decision to-night, Pasternak told me: "I made it quite alone. I did not consult anybody - I have not even told my close friends."
During our brief talk in his spacious living room he did not elaborate on the reasons given in his message to Stockholm, only emphasising that he had made the decision "in my own solitude."
There was no noticeable difference in Pasternak's bearing between to-day and last week when he received me to express his delight at winning the prize. He had indicated then that he hoped to accept it in person in Stockholm next month. To-day he wore his usual solemn, almost soulful expression. He said he was in good health except for slight pains in his back and legs - the symptoms of a long-standing illness.
The Soviet Writers' Union, which expelled him, built the house in which he lives. It now appears quite possible that he may be reinstated to membership, at least in time. In any case it was made known here that Pasternak need not fear expulsion from his home in the writers' colony.
Despite Pasternak's rejection telegram, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, though no ceremony was held. The Soviet Writers' Union did not reinstate him. Pasternak died from lung cancer in May 1960.
Source: www.theguardian.com
Understanding Boris Pasternak
On this day October 24 in 1945, the United Nations Charter, which was adopted and signed on June 26, 1945, is now effective and ready to be enforced.The United Nations was born of perceived necessity, as a means of better arbitrating international conflict and negotiating peace than was provided for by the old League of Nations. The growing Second World War became the real impetus for the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to begin formulating the original U.N. Declaration, signed by 26 nations in January 1942, as a formal act of opposition to Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers.
The principles of the U.N. Charter were first formulated at the San Francisco Conference, which convened on April 25, 1945. It was presided over by President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and attended by representatives of 50 nations, including 9 continental European states, 21 North, Central, and South American republics, 7 Middle Eastern states, 5 British Commonwealth nations, 2 Soviet republics (in addition to the USSR itself), 2 East Asian nations, and 3 African states. The conference laid out a structure for a new international organization that was to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,…to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
Two other important objectives described in the Charter were respecting the principles of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples (originally directed at smaller nations now vulnerable to being swallowed up by the Communist behemoths emerging from the war) and international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems around the world.
Now that the war was over, negotiating and maintaining the peace was the practical responsibility of the new U.N. Security Council, made up of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China. Each would have veto power over the other. Winston Churchill called for the United Nations to employ its charter in the service of creating a new, united Europe-united in its opposition to communist expansion-East and West. Given the composition of the Security Council, this would prove easier said than done.
Source: www.history.com
The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction
October 25, 1854 - During the Crimean War, the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred as Lord Cardigan led the British cavalry against the Russians at Balaclava. Of 673 British cavalrymen taking part in the charge, 272 were killed. The Charge was later immortalized in the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The commander-in-chief of British troops during the Crimean War issued an ambiguous order that his subordinates misinterpreted, resulting in the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade against a heavily defended Russian position.
Facing artillery and musket fire on three sides, British cavalrymen were slaughtered in droves as they galloped headlong down the so-called “valley of death.” Yet because they maintained discipline amid the chaos and even managed to briefly scatter the Russians, the British public glorified them. One participant would later describe it as “the most magnificent assault known in military annals and the greatest blunder known to military tactics.”
The Charge of the Light Brigade
by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.
Source: www.history.com
The Charge of the Light Brigade
On this day October 26 in 1900, writer Henry James first writes to Edith Wharton, whom he will finally meet in 1903. Wharton, then 38, had published her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, the previous year. An enormous admirer of James, she modeled parts of her work after his, including his attention to form and his interest in ethical questions. The two became great friends, and James encouraged her writing.Wharton was born to a wealthy, patrician family in New York in 1862. She grew up in an opulent world where pre-Civil War society kept the nouveau riche at bay, maintaining its own isolated sense of superiority. Wharton, expected to become a typical wife, mother, and hostess, instead showed intellectual talent and began to write at an early age. She had begun to fear spinsterhood when, at age 23, she married prominent socialite Edward Wharton–who had no profession or money worth speaking of. The match was unhappy and troubled, but the couple did not divorce until 1913. Wharton returned to writing, often dealing with themes of divorce, unhappy marriages, and free-spirited individuals trapped by societal pressures.
Wharton’s 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, told the story of a New York socialite with a strong sense of individuality who cannot adapt to the roles expected of her. The book became a bestseller. Wharton traveled abroad frequently and after her divorce began writing for women’s magazines. Her novella, Ethan Frome, detailing a New England farmer trapped by the demands of the women in his life, is still one of her best-known works. Her 1920 novel, Age of Innocence, won the Pulitzer.
Wharton published numerous other books, but some of her later work suffered from the deadlines and pressures imposed by writing for money. She remained in France during World War I, assisting refugees, and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1916. She published another bestseller, Twilight Sleep, in 1927, and her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934. She died in France in 1937.
Source: www.history.com
Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915
On this day, October 27, 1932 poet Sylvia Plath is born in Boston. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology and a leading expert on bumblebees. An autocrat at home, he insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. He died at home after a lingering illness that consumed the energy of the entire household and left the family penniless. Sylvia’s mother went to work as a teacher and raised her two children alone.Plath was an outstanding student. She won a scholarship to Smith, published her first short story, “Sunday at the Mintons,” in Mademoiselle while she was still in college, and won a summer job as “guest managing editor” at the magazine. After the job ended, she suffered a nervous breakdown, tried to commit suicide, and was hospitalized. She returned to school to finish her senior year, won a Fulbright to England, and went to Cambridge after graduation, where she met poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. They married four months later.
Plath took a job teaching at Smith, which she kept for a year before quitting to write full time. She and Hughes lived in Boston, and she attended poetry workshops with Robert Lowell, whose confessional approach to poetry deeply influenced her. Hughes won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959 and the couple returned to England, where Plath had her first child.
Her first poetry collection, Colossus, was published in 1960 to favorable reviews. The couple bought a house in Devon and had a second child in 1962, the same year that Plath discovered her husband was having an affair. He left the family to move in with his lover, and Plath desperately struggled against her own emotional turmoil and depression. She moved to London and wrote dozens of her best poems in the winter of 1962.
Her only novel, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical account of a college girl who works at a magazine in New York and suffers a breakdown, was published in early 1963 but received mediocre reviews. With sick children, frozen pipes, and a severe case of depression, Plath took her own life in February 1963 at age 30. Hughes edited several volumes of her poetry, which appeared after her death, including Ariel(1965), Crossing the Water (1971), and Collected Poems (1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
Source: www.history.com
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Desiderius Erasmus (Originally Gerrit Gerritszoon) was born today October 28, 1466 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. After six years in an Augustinian monastery, he became private secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, and a priest (1492). He went to Paris, where he lived as a teacher, then moved to England in 1498, and became professor of divinity and of Greek at Cambridge. Here he wrote his satire, Encomium moriae (1509, The Praise of Folly).
After 1514 he lived alternately in Basel and England. then in Louvain (1517-21). His masterpiece, Colloquia, appeared in 1519, an audacious handling of Church abuses. He also made the first translation of the Greek New Testament into English (1516) and edited the works of St Jerome (1519). In 1521 he left Louvain, and lived mainly in Basel, where he was engaged in continual controversy, but enjoyed great fame and respect in his later years.
From “Folly Speaks” by Erasmus (1509):
“Whatever is generally said of me by mortal men, and I'm quite well aware that Folly is in poor repute even amongst the greatest fools, still, I am the one — and indeed, the only one — whose divine powers can gladden the hearts of gods and men. Proof enough of this is in the fact that as soon as I stepped forward to address this crowded assembly, every face immediately brightened up with a new, unwonted gaiety and all your frowns were smoothed away. You laughed and applauded with such delightfully happy smiles that as I look at you all gathered round me I could well believe you are tipsy with nectar like the Homeric gods, with a dash of nepenthe too, though a moment ago you were sitting looking as gloomy and harassed as if you had just come up from Trophonius' cave. Now, when the sun first shows his handsome golden visage upon earth or after a hard winter the newborn spring breathes out its mild west breezes, it always happens that a new face comes over everything, new colour and a kind of youthfulness return; and so it only takes the mere sight of me to give you all a different look. For great orators must as a rule spend time preparing long speeches and even then find it difficult to succeed in banishing care and trouble from your minds, but I've done this at once — and simply by my looks …”
Praise of Folly
October 29, 1992More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo, Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the Church's most infamous wrongs -- the persecution of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the Earth moves around the Sun.
With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Saturday, Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into the Church's condemnation of Galileo in 1633. The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries, led to Galileo's house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.
The dispute between the Church and Galileo has long stood as one of history's great emblems of conflict between reason and dogma, science and faith. The Vatican's formal acknowledgement of an error, moreover, is a rarity in an institution built over centuries on the belief that the Church is the final arbiter in matters of faith.
At the time of his condemnation, Galileo had won fame and the patronage of leading Italian powers like the Medicis and Barberinis for discoveries he had made with the astronomical telescope he had built. But when his observations led him to proof of the Copernican theory of the solar system, in which the sun and not the earth is the center, and which the Church regarded as heresy, Galileo was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition.
By the end of his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his own scientific findings as "abjured, cursed and detested," a renunciation that caused him great personal anguish but which saved him from being burned at the stake.
Since then, the Church has taken various steps to reverse its opposition to Galileo's conclusions. In 1757, Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" was removed from the Index, a former list of publications banned by the Church. When the latest investigation, conducted by a panel of scientists, theologians and historians, made a preliminary report in 1984, it said that Galileo had been wrongfully condemned. More recently, Pope John Paul II himself has said that the scientist was "imprudently opposed."
"We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the Copernican astronomical theory," Paul Cardinal Poupard, the head of the current investigation, said in an interview published this week. This theory had been presented in a book published in 1543 by the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus in opposition to the prevailing theory, advanced by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy, that the Sun and the rest of the cosmos orbited the Earth. But the contest between the two models was purely on theoretic and theological grounds until Galileo made the first observations of the four largest moons of Jupiter, exploding the Ptolemaic notion that all heavenly bodies must orbit the Earth.
In 1616, the Copernican view was declared heretical because it refuted a strict biblical interpreation of the Creation that "God fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever." But Galileo obtained the permission of Pope Urban VIII, a Barberini and a friend, to continue research into both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican views of the world, provided that his findings drew no definitive conclusions and acknowledged divine omnipotence. But when, in 1632, Galileo published his findings in "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," the work was a compelling endorsement of the Copernican system.
Summoned to Rome for trial by the Inquisition one year later, Galileo defended himself by saying that scientific research and the Christian faith were not mutually exclusive and that study of the natural world would promote understanding and interpretation of the scriptures. But his views were judged "false and erroneous." Aging, ailing and threatened with torture by the Inquisition, Galileo recanted on April 30, 1633.
Because of his advanced years, he was permitted house arrest in Siena. Legend has it that as Galileo rose from kneeling before his inquisitors, he murmured, "e pur, si muove" -- "even so, it does move."
Source: www.nytimes.com
The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History
On this day October 30, 1938 Orson Welles causes a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds”—a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.
The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.” Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.
Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.
Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”
The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth.
Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”
When news of the real-life panic leaked into the CBS studio, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was just fiction. There were rumors that the show caused suicides, but none were ever confirmed. The Federal Communications Commission investigated the program but found no law was broken. Networks did agree to be more cautious in their programming in the future. Orson Welles feared that the controversy generated by “War of the Worlds” would ruin his career. In fact, the publicity helped land him a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane—a movie that many have called the greatest American film ever made.
Source: www.history.com
Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News
On this day October 31, in 1517, the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation.In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called “indulgences”—for the forgiveness of sins. At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel, commissioned by the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Leo X, was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Though Prince Frederick III the Wise had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg, many church members traveled to purchase them. When they returned, they showed the pardons they had bought to Luther, claiming they no longer had to repent for their sins.
Luther’s frustration with this practice led him to write the 95 Theses, which were quickly snapped up, translated from Latin into German and distributed widely. A copy made its way to Rome, and efforts began to convince Luther to change his tune. He refused to keep silent, however, and in 1521 Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church. That same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany, who issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence. Protected by Prince Frederick, Luther began working on a German translation of the Bible, a task that took 10 years to complete.
The term “Protestant” first appeared in 1529, when Charles V revoked a provision that allowed the ruler of each German state to choose whether they would enforce the Edict of Worms. A number of princes and other supporters of Luther issued a protest, declaring that their allegiance to God trumped their allegiance to the emperor. They became known to their opponents as Protestants; gradually this name came to apply to all who believed the Church should be reformed, even those outside Germany. By the time Luther died, of natural causes, in 1546, his revolutionary beliefs had formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation, which would over the next three centuries revolutionize Western civilization.
Source: www.history.com
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Today is All Saints' Day, and Pope Julius II chose this day November 1, in 1512, to display Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the first time. It took Michelangelo four years to complete the paintings that decorate the ceiling of the chapel. The paintings are of scenes from the Old Testament, including the famous center section, "The Creation of Adam." The chapel itself was built about 25 years earlier, and various Renaissance painters were commissioned to paint frescos on the walls.
Michelangelo was 33 years old at the time, and he tried to point out to the pope that he was a sculptor, and not really a painter, but the pope wouldn't listen. Michelangelo used his skills as a sculptor to make the two-dimensional ceiling look like a series of three-dimensional scenes, a technique that was relatively new at the time. It took him four years to finish the job, between 1508 and 1512.
He worked from a scaffold 60 feet above the floor, and he covered about 10,000 square feet of surface. Every day, fresh plaster was laid over a part of the ceiling and Michelangelo had to finish painting before the plaster dried.
The German writer Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "We cannot know what a human being can achieve until we have seen [the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel]."
Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel
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On the 21st September 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Hobbit was first published in the United Kingdom. Although it has remained in print ever since, Tolkien made a number of revisions to the text over the course of the next thirty years to bring plot elements into line with the storyline of the subsequent Lord of the Rings, and also to retain copyright in the USA.
Tolkien was an academic linguist who was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. However, alongside his academic pursuits he had an active creative side that saw him produce a series playful poems and stories for his children. Tolkien combined both these areas in The Hobbit. While it is primarily a children’s book, part of its appeal is the rich fantasy world that Tolkien created by drawing upon his knowledge of Old English literature and early Germanic mythology.
Tolkien is said to have taken up to two years to write the original manuscript for the book, copies of which he lent to various friends. Through contact with one of his students at Oxford, the publisher George Allen & Unwin Ltd. obtained a copy, which was given a positive review by the 10-year old son of the owner and encouraged Unwin to publish it.
The initial run of 1,500 copies sold out within three months, and further runs proved similarly popular. However, arguably The Hobbit’s greatest legacy is that it spawned the creation of The Lord of the Rings – the sequel that Tolkien was encouraged to write after The Hobbit’s runaway success.
Source: www.historypod.net