He considered himself an artist, but his work, while
popular and
incendiary, showed little
talent or
originality. Later in life he took up working with
precious metals, and that would be the craft he’s remembered for, but earlier in his career he
printed his own
engravings, or his
version of
the work of others. Earlier this year at Brown University’s
John Hay Library, something very rare was discovered. One of
Paul Revere’s prints depicting the Baptism of Christ was found tucked in an old textbook. While not a particularly valuable work or great art, this rare print does tell us a bit about the man as an artist, and about
his faith.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on May 7, 2012 -
6 comments
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans:
Almost immediately after the law came into practice, Northerners and abolitionists set up relief organisations, which battled to establish schools and provide other forms of support – but their resources were limited. They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county.
posted by nickyskye
on Mar 4, 2012 -
11 comments
'Few Americans today can name more than one or two
current boxers, but boxing once stood at the center of American life. It has become a ghost sport, long discredited but still hovering in the nation’s consciousness, refusing to go away and be silent entirely. But there was a time when things were very different. Boxing's history
winds a thread through the broader history of the nation.'
posted by zarq
on Sep 14, 2011 -
95 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
19th-century newspaper ads for patented stomach cures and digestive aids [...] foregrounded mince pie as the K2 of digestive summits. But for every published warning on the dangers of mince, the newspapers published a poem, essay, or editorial praising it as a great symbol of American cultural heritage or a nostalgic reminder of mother love and better times bygone—or even, as the State of Columbia, South Carolina, asserted in 1901, a beneficial Darwinian instrument that had "thinned out the weak ones" among the pioneering generations.
So wrote Cliff Doerksen in his wonderful, James Beard award-winning article
Mince Pie: The Real American Pie. Doerksen not only gives the history of this once most American of foods, he also makes two mince pies from 19th Century recipes to see if they are indeed all that. This is but one of many great articles Doerksen wrote for The Chicago Reader in recent years (links to a selection below the cut). Sadly, Cliff Doerksen
passed at the age of 47 just before Christmas.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 29, 2010 -
73 comments
Robert F. Gallagher served in the United States Army's 815th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion (Third Army) in the European Theater during WWII. He has posted his memoir online:
"Scratch One Messerschmitt," told from numerous photos he took during the war and the detailed notes he made shortly afterwards.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 23, 2010 -
7 comments
IMAGINE THAT THIS MINUTE, ON THIS STATION, YOU RECEIVED WORD THAT WE HAD MADE CONTACT WITH A CIVILIZATION ON ANOTHER PLANET. THE CLOSEST THING IN HUMAN HISTORY TO SUCH AN EVENT TOOK PLACE IN 1493 WHEN NEWS REACHED EUROPE THAT COLUMBUS HAD ENCOUNTERED A NEW WORLD.
posted by Brent Parker
on Oct 10, 2010 -
74 comments
The Personal Photographs of Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, Television Pioneer. The screen images are time exposure photographs of the picture on the kinescope in the monitoring rack in the main control room. Some were taken with stationary frames of moving picture film projected upon the iconoscope by a standard moving picture machine. Others are actually the pictures transmitted with the iconoscope camera in the studio and outdoors.
posted by tellurian
on May 3, 2010 -
9 comments
The Obama Coalition "
These general findings suggest the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States. With effective organization and mobilization, such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future."
posted by Glibpaxman
on Apr 4, 2010 -
37 comments
Few things in history are as compelling as the duel. Refined and barbaric at the same time, this practice has had a checkered history.
The rules of dueling were codified by the Irish in 1777 in the Code Duello (
summarized here), which was codified at Clonmel Summer Assizes in 1777. As evidenced by these
documents, dueling was in practice prior to the Irish rules being drafted. The procedure and philosophy behind duels is illustrated in
this article.
Dueling gained some traction in America in the
19th century, culminating in the famous Burr-Hamilton affair. There are many more resources to find out more
here. For a list of famous duels, you can check out
this list.
Lest you think men were the only ones dueling, here are a
few short anecdotes of women dueling.
Reportedly,
dueling is still legal in Paraguay, as long as both parties are registered blood donors.
posted by reenum
on Sep 15, 2009 -
17 comments
"The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion."
~
George Washington / "I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature."
~
Thomas Jefferson / "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion."
~
Abraham Lincoln / "A just government has no need for the clergy or the church." ~
James Madison / "I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice." ~
John F. Kennedy / "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus --
and nonbelievers." ~
Barack Obama
posted by 0bvious
on Jan 20, 2009 -
270 comments
The Third View project is a fascinating presentation of "rephotographs" of over 100 historic landscape sites in the American West that presents original 19th-century survey photographs, photographed again in the 1970s, then once again in the '90s - from the original vantage points, under similar lighting conditions, at (roughly) the same time of day and year.
[Flash, and you'll probably need to allow pop-ups; a little more info inside...]
posted by taz
on Jun 15, 2007 -
13 comments
Through a Glass, Darkly How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history--from Harpers.
...producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history. ...
posted by amberglow
on Jan 12, 2007 -
111 comments
