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Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School and then on to University College, Oxford; his father's old college. Stephen wanted to study Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursued Physics instead. After three years and not very much work, he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.
Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979, and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009.
The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton. Stephen is still an active part of Cambridge University and retains an office at the Department for Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics. His title is now the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.
His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W Israel. Among the popular books Stephen Hawking has published are his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and My Brief History.
Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees. He was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Stephen was diagnosed with ALS, a form of Motor Neurone Disease, shortly after his 21st birthday. In spite of being wheelchair bound and dependent on a computerised voice system for communication Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he has three children and three grandchildren), and his research into theoretical physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures. He still hopes to make it into space one day.
Source: www.hawking.org.uk
Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind
Event Date: January 9, 1902Location: New York City, New York, USA
New York, “the city that never sleeps,” is known as one of the free, fun capitals of the world where almost anything goes. It’s a good job, then, that the city authorities turn a blind eye to a number of restrictive laws that are still on the Statute Book of the “Big Apple”. On this day, for instance, the New York State Legislature outlawed flirting in public.
The new law, which technically still exists, prohibited men turning around on a street and “looking at a woman in that way”. Offenders could be fined $25. Those that went on to commit a second flirting offence would be ordered to wear a pair of horse blinders whenever they stepped out on the streets!
Of course, one thing leads to another, as the puritan authorities must have been aware. Because in New York adultery is a crime. Section 255.17 of the state penal law introduced on September 1st, 1907, states: “A person is guilty of adultery when he engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.” Adultery is a class B misdemeanor which is punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $500 fine.
Although it is rarely enforced, about a dozen people have been charged under the adultery law since the 1970s. Other bizarre laws still on the Statute Book in New York mean that it is illegal for a woman to be on the street wearing “body-hugging clothing”. And citizens may not greet each other by “putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers”.
Other states in the US have their share of strange, unrepealed laws. In Florida, women can be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer, as can the salon owner. And unmarried women in Florida are breaking the law if they go parachuting on a Sunday.
In Indiana, people are not allowed to go to a cinema or a theatre or ride in a public streetcar if they have eaten garlic less than four hours earlier.
In Iowa, it is an offence for a kiss to last more than five minutes and in Massachusetts, snoring is prohibited unless all bedroom windows are locked shut.
Men who feel they need a drink after reading all these restrictions could be unlucky if they live in Pennsylvania. There, an old law decrees that no man may purchase alcohol without written consent from his wife. . .
Source: www.onthisday.com
Published in “The Examiner” on 11 January 1818, ‘Ozymandias’ is perhaps Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most celebrated and best-known poem. Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
In summary, the speaker of the poem tells of the traveller he met in an ‘antique land’ (somewhere associated with antiquity – we’ll later be able to deduce it’s Egypt) who told him about two stony stumps which stand in the desert. Near them are the remains of a stone face – evidently part of a statue – and the face bears a superior, grim expression. This stone face was clearly modelled on a real person, most probably a ruler, who once had a kingdom or empire in the desert – now long since vanished.
On the pedestal of the statue’s remains there is an inscription. The inscription is ironic: Ozymandias was the Greek name for Rameses II, the Egyptian ruler (now we know where that ‘antique land’ was), whose empire crumbled to dust long ago. The declaration ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ is supposed to be triumphant, and originally was: when the statue was first built, people gazing at it were meant to look at the empire built by Rameses and be cowed into submission by its vastness and power.
Others, too, who came afterwards, were meant to feel awe at the might of Ozymandias’ empire. But now, of course, as the traveller confides to the poem’s speaker, ‘nothing beside remains’: the ‘works’ the statue’s inscription refers to (‘Look on my works’) have not lasted. Nothing does: all things must pass. So, unbeknownst to Ozymandias when he had those words inscribed, we have another reason to ‘despair’: the transience of all things …
‘Ozymandias’ is rightly celebrated and often anthologised and analysed, but what is less well-known is that Shelley wrote the poem in competition with his friend, Horace Smith. (Smith’s effort was published in the same magazine a month after Shelley’s.) Smith originally titled his poem ‘Ozymandias’, the same as Shelley’s, though he subsequently renamed it ‘On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’ – which is rather less catchy or memorable as titles go. Smith’s poem doesn’t repay the same close analysis as Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, but it’s worth a read:
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,
‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
‘The wonders of my hand.’— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Not up to Shelley’s standard, perhaps – but not a bad effort. Ozymandias’ empire may have gone, but the poem written in his name has endured. In the last analysis, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is a fine reminder that everything – even mighty empires – is doomed to fall to dust.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com (adapted)
Ozymandias
On this day January 11, in 1978, Toni Morrison wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. The award brought the writer national attention for the first time, although she had already published two moderately successful books, The Bluest Eye (1969) and Sula (1973). Morrison went on to win the Pulitzer in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to a welder father and homemaker mother. She graduated from Howard University in 1953, then took a master’s in literature at Cornell. She married architect Howard Morrison and had two sons.
After she and her husband divorced, Morrison taught English and worked as one of the very few black editors at Random House. She published her first novel in 1969. After the publication of her breakthrough novel in 1978, she published Tar Baby (1981) and Jazz (1992).
Her 1987 novel, Beloved, the story of a 19th-century slave who escapes bondage but is forced to kill her own baby, won the Pulitzer.
When Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, she became the first African-American to win the award, as well as the first American woman to win in more than 50 years.
The same year, a fire destroyed her Nyack, New York, home-fortunately, she’d left the manuscript of her next novel, Paradise, in her office at Princeton University, where she was teaching creative writing. The book, published in 1998, explored the dynamics of an all-black town in the late 1960s.
Source: www.history.com
Song of Solomon
12 January, 1855. Chief Seattle responds to the Governor of the State of Washington following the decision to place the Indian tribes on reservations, 1855:"The son [a reference to Terr. Gov. Stevens] of the White Chief says his father sends us greetings of friendship and good will. This is kind, for we know he has little need of our friendship in return, because his people are many. They are like the grass that covers the vast prairies, while my people are few, and resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain.
The great, and I presume also good, white chief sends us word that he wants to buy our lands but is willing to allow us to reserve enough to live on comfortably. This indeed appears generous, for the red man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, for we are no longer in need of a great country. There was a time when our people covered the whole land, as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten. I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my pale-face brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame…
Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. The white man's God cannot love his red children or he would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we become brothers? How can your father become our father and bring us prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness?
Your God seems to us to be partial. He came to the white man. We never saw Him; never even heard His voice; He gave the white man laws but He had no word for His red children whose teeming millions filled this vast continent as the stars fill the firmament. No, we are two distinct races and must remain ever so. There is little in common between us. The ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their final restingplace is hallowed ground, while you wander away from the tombs of your fathers seemingly without regret.
Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people. Your dead cease to love you and the homes of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars, are soon forgotten, and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely hearted living and often return to visit and comfort them …
It matters but little where we pass the remainder of our days. They are not many. The Indian's night promises to be dark. No bright star hovers above the horizon. Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance. Some grim Nemesis of our race is on the red man's trail, and wherever he goes he will still hear the sure approaching footsteps of the fell destroyer and prepare to meet his doom, as does the wounded doe that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter. A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of all the mighty hosts that once filled this broad land or that now roam in fragmentary bands through these vast solitudes will remain to weep over the tombs of a people once as powerful and as hopeful as your own …”
Source: http://www.historylink.org
The Chief Seattle's Speech
On this day in 1898, French writer Emile Zola’s inflammatory newspaper editorial, entitled “J’accuse,” is printed. The letter exposed a military cover-up regarding Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a French army captain, had been accused of espionage in 1894 and sentenced in a secret military court-martial to imprisonment in a South American penal colony. Two years later, evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence surfaced, but the army suppressed the information. Zola’s letter excoriated the military for concealing its mistaken conviction.
Zola was a well-known writer who had published his first story collection more than three decades earlier. A high school dropout, he had worked in the sales department of a major French publisher, who encouraged his writing and published his first book. He became one of the most famous writers in France with the publication of his 1877 hit, The Drunkard, part of his 20-novel cycle exploring the lives of two families.
Zola’s letter provoked national outrage on both sides of the issue, among political parties, religious organizations, and others.
Supporters of the military sued Zola for libel. He was convicted and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, but he fled France to avoid the sentence. In 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned, but for political reasons was not exonerated until 1906. Zola returned to France shortly after Dreyfus’ pardon, and died in 1902.
Source: www.history.com
J'accuse!
The theologian, musician, philosopher and Nobel Prize-winning physician Albert Schweitzer is born on this day January 14 in 1875 in Upper-Alsace, Germany (now Haut-Rhin, France).The son and grandson of ministers, Schweitzer studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris and Berlin. After working as a pastor, he entered medical school in 1905 with the dream of becoming a missionary in Africa. Schweitzer was also an acclaimed concert organist who played professional engagements to earn money for his education. By the time he received his M.D. in 1913, the overachieving Schweitzer had published several books, including the influential The Quest for the Historical Jesus and a book on the composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
Medical degree in hand, Schweitzer and his wife, Helene Bresslau, moved to French Equatorial Africa where he founded a hospital at Lambarene (modern-day Gabon). When World War I broke out, the German-born Schweitzers were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. Released in 1918, they returned to Lambarene in 1924. Over the next three decades, Schweitzer made frequent visits to Europe to lecture on culture and ethics. His philosophy revolved around the concept of what he called “reverence for life”–the idea that all life must be respected and loved, and that humans should enter into a personal, spiritual relationship with the universe and all its creations. This reverence for life, according to Schweitzer, would naturally lead humans to live a life of service to others.
Schweitzer won widespread praise for putting his uplifting theory into practice at his hospital in Africa, where he treated many patients with leprosy and the dreaded African sleeping sickness. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952, Schweitzer used his $33,000 award to start a leprosarium at Lambarene. From the early 1950s until his death in 1965, Schweitzer spoke and wrote tirelessly about his opposition to nuclear tests and nuclear weapons, adding his voice to those of fellow Nobelists Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.
Source: www.history.com
Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer
Event Date: January 15, 1759Location: London, England, United Kingdom
The British Museum was opened to visitors on 15 January, 1759. But not just any visitors. Fearing damage to the collections by unruly hordes, the trustees decided that nobody would be admitted without a ticket. The problem was that only a few tickets were issued each day and even then a number of obstacles had to be surmounted before prospective visitors could receive their prize.
They had to go to the museum and apply to the porter for a ticket. If approved, they then had to go back on another day to collect it, and then go back again at an appointed time to be allowed in.
All tickets issued were free, but designated for a particular time. Visitors were taken round in groups of five, each group guided by one of the under-librarians. They were taken round the building very quickly to make way for the next party.
The early trustees would no doubt recoil in horror at the sight of today's ticketless crowds wandering at will around the building, disdainfully snapping with 'selfie' phones. But at least there are no longer any servants who might be expecting a tip!
Source: www.onthisday.com
The British Museum A-Z Companion
Jan 6 1605 The first edition of “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha” (Book One of Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes is published in Madrid. 15 Things You Might Not Know About Don Quixote:Even if you have never picked up a copy of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, you’re doubtlessly familiar with the story: one of delusional noblemen, portly squires, and windmill monsters. Nevertheless, there could be a few little-known facts you haven’t heard about the two-volume 17th-century masterpiece.
1. DON QUIXOTE IS CONSIDERED THE FIRST MODERN NOVEL.
Such esteemed thinkers as award-winning literary critic Harold Bloom and decorated novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes have declared that Don Quixote is the very first true example of the modern novel. Bloom identifies the arcs of change bracing the story’s titular character and his companion Sancho Panza as the primary marker that distinguishes it as the first of its breed, and Fuentes suggested that the nuance in the dialogue and characterization is chief in separating Don Quixote from all preceding texts.
2. CERVANTES CAME UP WITH THE STORY WHILE HE WAS IN JAIL.
Though he’d eventually go on to pen one of the most famous novels in world history, a young Miguel de Cervantes suffered from a plight familiar to any aspiring writer: working a day job to pay the bills. Among the varied gigs Cervantes kept in the years before his literary breakout was a job as a tax collector for the Spanish government. However, frequent “mathematic irregularities” landed Cervantes in the Crown Jail of Seville twice between 1597 and 1602. It was during this time in the slammer that Cervantes is believed to have first thought up the story that would become Don Quixote.
3. CERVANTES NAMED THE MAIN CHARACTER AFTER HIS WIFE’S UNCLE.
Near the conclusion of the second volume of Don Quixote, Cervantes reveals the real name of his hero to be Alonso Quixano (alternatively spelled “Quijano”). He borrowed this name from Alonso de Quesada y Salazar, the great uncle of Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, whom Cervantes married in 1584. Alonso is believed to have inspired not only the name but also the general characterization of the novel’s hero. And, the name Quixote came from the word for "thigh armor."
4. CERVANTES PLUGGED DON QUIXOTE: PART II IN THE FOREWORD OF ANOTHER STORY.
Cervantes released the 12-part novella collection Novelas ejemplares in 1613 after having penned the series incrementally over the eight-year span that followed the publication of the original volume of Don Quixote. A foreword to the collection not only introduced the new work, but also promised readers that Cervantes was planning a continuation of the incomplete Gentleman of La Mancha fable. (His advertisement for an upcoming book ahead of an entirely independent work could be seen as an ancestor to the modern day movie trailer.) This second volume was published two years later, in 1615.
5. A PHONY PART II WAS PUBLISHED AS A HOAX.
Just one year after Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares foreword plug, however, a volume of mysterious origin wormed its way into the Don Quixote canon. Written by an author who used the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the unofficial sequel was infamous for the feeble quality of writing and the numerous potshots it took at Cervantes and the source material.
6. THIS FAKE SEQUEL IS THOUGHT TO HAVE CONVINCED CERVANTES TO FINISH HIS OWN.
Although Cervantes had already gone on record about intending to wrap up the story of Don Quixote in a second text, it is generally believed that the Avellaneda debacle was the straw that broke the camel’s back and motivated the author to transfer his intentions to the page. Cervantes was so enraged by the hoax that he wrote the existence of Avellaneda’s novel into his own Part II, maligning it for poor quality and misunderstanding of his original characters and story.
7. DON QUIXOTE HELPED ESTABLISH THE MODERN SPANISH LANGUAGE.
The variant of the Spanish language in which Cervantes penned his novel was actually a rather new development at the turn of the 17th century and would be much more familiar to contemporary Spanish speakers than the colloquial tongue of the era. The popularity of Don Quixote cemented the modern Spanish that is now the second most commonly spoken language in the world, behind Mandarin.
8. CERVANTES DREW FROM HIS EXPERIENCES AS A SLAVE TO WRITE THE NOVEL.
A particularly empathetic sequence in the novel sees the hero and Sancho Panza freeing a group of galley slaves from captivity. Cervantes’ special sensitivity to these recipients of Don Quixote’s chivalry likely stems from his own experiences in servitude in the 1570s. Cervantes spent five years as a slave in Algiers, attempting escape on more than one occasion.
9. THE NOVEL IS CREDITED FOR THE SPREAD OF A POPULAR IDIOM.
Today, the proverb “the proof is in the pudding” is a regular fixture in the vernacular. The phrase is in fact a corruption of the somewhat more readily coherent—albeit admittedly less euphonic—variant, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” While the latter traces roots to a 14th century-born Middle English predecessor (“Jt is ywrite that euery thing Hymself sheweth in the tastyng”) and would appear in various similar forms for the next few hundred years, the modern phrasing is in fact believed to have debuted in an 18th century English-language translation of Don Quixote. The phrase was introduced by translator Pierre Antoine Motteux in lieu of Cervantes’ original maxim: “al freír de los huevos lo verá,” or “you will see when the eggs are fried.”
10. THE FIRST TRANSLATION OF DON QUIXOTE WAS TOO LITERAL.
The very first translation of Don Quixote was Dublin-born author Thomas Shelton’s English take on the text, published in 1608. Shelton didn’t exemplify quite the same degree of linguistic creativity as his successor Motteux. The former’s rigid adherence to Cervantes’ diction, in fact, was his publication’s greatest downfall. For instance, where an English speaker would substitute the word “inches” at Cervantes’ idiomatic mention of “dedos,” Shelton applied the literal translation: “fingers.”
11. A FAMOUS AUTHOR CITED DON QUIXOTE AS HIS FAVORITE LITERARY CHARACTER.
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky committed his admiration for Don Quixote to print on numerous occasions. In a letter to his niece Sophia Ivanova, Dostoevsky heralded Cervantes’ protagonist as the superlative literary hero: “Of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote,” adding, “but he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous.”
12. ONE ORGANIZATION DEEMED THE BOOK THE GREATEST PIECE OF LITERATURE EVER WRITTEN.
In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club polled esteemed writers across 54 countries to construct a list of the 100 greatest books ever published, naming the project the Bokklubben World Library. The official stance of the list, which covers literature as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and as recent as José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, is that all represented titles enjoy equal footing. That is, with the one exception: Don Quixote, which the Bokklubben World Library distinguishes as “the best literary work ever written.”
13. THE BOOK HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO AT LEAST 50 LANGUAGES.
Today, Don Quixote boasts prints in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Latin, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Romanian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Irish, Gaelic, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Georgian, Esperanto, Yiddish, and Braille.
14. CERVANTES DID NOT PROFIT OFF OF THE SUCCESS OF DON QUIXOTE.
Despite the near-immediate popularity of the original 1605 novel, Cervantes barely made a dime off its publication, since it was common in the 17th century for a writer to be denied royalties on his or her published works. The ramifications of this setup could be seen as especially harsh in the case of Don Quixote, considering the fact that…
15. DON QUIXOTE MIGHT BE THE BEST-SELLING NOVEL OF ALL TIME.
While the age of the novel makes it hard to fully estimate the scope of its distribution, many scholars estimate that it has reached a readership of 500 million. This figure would make it the best selling novel in world history by far, topping Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities’ 200 million count and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s 150 million count.
Source: www.mentalfloss.com
Don Quixote
Mod
A book one has to read sooner or later in life ...
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Jan 6 1605 The first edition of “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha” (Book One of Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes is published in Madrid. 15 Things You Might Not Know..."Quite right, dear LauraT. The best is to read it in the original language. I have in my library an edition illustrated by Salvador Dalì ... a book in a book ...
Mod
LauraT wrote: "If only I could read Spanish!!! My next effort: to learn this beautiful language!"It's not an easy language, even if it sounds easy for neo-latin language speakers ...
Popeye, first appearance on January 17, 1929. Popeye is a middle-aged sailor with a screwed-up face and muscular forearms, with anchors tattooed on them. He wears a captain's hat, and he smokes a corncob pipe. Despite his appearance, Popeye is very kind-hearted and adventurous. When he is up to his neck in danger, Popeye eats a lot of spinach that give him loads of strength (in its early adventures he got this power rubbing the head of Bernice the Whiffle Hen). When Olive Oyl meets Popeye, she left Ham Gravy to become Popeye's girlfriend.
Background/Features: "The Thimble Theatre" was cartoonist E. C. Segar's third published strip when it first appeared in the New York Journal on December 19, 1919. Born as a drama-a-day, in a few months Segar changed the strip to a gag-a-day, easing out the melodrama satire and introducing new characters. In its early years, the strip featured characters acting out various stories and scenarios in theatrical style (hence the strip's name). Thimble Theatre's first main characters were Olive Oyl and her boyfriend, Harold Hamgravy. After the strip moved away from its initial focus, it settled into a comedy-adventure style featuring Olive, Ham Gravy, and Olive's enterprising brother, Castor Oyl. Olive's parents, Cole and Nana Oyl, also made frequent appearances. The Sunday Thimble Theatre started in 1925, and the cast grew here and there. Popeye first appeared in the strip on January 17, 1929 as a minor character; he was initially hired by Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy to crew a ship for a voyage to Dice Island. Popeye became soon so popular that he was given a larger role, and the strip was expanded into many more newspapers as a result. Though initial strips presented Olive as being less than impressed with Popeye, she eventually left Ham Gravy to become Popeye's girlfriend. In 1931 the strip was renamed "The Thimble Theatre starring Popeye"; "Popeye" became the strip's title in later years. The strip carried on after Segar's death in 1938, at which point he was replaced by a series of artists.
Interesting facts: In the comics, Popeye originally derived his great strength from rubbing the head of Bernice the Whiffle Hen, until June 26, 1931, when spinach was first referenced as the source of Popeye's power. Segar's strip was quite different from the cartoons that followed. The stories were more complex, with many characters that never appeared in the cartoons. Spinach usage was rare and Bluto made only one appearance.
Quote (Popeye): «I yam what I yam!»
Property: © King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Reference website: http://popeye.com
Source: www.firstversions.com
The Popeye Story
62 people own the same as half the world, reveals Oxfam Davos reportPublished: 18 January 2016
The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.
Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality, and in September agreed a global goal to reduce it, the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months. Oxfam’s prediction, made ahead of last year’s Davos, that the 1% would soon own more than the rest of us, actually came true in 2015 - a year earlier than expected.
Oxfam is calling for urgent action to tackle the extreme inequality crisis which threatens to undermine the progress made in tackling poverty during the last quarter of a century. As a priority, it is calling for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen the increasing use of offshore centers by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality.
Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam International Executive Director, who will again attend Davos having co-chaired last year’s event, said: “It is simply unacceptable that the poorest half of the world’s population owns no more than a few dozen super-rich people who could fit onto one bus. “World leaders’ concern about the escalating inequality crisis has so far not translated into concrete action – the world has become a much more unequal place and the trend is accelerating. We cannot continue to allow hundreds of millions of people to go hungry while resources that could be used to help them are sucked up by those at the top.
"I challenge the governments, companies and elites at Davos to play their part in ending the era of tax havens, which is fuelling economic inequality and preventing hundreds of millions of people lifting themselves out of poverty. Multinational companies and wealthy elites are playing by different rules to everyone else, refusing to pay the taxes that society needs to function. The fact that 188 of 201 leading companies have a presence in at least one tax haven shows it is time to act." … (cont’d)
Source: www.oxfam.org
Bruce Chatwin, in full Charles Bruce Chatwin, (born May 13, 1940, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England—died January 18, 1989, Nice, France), British writer who won international acclaim for books based on his nomadic life.In 1966 Chatwin abandoned a promising career as a director of Impressionist art at the auction firm Sotheby’s in London to study archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. From 1973 he worked for a time as a traveling correspondent for The Sunday Times (London), but he quit in 1976 to begin a pilgrimage through the Patagonia region of southern Argentina and Chile. The book In Patagonia (1977), based on his travels, won awards in Britain and the United States. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980; filmed as Cobra Verde, 1987) is a fictionalized biography of a Brazilian slave trader in 19th-century Dahomey. In On the Black Hill (1982; filmed 1988), which won the Whitbread literary award, Chatwin explored the lives of twin brothers on an isolated 20th-century Welsh farm. Chatwin’s most commercially successful work, The Songlines (1987), is both a study of Australian Aboriginal creation myths and a philosophical reverie on the nature of nomads. His last novel was Utz (1988; filmed 1992). What Am I Doing Here?, a collection of Chatwin’s essays, was published posthumously.
Source: www.britannica.com
Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989
January 20 in HistoryWhat is History?
According to Prufrock
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
—T.S. Eliot. 1920 Gerontion. In The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems.
----
January 20, 1649 - At the conclusion of the English Civil War, King Charles I was brought before a high court of justice at Westminster Hall on charges of treason. The Civil War had been fought over whether the King's power was absolute or was limited by the powers of Parliament. Oliver Cromwell had led the Parliamentary forces to victory over the Royals. In the trial that followed, Charles was found guilty and condemned as "a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy" and was beheaded several days later in front of Whitehall Palace in London.
January 20, 1936 - King George V of England died at age 71. The grandson of Queen Victoria, he had reigned since 1910. He renamed his line as the House of Windsor, breaking his association with the family's German line of descent. He was succeeded by his son King Edward VIII who abdicated in December and was succeeded by George VI.
January 20, 1942 - During the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons.
January 20, 1945 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States. He had served since 1933.
January 20, 1981 - Ronald Reagan became president of the United States at the age of 69, the oldest president to take office. During his inauguration celebrations, he announced that 52 American hostages that had been seized in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, were being released after 444 days in captivity.
January 20, 1996 - Yasir Arafat became the first democratically-elected leader of the Palestinian people with 88.1 percent of the vote.
Source: www.historyplace.com
What Is History?
Antonio wrote: "In the beginning somebody asked: “Is it possible to know everything?”. Now, this question has split into two : “When did it become impossible to know everything? Is it true that nowadays it has bec..."It's always been impossible to know everything. Think about people who lived in a time without books,televsion and the internet. How could they even start to learn about "everything"? This did not keep some individuals from learning constantly and deeply about their environment and the other people they knew. I believe it is the human condition to always want to know more, so in the old days, a visitor to a remote village was feted because he could bring news of the outside world and different experiences that that were un available to the villagers. Storytelling and folksongs flourished as ways to instruct the young to to express imagination.
E.Lurie wrote: "Antonio wrote: "In the beginning somebody asked: “Is it possible to know everything?”. Now, this question has split into two : “When did it become impossible to know everything? Is it true that now..."But what is "everything"? One might answer this question saying that past-present-future is "everything". Are we really able to answer in full the notorious "wh-questions"? The poet said that "the more we know, the more we don't know" ...
On January 21, 1793 …On January 20, 1793, the National Convention condemned Louis XVI to death, his execution scheduled for the next day. Louis spent that evening saying goodbye to his wife and children. The following day dawned cold and wet. Louis arose at five. At eight o'clock a guard of 1,200 horsemen arrived to escort the former king on a two-hour carriage ride to his place of execution.
Accompanying Louis, at his invitation, was a priest, Henry Essex Edgeworth, an Englishman living in France. Edgeworth recorded the event and we join his narrative as he and the fated King enter the carriage to begin their journey:
"The King, finding himself seated in the carriage, where he could neither speak to me nor be spoken to without witness, kept a profound silence. I presented him with my breviary, the only book I had with me, and he seemed to accept it with pleasure: he appeared anxious that I should point out to him the psalms that were most suited to his situation, and he recited them attentively with me. The gendarmes, without speaking, seemed astonished and confounded at the tranquil piety of their monarch, to whom they doubtless never had before approached so near.
The procession lasted almost two hours; the streets were lined with citizens, all armed, some with pikes and some with guns, and the carriage was surrounded by a body of troops, formed of the most desperate people of Paris. As another precaution, they had placed before the horses a number of drums, intended to drown any noise or murmur in favour of the King; but how could they be heard? Nobody appeared either at the doors or windows, and in the street nothing was to be seen, but armed citizens - citizens, all rushing towards the commission of a crime, which perhaps they detested in their hearts.
The carriage proceeded thus in silence to the Place de Louis XV, and stopped in the middle of a large space that had been left round the scaffold: this space was surrounded with cannon, and beyond, an armed multitude extended as far as the eye could reach. As soon as the King perceived that the carriage stopped, he turned and whispered to me, 'We are arrived, if I mistake not.' My silence answered that we were. One of the guards came to open the carriage door, and the gendarmes would have jumped out, but the King stopped them, and leaning his arm on my knee, 'Gentlemen,' said he, with the tone of majesty, 'I recommend to you this good man; take care that after my death no insult be offered to him - I charge you to prevent it.'… As soon as the King had left the carriage, three guards surrounded him, and would have taken off his clothes, but he repulsed them with haughtiness- he undressed himself, untied his neckcloth, opened his shirt, and arranged it himself. The guards, whom the determined countenance of the King had for a moment disconcerted, seemed to recover their audacity. They surrounded him again, and would have seized his hands. 'What are you attempting?' said the King, drawing back his hands. 'To bind you,' answered the wretches. 'To bind me,' said the King, with an indignant air. 'No! I shall never consent to that: do what you have been ordered, but you shall never bind me. . .'
The path leading to the scaffold was extremely rough and difficult to pass; the King was obliged to lean on my arm, and from the slowness with which he proceeded, I feared for a moment that his courage might fail; but what was my astonishment, when arrived at the last step, I felt that he suddenly let go my arm, and I saw him cross with a firm foot the breadth of the whole scaffold; silence, by his look alone, fifteen or twenty drums that were placed opposite to me; and in a voice so loud, that it must have been heard it the Pont Tournant, I heard him pronounce distinctly these memorable words: 'I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I Pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.'
He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and showed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of 'Vive la Republique!' were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air."
Source: /www.eyewitnesstohistory.com
Memoirs of the ABBE Edgeworth: Containing His Narrative of the Last Hours of Louis XVI
The Death of Queen Victoria, January 22, 1901She ascended to the British throne upon the death of her uncle in 1837. She was only a teenager of eighteen at a time when the Crown had become tarnished by the scandal of her predecessors. Her unwavering dedication to her role as Queen soon won the respect of her subjects. She reigned for the next sixty-three years, the longest royal reign in British history. During this time she and her subjects witnessed the global expansion of her empire and the elevation of Britain to super-power status among the nations of the world. She gave her name to an era and became the symbolic representation of the prestige and power of her kingdom.
Her reign and her life came to an end at her estate, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight on January 22, 1901. Victoria was eighty-one years old and had served as Britain's Queen for almost sixty-four years. At her passing she was surrounded by her children and grandchildren including her son, who would succeed her as King Edward VII, and her grandson German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, thirteen years later, would lead German forces against Britain in World War I.
The Countess of Denbigh was a witness to the beginning of Queen Victoria's final journey to her burial at Windsor Castle. in a letter to a friend, she describes the scene as the Queen's body leaves the Isle of Wight aboard a British Navy ship:
"The day was one of glorious sunshine. . . "
"I think you will like to hear of my going down to Southampton to see the passing of our dear Queen from Osborne to Portsmouth. I went on the Scot, where both Houses were embarked. We steamed out, and took up our position between the last British ship and the first foreign ships of war, on the south side of the double line down which the procession was to pass. The day was one of glorious sunshine, with the smoothest and bluest of seas. After a while a black torpedo destroyer came dashing down the line signaling that the Alberta was leaving Osborne and from every ship, both British and foreign, boomed out the minute guns for close on an hour before the procession reached us. The sun was now (three p.m.) beginning to sink, and a wonderful golden pink appeared in the sky and as the smoke slowly rose from the guns it settled in one long festoon behind them, over Haslar, a purple festoon like the purple hangings ordered by the King.
Then slowly down the long line of battleships came eight torpedo destroyers, dark gliding forms, and after them the white Alberta looking very small and frail next the towering battleships. We could see the motionless figures standing round the white pall which, with the crown and orb and sceptre, lay upon the coffin. Solemnly and slowly, it glided over the calm blue water, followed by the other three vessels, giving one a strange choke, and a catch in one's heart as memory flew back to her triumphal passage down her fleet in the last Jubilee review. As slowly and as silently as it came the cortege passed away into the haze: with the solemn booming of the guns continuing every minute till Portsmouth was reached. A wonderful scene and marvelously impressive, leaving behind it a memory of peace and beauty and sadness which it is impossible to forget."
Source: www.eyewitnesstohistory.com
Queen Victoria: A Personal History
LauraT wrote: "Interestng Queen, was Victoria"Did you have the chance to see the ITV produced landmark historical drama, starring Jenna Coleman here in Italy? Victoria charts the beginning of Queen Victoria's incredible 64-year reign, which saw her transform from a naive 18-year-old into an iconic monarch, the wife of Prince Albert and mother of nine.
Mod
Did you have the chance to see the ITV produced landmark historical drama, starring Jenna Coleman here in Italy? Victoria charts the beginning of Que..."
I'm watching now the second series. Loving it!!
The Royal Exchange opens in London. The 23rd of January 1571 Sir Thomas Gresham, the financial genius who served Edward VI and Queen Mary before Elizabeth, had made the bulk of his fortune in his dealings with Antwerp, which enjoyed a fine Bourse to facilitate trading of goods between merchants and the financing of new ventures. He had also worked in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it is possible that he was influenced too by the Bourse in Venice.
London before his intervention used Lombard Street for such matters, open to the elements with only a few covered areas for shelter. It is thought that the loss of his only son and heir in 1564, and thus of any hopes of continuing the merchant dynasty begun by his father Richard, pushed Gresham into seeking a living memorial in the form of The Exchange. He arranged funding, some his own, other sums raised from his circle and from guild members.
A large number of properties in Cornhill were purchased and demolished, and in their stead a four-storeyed structure in brick erected. This was said to be in the Flemish style, though with its piazzas and covered walkways others saw more of an echo of Venice in it. Gresham’s statue was a major feature, and the grasshopper from his family crest was seen on atop all four towers.
As well as being a trading area, bringing together the entrepreneurs and merchants of the day, it also offered space for many shops dealing in everything from cloth and armour to mousetraps and jewellery. Rather fittingly its descendent today (the third building, the previous two having perished in fires) houses a luxury shopping area, with the likes of Hermes and Tiffany represented.
The Exchange actually opened in the late 1560s, but on January 23 1571 Queen Elizabeth (perhaps returning a favour) visited and declared that henceforth it would be The Royal Exchange. Royal patronage helped fill the remaining unlet shops rapidly.
Source: www.information-britain.co.uk
The Life of Sir Thomas Gresham: Founder of the Royal Exchange
John Evelyn, his Diary and the London Frost of January 24, 1684When you are looking at history, primary sources are always the ideal and it isn't everyday that you get to cite a gem like The Diary Of John Evelyn. First published in an 1818 edition as "Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn" by William Bray with the assistance of William Upcott, the diary serves as a memoir of a British royalist named John Evelyn. In his memoir which was written from 1620 to 1706, Evelyn wrote of many major historical events of the era including the Great Fire Of London in 1666, the death of Oliver Cromwell and the epidemic of the bubonic plague that struck London in 1665 and 1666 …
Evelyn's diary entry from December 1, 1662 reads as follows: "Having seen the strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders on the new canal in St. James's Park, performed before their Majesties by divers gentlemen and others with skates, after the manner of the Hollanders, with what swiftness they pass, how suddenly they stop in full career upon the ice; I went home by water, but not without exceeding difficulty, the Thames being frozen, great flakes of ice encompassing our boat." Evelyn's mention of skating on the Thames is explained by a period known historically as The Little Ice Age, where the winters in England were much more severe than in present day and the river was wider and slower and blocked by the Old London Bridge and was frozen solid. The Thames was in fact frozen so solid that Frost Fairs were held on the ice, which included skating, entertainment, games of football and meals of roasted ox. The first recorded "official" Frost Fair was in 1608 and the final in 1814, when the weather took a turn for the better. In Evelyn's January 24, 1684 diary entry, he recounted in detail a Frost Fair including skating:
"The frost continues more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished, and full of commodities, even to a printing press, where the people and ladies took a fancy to have their names printed, and the day and year set down when printed on the Thames: this humor took so universally, that it was estimated that the printer gained £5 a day, for printing a line only, at sixpence a name, besides what he got by ballads, etc. Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs to and fro, as in the streets, sleds, sliding with skates, a bull-baiting, horse and coach-races, puppet-plays and interludes, cooks, tippling, and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water, while it was a severe judgment on the land, the trees not only splitting as if the lightning struck, but men and cattle perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with ice, that no vessels could stir out or come in. The fowls, fish, and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens, universally perishing. Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear, that there were great contributions to preserve the poor alive. Nor was this severe weather much less intense in most parts of Europe, even as far as Spain and the most southern tracts. London, by reason of the excessive coldness of the air hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of the sea-coal, that hardly could one see across the street, and this filling the lungs with its gross particles, exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one could scarcely breathe. Here was no water to be had from the pipes and engines, nor could the brewers and divers other tradesmen work, and every moment was full of disastrous accidents …”
Source: https://archive.org/details/diaryofjo...
The Diary of John Evelyn
Robert Burton, (born February 8, 1577, Lindley, Leicestershire, England—died January 25, 1640, Oxford), English scholar, writer, and Anglican clergyman whose Anatomy of Melancholy is a masterpiece of style and a valuable index to the philosophical and psychological ideas of the time.Anatomy of Melancholy, The, in full The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is; with all the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes and Several Cures of it: In Three Maine Partitions With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut up, by Democritus Junior, exposition by Robert Burton, published in 1621 and expanded and altered in five subsequent editions (1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1651/52).
In the first part of the treatise, Burton defines the “inbred malady” of melancholy, discusses its causes, and sets down the symptoms. The second part is devoted to its cure. Love melancholy is the subject of the first three sections of the third part. A master of narrative, Burton includes as examples most of the world’s great love stories, again showing a modern approach to psychological problems. The fourth section deals with religious melancholy, and on the cure of despair he rises to heights of wisdom and of meditation.
Burton’s lively, colloquial style is as individual as his subject matter. It is imaginative and eloquent, full of classical allusions and Latin tags that testify to his love of curious and out-of-the-way information as well as to his erudition. He is a master of lists and catalogs, but their sonorous roll is often broken by his humorous asides.
“Paperback not so much of the week as of the year, of the decade - or, I am enclined to say, of all time. And why? Because it’s the best book ever written, that’s why.” (Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
January 26, 1765. History of a duel"The following," writes Horace Walpole, "is the account nearest the truth that I can learn of the fatal duel last night. A club of Nottinghamshire gentlemen had dined at the Star and Garter, and there had been a dispute between the combatants whether Lord Byron, who took no care of his game, or Mr. Chaworth, who was active in the association, had most game on their manor. The company, however, had apprehended no consequences, and parted at eight o'clock: but Lord Byron, stepping into an empty chamber, and sending the drawer for Mr. Chaworth, or calling him thither himself, took the candle from the waiter, and bidding Mr. Chaworth defend himself, drew his sword. Mr. Chaworth, who was an excellent fencer, ran Lord Byron through the sleeve of his coat, and then received a wound fourteen inches deep into his body. He was carried to his house in Berkeley Street, made his will with the greatest composure, and dictated a paper which, they say, allows it was a fair duel, and died at nine this morning." Lord Byron surrendered to take his trial in Westminster Hall, and was, almost unanimously, found guilty, but discharged on claiming his privilege of peerage under Edward VI.'s statute.”
Horace Walpole to the Earl of Hertford, 1765. This was the 5th Lord Byron, grand-uncle of the poet. He was tried in Westminster Hall by his fellows peers and found guilty of manslaughter.
Source: http://1066.co.nz/Mosaic%20DVD/librar...
Murray's Daily Companion
On January 27, 1926, John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, gives the first public demonstration of a true television system in London, launching a revolution in communication and entertainment. Baird’s invention, a pictorial-transmission machine he called a “televisor,” used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses. This information was then transmitted by cable to a screen where it showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird’s first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of view of the audience.
Baird based his television on the work of Paul Nipkow, a German scientist who patented his ideas for a complete television system in 1884. Nipkow likewise used a rotating disk with holes in it to scan images, but he never achieved more than the crudest of shadowy pictures. Various inventors worked to develop this idea, and Baird was the first to achieve easily discernible images. In 1928, Baird made the first overseas broadcast from London to New York over phone lines and in the same year demonstrated the first color television.
The first home television receiver was demonstrated in Schenectady, New York, in January 1928, and by May a station began occasional broadcasts to the handful of homes in the area that were given the General Electric-built machines. In 1932, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated an all-electronic television using a cathode-ray tube in the receiver and the “iconoscope” camera tube developed by Russian-born physicist Vladimir Zworykin. These two inventions greatly improved picture quality.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) inaugurated regular high-definition public broadcasts in London in 1936. In delivering the broadcasts, Baird’s television system was in competition with one promoted by Marconi Electric and Musical Industries. Marconi’s television, which produced a 405-line picture–compared with Baird’s 240 lines–was clearly better, and in early 1937 the BBC adopted the Marconi system exclusively. Regular television broadcasts began in the United States in 1939, and permanent color broadcasts began in 1954.
Source: www.history.com
John Logie Baird: Television Pioneer
The word ‘serendipity’ was invented on 28 January 1754.It was one of two literary creations by its inventor, Horace Walpole, that would achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, both inventions are still with us: when Walpole (son of Britain’s first de facto Prime Minister, Robert Walpole) put down the word ‘serendipity’ for the first time, he was giving the English language one of its most beloved, but bewilderingly difficult, words. His other invention, created ten years after the coining of ‘serendipity’, would spawn a whole now genre of fiction.
Walpole was a prolific inventor, or at least populariser, of new words. He is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with introducing over 200 words into the English language, among them beefy, malaria, nuance, sombre, and souvenir.
But his most celebrated neologism was ‘serendipity’, meaning the ‘faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident’. This Serendipity was coined in a letter of 28 January 1754 written to another man named Horace, namely Horace Mann. In the letter, Walpole calls the word ‘very expressive’ (if he does say so himself). The word ‘serendipity’ comes from Serendip, the old name for Sri Lanka, but Walpole was indebted to a specific work of literature for the creation of the word.
‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ is one of the earliest detective stories in existence: it tells of how three princes track down a missing camel through luck and good fortune. However, that’s not the whole truth. The three princes in the story do actually utilise what we would now call forensic deduction – almost Sherlockian in its method – and that, ironically, is what gets them into trouble. As they are travelling through the desert, they meet a merchant whose camel has gone missing. Having tracked the animal’s progress through the land, the princes can describe the merchant’s lost camel in such striking detail that he suspects them of having stolen it. Hauling them before the king, Bahram Gur, the merchant publicly accuses the princes of theft, and the king sentences them to death – unless they can produce the camel and return it to its owner.
Among the details of the camel that the princes had correctly managed to deduce, the princes identified that it was lame in one leg, blind in one eye, and had a missing tooth. They deduced these distinguishing features from the patches of grass at which the camel had grazed, and the imprints it had left in the ground. We say ‘deduced’ but here – as with the process of detection used by Sherlock Holmes – ‘deduction’ is actually the wrong word. It’s actually ‘abduction’ – we explain why in this post on Sherlock Holmes.
What happens to the princes in the end? Well .... (spoiler alert) ...
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
Three Princes Of Serendip
29 January 1813, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen.Letter written on the publication of “Pride and Prejudice” in which Jane refers the novel as “my own darling child”.This letter was written by Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra, in January 1813. The sisters were very close, best friends really, and Jane was at home with their mother in Chawton, while Cassandra was staying with their clergyman brother, James, across the county of Hampshire in their birthplace village of Steventon. They wrote to each other regularly whenever they were apart.
It is an extremely important letter because it describes the publication of Jane’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice. This was a huge achievement, not just because there were so few novelists in 1813, but also because she was an unmarried woman. So this letter describes one of the most exciting days in Jane Austen’s whole life. We know what the day meant to Jane because of the way she describes having the actual book – in three small leather bound volumes – in her hands. “I want to tell you,” she writes to Cassandra, “that I have got my own darling Child from London”.
She describes Pride and Prejudice as if it were her baby, which in many ways, it was. She died young, at 41, and never married. In fact, the only time she agreed to be engaged, to a young man called Harris Bigg-Wither, she wrote to him the morning after their engagement, to tell him that she couldn’t marry him after all. In her heart of hearts, she must have known that her ‘children’ would turn out be her books.
Friday [January 29, 1813].
I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child from London. On Wednesday I received one copy sent down by Falkener, with three lines from Henry to say that he had given another to Charles and sent a third by the coach to Godmersham … Miss Benn dined with us on the very day of the book's coming, and in the evening we set fairly at it, and read half the first vol. to her, prefacing that, having intelligence from Henry that such a work would soon appear, we had desired him to send it whenever it came out, and I believe it passed with her unsuspected. She was amused, poor soul! That she could not help, you know, with two such people to lead the way, but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know. There are a few typical errors; and a 'said he,' or a 'said she,' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear ...The second volume is shorter than I could wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part. I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than Sense and Sensibility altogether. Now I will try and write of something else; and it shall be a complete change of subject--ordination. I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well. If you could discover whether Northamptonshire is a country of hedgerows, I should be glad again.
Source: https://www.jane-austens-house-museum...
http://www.mollands.net/etexts/lifean...
Pride and Prejudice
Antonio wrote: "The word ‘serendipity’ was invented on 28 January 1754.It was one of two literary creations by its inventor, Horace Walpole, that would achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, both inventions are ..."
I assume the 2nd creation which you say "would spawn a whole now genre of fiction." was the first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. Am I right?
Very interesting about the word serendipity!
Leslie wrote: "Antonio wrote: "The word ‘serendipity’ was invented on 28 January 1754.It was one of two literary creations by its inventor, Horace Walpole, that would achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, both..."
Quite right!
On January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi fell to his assassin Nathuram Vinayak Godse’s bullets during an evening prayer ceremony at Birla House in Delhi. Perched atop a gate of Birla House, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced to the world the “light has gone out of our lives”.
Eight men were convicted in the murder trial inside Red Fort by a special court, constituted by an order of the central government. Godse and co-conspirator Narayan Apte were hanged for the murder of the Father of the Nation on November 15, 1949.
Historians and scholars have written extensively on “who killed Gandhi and why?” and the answer, obviously, doesn’t end with Godse. What Godse told the court in an attempt to explain why he chose to pump three bullets into Gandhi’s chest at point-blank range provides a glimpse into the politics of the assassination. Why Godse killed Gandhi:
“I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus,” Godse told the court.
He added: “I bear no ill will towards anyone individually, but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi.”
Godse had been an active member of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha and ran a nationalist newspaper called Hindu Rashtra. Political psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy wrote in his book “At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture” that Godse did not find the RSS militant enough, and in the Hindu Mahasabha “he found a more legitimate expression of the Hindu search for political potency”.
Source: www.hindustantimes.com
Source: https://goo.gl/Wh2aD0
Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
Only 153 years ago … On Jan. 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. THE PASSAGE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT
The great feature of the existing rebellion was the passage to-day by the House of Representatives of the resolutions submitting to the Legislatures of the several States an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery. It was an epoch in the history of the country, and will be remembered by the members of the House and spectators present as an event in their lives. At 3 o'clock, by general consent, all discussion having ceased, the preliminary votes to reconsider and second the demand for the previous question were agreed to by a vote of 113 yeas, to 58 nays; and amid profound silence the Speaker announced that the yeas and nays would be taken directly upon the pending proposition. During the call, when prominent Democrats voted aye, there was suppressed evidence of applause and gratification exhibited in the galleries, but it was evident that the great interest centered entirely upon the final result, and when the presiding officer announced that the resolution was agreed to by yeas 119, nays 56, the enthusiasm of all present, save a few disappointed politicians, knew no bounds, and for several moments the scene was grand and impressive beyond description. No attempt was made to suppress the applause which came from all sides, every one feeling that the occasion justified the fullest expression of approbation and joy.
Source: www.nytimes.com
American Slavery, American Freedom
Today in the History of PublishingOn February 1, 1884, editors published the first volume of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary. The fascicle—one part of a larger book, this one 352 pages covering “a” through “ant”—sold only 4,000 copies. Since then, the OED has become one of the most respected and comprehensive dictionaries in the world.
The book, originally titled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, was far from the first dictionary of the English language. (That would probably be Thomas Elyot’s “wordbook,” published in 1538.) However, an elite group of intellectuals was dissatisfied with the existing dictionaries, and set out to correct mistakes and add more words.
The last printed edition of the OED was published in 1989, and contained 20 volumes. Always being updated, the current OED—from “a” through “Zyzzogeton” (a type of South American insect!)—only exists in an electronic format available to subscribers.
Source: www.nationalgeographic.org
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
2 February 1709: Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, is rescued after more than four years marooned on a Pacific island 400 miles off the coast of Chile.The moment Alexander Selkirk saw the Cinque Ports sailing away, he knew he’d made a mistake. He ran into the sea, but it was too late – the ship’s captain, Thomas Stradling, wouldn’t take him back. Selkirk was a castaway. As the ship’s master, Selkirk had quarrelled with the 21-year-old captain over the leaking state of the ship. He refused to sail on until repairs were made. Stradling took Selkirk at his word, and marooned the Scot on the island of Más a Tierra, 400 miles off the coast of modern-day Chile in 1704.
For the next four years and four months, Selkirk learned to scavenge and hunt goats for his food. He made rough and ready clothes from the hides and built shelter using the pepper trees on the island. Amusement was limited to reading the Bible and singing to his hoard of feral cats, which he persuaded to protect him from the rats.
Salvation came at the end of January 1709, when the English privateering frigates Dukeand Duchess hove into view. Selkirk lit a bonfire to attract the sailors’ attention and on 2 February, Captain Woodes Rogers ordered a landing party.
Once back in London, Selkirk became a media sensation. Captain Rogers cashed in by writing the best-selling A cruising voyage around the world. And of course, Daniel Defoe wrote his famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, said to be based on Selkirk’s time on the island – although the book is set in the Caribbean.
Selkirk struggled to settle back into British life and his new-found wealth was little consolation. He told journalist Robert Steele that even though he was now worth £800, he was never so happy as when he was not worth a farthing. Selkirk tired of his fortune and enlisted in the Royal Navy. He died in 1721.
But Selkirk’s legacy lives on. In 1966, the Chilean government spied an opportunity to attract tourists and renamed Más a Tierra as Robinson Crusoe Island. Another island in the archipelago was renamed in honour of the real-life castaway.
As for the Cinque Ports, the leaking ship sank shortly after abandoning Selkirk to his fate, and the surviving crew were captured by the Spanish. Alexander Selkirk had been right to get off when he did.
Source: www.moneyweek.com
Marooned: The Strange but True Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the Real Robinson Crusoe
This is so interesting! While I knew Robinson Crusoe was based on truth, I did not know the details, thank you for sharing.
Evelyn wrote: "This is so interesting! While I knew Robinson Crusoe was based on truth, I did not know the details, thank you for sharing."Thank you for reading
1468: February 3, Johannes Gutenberg dies in Mainz, Germany. His name lives on.Gutenberg made one contribution to technology in particular and to civilization in general, but it was a doozy. The printing press made the mass production of printed material possible and revolutionized human communication.
Gutenberg was born in Mainz sometime between 1394 and 1400 – his actual birth date is uncertain. A goldsmith by trade, he borrowed money from local businessmen to develop a printing press that used movable, replaceable letters made from cast metal.
Although movable type existed in China as early as the 11th century, Gutenberg's printing press began a chain of events that altered the social and scientific history of Europe.
His press was inspired by the screw-type wine presses then common in the fertile Rhine Valley. He essentially mechanized the craft of woodblock printing, a painstaking, time-consuming process. His technology continued evolving over the centuries, and with these refinements Gutenberg's invention has remained the cornerstone of printing to this day.
Source: www.wired.com
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture-----
I'm proud of being born into a family of post-Gutenberg printers. I learned to read and write in the hand composer typographers' room when I was four. I was born "papery", I became digital. The evolution of the species ...
February 4, 2004: Facebook is launched, sparking a social media revolution.Mark Zuckerberg, a 19-year-old computing and psychology student at Harvard University, welcomed the first users to a website which has since made him $33bn. Facebook now has over 1.8 billion active users who use the site to keep in touch with friends and relatives, learn more about their own areas of interest and share information and pictures.
In 2003 Zuckerberg had built a website called Facemash, in which he placed two photos of Harvard students next to each other and had people vote on which was the more attractive. This had got him into trouble with the university, while marking him out as a programming prodigy to other students.
The popularity of Facemash inspired Zuckerberg to create ‘Thefacebook’, a networking site initially just for Harvard students. His friend and future colleague Dustin Moskovitz claims that within 24 hours of the site’s launch on February 4, between 1,200 and 1,500 students had signed up to it.
Fellow students Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and Andrew McCollum were brought on board to help with programming, design, marketing and financing. By the summer, Thefacebook was available to all the Ivy League colleges.
A week after the site’s launch, Zuckerberg was accused by students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra of having stolen the idea from them. The dispute led to a full-blown lawsuit, which was finally settled in 2008 with the Winklevosses and Narendra receiving $65 million.
The site was renamed simply Facebook in 2005, and the following year it became open to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address. By 2008, it was the most-used networking site in the world.
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World
Question: How much “modern” was this film? On this day, February 5, 1936, “Modern Times”, silent film directed by, written by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is released. Charlie is a worker in a factory whose demanding boss monitors and gives orders to his employees over an extensive closed-circuit TV system. Charlie's inability to keep up with the work causes moments of chaos in the plant, and the monotonously repetitive tasks finally cause him to crack, putting him in a mental hospital and out of a job. On his release, he encounters the turmoil of the Depression in labor strikes, political rallies, and shantytowns. He also befriends a feisty young girl, the Gamin, who lives by her wits on the streets and steals bread to survive. Helping her avoid the juvenile authorities who take her younger sisters away after their unemployed father dies, Charlie vows to get them a real home. But their adventures together prove they're not suited or destined for a normal settled life.
Why MODERN TIMES is Essential?
Years after sound took over the motion picture industry and public taste, Charles Chaplin released an essentially silent film - Modern Times. It was the last true silent ever made (not counting parodies and experimental pieces). When the careers of his fellow comedians of cinema's early years had begun to decline or already faded, Chaplin limned the comic possibilities of the Depression era and the dehumanizing effects of the Machine Age through the character he had created and sustained for two decades, the Little Tramp. Against all wisdom, he had a success with the movie, delighting audiences and garnering reviews that, although mixed in their assessment, agreed that Chaplin's genius for filmmaking was undeniable.
Chaplin actually intended to make Modern Times an all-talking picture but abandoned the idea. Although dialogue is mostly relegated to title cards and the story conveyed primarily through visuals and pantomime in the movie, speech is heard, but on Chaplin's terms. Rather than "live," it's electronically reproduced on giant video monitors and pre-recorded phonograph records; it's mechanized beyond the purely human, like the automatic feeding machine that Charlie is strapped into by management as an experiment. In the caf sequence that climaxes the story, singers, audience, and background noises are heard while the Tramp and Gamin carry on a scene in silence. Also, when at last we hear Charlie's voice, for the first time on film, it is singing gibberish, leaving us still dependent on his pantomime to understand the meaning.
Modern Times represents more than a refusal to move into talkies for the film actually comments on sound and plays with the conventions of both silent and talking pictures. In exploring this new technology, the form of the film becomes part of the content and the story itself becomes a reflection of the cinematic "modern times," an observation on the increasingly mechanized, factory-like production of movies, something far removed from the improvisational and leisurely way Chaplin was accustomed to working.
Ultimately, however, what audiences have responded to for years in Modern Times is not so much the formal qualities of the movie as the human, comic aspects of the story. It is almost a catalogue of Chaplin's greatest bits. He had created the Little Tramp in the early days of cinema and, in dozens of films over two decades, combining comedy and pathos to depict a person at odds with the world around him. His screen alter ego was always a misfit who usually finds a way to fit in and gain the home and companionship he craves, only to fail, time after time, walking off down the road alone. The character he created became the most universally recognized fictional figure in screen history, and in Modern Times Chaplin at last gives him a final gesture of hope and warmth in an increasingly hostile world, by sending him off down the road with a companion.
There are other considerable factors that mark Modern Times as a milestone, not least the artist's shift to the broader social and political satire he would explore further in the handful of films that followed. But all else aside, Modern Times would still be immortal if only for that final shot. Although they may not have known it at the time, it was the last time cinema audiences would ever see the Little Tramp.
Source: www.tcm.com
Charlie Chaplin: His Reflection in Modern TimesFree download: https://goo.gl/XSxRKN
100 years ago - on 6 February 1918 - an important law was passed which changed the UK forever. It was called the Representation of People Act 1918. What was this law?The Representation of People Act 1918 was an important law because it allowed women to vote for the very first time. It also allowed all men over the age of 21 to vote too. Before this law, women weren't allowed to vote in general elections at all. Some men could vote, but not all of them - for example, a man had to have property in order to be able to vote, so it excluded people who weren't as wealthy.
The contribution made during World War One by men and women who didn't have the right to even vote was an important reason for the law changing. But even after the Representation of People Act 1918, men and women still didn't have the same rights when it came to politics.The law said that women over the age of 30 who occupied a house (or were married to someone who did) could now vote. This meant 8.5 million women now had their say over who was in Parliament - about 2 in every 5 women in the UK.
It also said that all men over the age of 21 could vote - regardless of whether or not they owned property - and men in the armed forces could vote from the age of 19. The number of men who could now vote went from 8 million to 21 million. So the situation was still very unequal between men and women. It was another 10 years before women were allowed to vote in the same way that men could. However, the Representation of People Act 1918 was an important step in the fight for getting equality for women in society ….. (cont.)
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/42794339
Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women
Samuel Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield 7th February 1755 about his “English Dictionary”To The Right Honourable The Earl of Chesterfield
My Lord,
I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of The World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre;—that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Seven years, my lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. Is not a patrons my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it: till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; (2) till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself.
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,
My Lord,
Your lordship's most humble,
most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON
Source: www.ourcivilisation.com
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
THE EXECUTION OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS8 FEBRUARY 1587
Her prayers being ended, the executioners, kneeling, desired her Grace to forgive them her death: who answered, 'I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.' Then they, with her two women, helping her up, began to disrobe her of her apparel: then she, laying her crucifix upon the stool, one of the executioners took from her neck the Agnus Dei, which she, laying hands off it, gave to one of her women, and told the executioner, he should be answered money for it. Then she suffered them, with her two women, to disrobe her of her chain of pomander beads and all other apparel most willingly, and with joy rather than sorrow, helped to make unready herself, putting on a pair of sleeves with her own hands which they had pulled off, and that with some haste, as if she had longed to be gone.
All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words,'that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company.' Then she, being stripped of all her apparel saving her petticoat and kirtle, her two women beholding her made great lamentation, and crying and crossing themselves prayed in Latin. She, turning herself to them, embracing them, said these words in French, 'Ne crie vous, j'ay prome pour vous', and so crossing and kissing them, bad them pray for her and rejoice and not weep, for that now they should see an end of all their mistress's troubles.
Then she, with a smiling countenance, turning to her men servants, as Melvin and the rest, standing upon a bench nigh the scaffold, who sometime weeping, sometime crying out aloud, and continually crossing themselves, prayed in Latin, crossing them with her hand bade them farewell, and wishing them to pray for her even until the last hour.
This done, one of the women have a Corpus Christi cloth lapped up three-corner-ways, kissing it, put it over the Queen of Scots' face, and pinned it fast to the caule of her head. Then the two women departed from her, and she kneeling down upon the cushion most resolutely, and without any token or fear of death, she spake aloud this Psalm in Latin, In Te Domine confido, non confundar in eternam, etc. Then, groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both her hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied. Then lying upon the block most quietly, and stretching out her arms cried, In manus tuas, Domine, etc., three or four times. Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade God save the Queen. Then, her dress of lawn [i.e. wig] from off her head, it appeared as grey as one of threescore and ten years old, polled very short, her face in a moment being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face. Her lips stirred up and a down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off.
Then Mr. Dean [Dr. Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough] said with a loud voice, 'So perish all the Queen's enemies', and afterwards the Earl of Kent came to the dead body, and standing over it, with a loud voice said, 'Such end of all the Queen's and the Gospel's enemies.'
Then one of the executioners, pulling off her garters, espied her little dog which was crept under her cloths, which could not be gotten forth by force, yet afterward would not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay between her head and her shoulders, which being imbrued with her blood was carried away and washed, as all things else were that had any blood was either burned or washed clean, and the executioners sent away with money for their fees, not having any one thing that belonged unto her. And so, every man being commanded out of the hall, except the sheriff and his men, she was carried by them up into a great chamber lying ready for the surgeons to embalm her.
Recorded by Robert Wynkfield (spelling modernized)
Source: www.tudorhistory.org
Mary Queen of Scots
On February 9, 1888, Walt Whitman penned a note to the publishers of The Riverside Literature Series No. 32 calling attention to mistakes in their recently printed version of his poem, “O Captain! My Captain!”.“Somehow you have got a couple of bad perversions in ‘O Captain,'” he wrote. “I send you a corrected sheet.” Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” in response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. He revised the poem in 1866 and again in 1871. Apparently, the Riverside editors published an earlier version of the poem. Whitman’s February 9 letter to the publishers details his changes for punctuation and entire lines of text.
Published to immediate acclaim in the Saturday Press, “O Captain! My Captain!” was the only poem from Whitman’s compendium, Leaves of Grass, widely reprinted and anthologized during his lifetime. Whitman rarely used rhymed, rhythmically regular verse, but here it creates a somber, yet exalted, effect.
O CAPTAIN! my captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red!
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
By the 1880s, Whitman was asked to recite the poem so often he said, “I’m almost sorry I ever wrote [it],” though it had “certain emotional immediate reasons for being.” An outpouring of communal grief and numerous efforts to memorialize the fallen leader followed Lincoln’s death. In May 1865, African-American citizens of the District of Columbia organized the Educational Monument Association to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln for the purpose of erecting a national monument to Lincoln. African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907 contains the complete text of the group’s constitution as well as the eloquent tribute that Frederick Douglass made to Lincoln at the 1876 unveiling of the Lincoln Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C. (adapted)
Source: www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/feb...
Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Speech and Other Papers
On this day February 10 in 1996, after three hours, world chess champion Garry Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action on the Internet.
Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.
Kasparov, who was born in 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan, became the Soviet Union’s junior chess champion at age 13 and in 1985, at age 22, the youngest world champ ever when he beat legendary Soviet player Anatoly Karpov. Considered by many to be the greatest chess player in the history of the game, Kasparov was known for his swashbuckling style of play and his ability to switch tactics mid-game.
In 1997, a rematch took place between Kasparov and an enhanced Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first game, the computer the second, with the next three games a draw. On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue came out on top with a surprising sixth game win–and the $700,000 match prize.
In 2003, Kasparov battled another computer program, “Deep Junior.” The match ended in a tie. Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005.
Source: www.history.com
How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom
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On the 7th June 1557 Mary I’s heralds proclaimed that England was at war with France.The catalyst for this declaration of war was an attempt in April 1557 by Sir Thomas Stafford and a hundred French and English rebels to depose Mary who Stafford believed had forfeited her right to the throne by marrying Philip of Spain. The rebels managed to seize Scarborough Castle but within a week Stafford had been captured and the Earl of Westmoreland had retaken Scarborough Castle. Stafford was executed as a traitor on the 28th May.
On the 6th July 1557, Mary I’s husband, King Philip II of Spain, left England for France, followed by the Earl of Pembroke and 1,000 English soldiers a few days later. Author and historian, Anna Whitelock, notes how the force included “former rebels and plotters”, such as Robert Dudley, Sir Peter Carew, Sir James Croft and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton.
In the August, some of Pembroke’s men helped the Spanish troops capture the city of Saint-Quentin – a great start to the war on France. However, on the 1st January 1558, the French took adavantage of the winter lull in campaigning and the frozen marshes to wreak their revenge on the English forces. 27,000 French soldiers attacked the city of Calais which had been in English possession since 1347 when Edward III captured it. It was the very last English territory in France. By the 7th January, French troops, led by the Duke of Guise, had entered the castle, forcing the Lord Deputy of Calais, Thomas Wentworth, to surrender.
It was a huge blow for Mary I and England and it is said that Mary exclaimed to one of her attendants, “”When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Philip’ and ‘Calais’ lying in my heart”. Mary never saw her husband again and she died just 10 months later, on the 17th November 1558.
Source: www.elizabethfiles.com/7th-january-1558