History & Archaeology | Smithsonian.com

Europe’s Hypocritical History of Cannibalism

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:12:28 GMT

In 2001, a lonely computer technician living in the countryside in Northern Germany advertised online for a well-built man willing to participate in a mutually satisfying sexual act. Armin Meiwes’ notice was similar to many others on the Internet except for a rather important detail: The requested man must be willing to be killed and eaten. Meiwes didn’t have to look far. Two hundred and thirty miles away in Berlin, an engineer called Bernd Brandes agreed to travel to Meiwes’ farmhouse. There, a gory video later found by police documented Brandes’ consensual participation in the deadly dinner. The cannibalism was both a shock to the German public and a conundrum to

When an Army of Artists Fooled Hitler

Tue, 21 May 2013 03:22:23 GMT

Shortly after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, two Frenchmen on bicycles managed to cross the perimeter of the United States Army’s 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and what they saw astounded them. Four American soldiers had picked up a 40-ton Sherman tank and were turning it in place. Soldier Arthur Shilstone says, “They looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said: ‘The Americans are very strong.’” Patriotic pride aside, the men of the 23rd were not equipped with super-human strength. They did, however, have inflatable tanks. Shilstone was one of 1,100 soldiers who formed the unit, also known as the Ghost Army. They were artists

How Edwin Hubble Became the 20th Century’s Greatest Astronomer

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:28:00 GMT

Galaxy M106 as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA Edwin Hubble. Photo: Wikipedia When the great minds of science gathered at the U.S. National Museum (now known as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History) on April 26, 1920, the universe was at stake. Or at least the size of it, anyway. In scientific circles, it was known as the Great Debate, and although they didn’t know it at the time, the astronomy giants Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis—the two men who came to Washington, D.C., to present their theories—were about to have their life’s work eclipsed by Edwin Hubble, a young man who would soon become known as the grea

Where’d You Get Those Creepers?

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:42:05 GMT

Typical creepers. In modern slang, a “creeper” is that odd, socially awkward guy you know from the office, dorm, neighborhood, local restaurant. You can also call him a creep. A couple of years ago, Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island crew premiered the digital short called “The Creep,” with filmmaker and creeper John Waters, on “Saturday Night Live,” spawning a series of YouTube imitators mimicking the stilted, zombielike dance. Going back 50 years, another dance spawned a different sort of “creeper.” The dance was done to the 1953 hit ”The Creep,” from big-band leader Ken Mackintosh. A slow shuffle movement, it was embrace

The National Automated Highway System That Almost Was

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:31:23 GMT

A computer visualization of the driverless car of the future (1997) Visions of driverless cars zipping around on the highways of the future are nothing new. Visions of automated highways date back to at least the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the push-button driverless car was a common dream depicted in such midcentury utopian artifacts as 1958′s Disneyland TV episode “Magic Highway, U.S.A.” But here in the 21st century there’s a growing sense that the driverless car might actually (fingers crossed, hope to die) be closer than we think. And thanks to the progress being made by companies like Google (not to mention just about every major car company), som

$18 for a Dozen Eggs by 2010? Inflation Fears in 1982

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:28:21 GMT

Cover of the 1982 book Omni Future Almanac (Source: Novak Archive) The Omni Future Almanac was published in 1982 — a year when America would see double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Despite all this, the authors of the book were generally optimistic about the future of the nation. Technology, they explained, would solve many of the problems facing the country. In conjunction with this, the American people would surely worker smarter and simplify their lives, all while improving everyone’s standard of living. From the book: By 2000, most Americans will be experiencing a new prosperity. The problems of shrinking energy supplies and spiraling costs will be

The History of Baseball Stadium Nachos

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:12:48 GMT

A Ricos advertisement for the nacho bowl from the early ’80s. Image courtesy of Ricos Products Co., Inc. The smell of freshly cut grass, the crack of the bat, the 30 minutes standing in line at the concession stand. Baseball season is up and running and the experience of going to a game wouldn’t be the same without an expensive beer in one hand and a plastic receptacle of nachos covered in ooey-gooey cheese product in the other. But how did nachos become a stadium standard? In September 1988, Adriana P. Orr, a researcher at the Oxford English Dictionary, was asked to trace the etymology of the word “nachos” and conducted an initial investigation of the nacho st

What to Really Eat on Cinco de Mayo

Fri, 03 May 2013 05:12:56 GMT

Cinco de Mayo festival in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). Cinco de Mayo, as celebrated in the United States, shares some similarities to St. Patrick’s Day: a mainstream marketing fiasco that’s evolved out of an authentic celebration of cultural heritage. The typical Cinco de Mayo is a day of eating tacos and drinking margaritas. But, just like you won’t find corned beef and green beer in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, you won’t find ground beef tacos, nachos and frozen margaritas in Mexico on Cinco de Mayo. Contrary to popular belief, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence Day; it celebrates the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco

8 Famous People Who Missed the Lusitania

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:00:00 GMT

When the First World War began, in the summer of 1914, the Lusitania was among the most glamorous and celebrated ships in the world—at one time both the largest and fastest afloat. But the British passenger liner would earn a far more tragic place in history on May 7, 1915, when it was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives. The Lusitania was not the first British ship to be torpedoed, and the German Navy had publicly vowed to destroy “every enemy merchant ship” it found in the waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland. On the day the Lusitania set sail from New York, the German Embassy ran ads in U.S. newspapers,

For Perusing Pleasure, Zandra Rhodes’ New Online Fashion Archive

Thu, 02 May 2013 05:11:40 GMT

(c) Zandra Rhodes 2012. Paris, Frills and Button Flowers, Autumn/Winter 1971. If you want to lose a few hours, head over to the online fashion archive of designer Zandra Rhodes. Born in 1940 in southeast England, the pink-haired, flamboyantly dressed Rhodes was first exposed to fashion by her mother, a fitter for a Paris fashion house. She immersed herself in sartorial studies, and more specifically textile design, when she enrolled in the Medway College of Art and then the Royal College of Art before opening her own London boutique with Sylvia Ayton in 1967, the Fulham Road Clothes Shop. She got her break in 1969 when Diana Vreeland featured a few of her pieces in Vogue. From there,

Predictions for Privacy in the Age of Facebook (from 1985!)

Thu, 02 May 2013 05:06:55 GMT

Cover of the January 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review (Source: Novak Archive) “The ubiquity and power of the computer blur the distinction between public and private information. Our revolution will not be in gathering data — don’t look for TV cameras in your bedroom — but in analyzing information that is already willingly shared.” Are these the words of a 21st century media critic warning us about the tremendous quantity of information that the average person shares online? Nope. It’s from a 1985 article for the Whole Earth Review by Larry Hunter, who was writing about the future of privacy. And it’s unlikely Mr. Hunter could have any more a

Look Ma, No Fuel! Flying Cross Country on Sun Power

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:31:58 GMT

The Solar Impulse flying over San Francisco at night. Photo courtesy of Jean Revillard/Solar Impulse Bet you didn’t know that Texas has more solar energy workers than ranchers and California has more of them than actors, and that more people now work in the solar industry in the U.S. than in coal mines. Or that in March, for the first time ever, 100 percent of the energy added to the U.S. power grid was solar. Okay, so now you know all that, but I’m guessing you’re no more aquiver over solar energy than you were five minutes ago. That’s the way it is in America these days. Most people think solar is a good thing, but how jazzed can you get about putting pane

Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism

Wed, 01 May 2013 02:40:24 GMT

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl. “The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned ove

How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:55:33 GMT

Before the blows began to rain: Walter Reuther (hand in pocket) and Richard Frankensteen (to Reuther’s left). Photo: James Kilpatrick of the Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union. On the morning of May 26, 1937, Detroit News photographer James “Scotty” Kilpatrick wa

Decoding the Range: The Secret Language of Cattle Branding

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:09:32 GMT

samples of a few brand characters (image: we made this) To the untrained eye, cattle brands, those unique markings seared into animals’ hides with a hot iron, might just seem like idiosyncratic logos or trademarks designed to clearly and simply indicate ownership. However, unlike the graphic logos and trademarked images of popular commercial brands, they must comply with a rigorous set of standards and are developed using a specific language ruled by its own unique syntax and morphology.Livestock branding dates back to 2700 BC, evidenced by Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ancient Romans are said to have used hot iron brands as an element of magic. But brands are most famously ass

Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:13:47 GMT

Artist’s conception of a future monorail for Los Angeles, California in 1954 (Source: Novak Archive) “Who needs a car in L.A.? We got the best public transportation system in the world!” says private detective Eddie Valiant in the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Set in 1947, Eddie is a car-less Angeleno and the movie tells the tale of a an evil corporation buying up the city’s streetcars in its greedy quest to force people out of public transit and into private automobiles. Eddie Valiant’s line was a wink at audiences in 1988 who knew quite well that public transportation was now little more than a punchline. Aside from Detroit there’s no American cit

The Story of Elizabeth Keckley, Former-Slave-Turned-Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:49:52 GMT

Mary T. & Lizzy K. runs through May 5, 2013, at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. Illustration by Jody Hewgill. Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818 in Virginia. Although she encountered one hardship after another, with sheer determination, a network of supporters and valuable dressmaking skills, she eventually bought her freedom from her St. Louis owners for $1,200. She made her way to Washington, D.C. in 1860 to establish her own dressmaking business and met first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Just after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, in 1861, the FLOTUS hired Keckley (also spelled Keckly) as her personal modiste. Keckley took on the role of dressmaker,

Children of the 1980s Build Their Cities of Tomorrow

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:25:16 GMT

Screenshot from the 1983 film “City of the Future” When I was in second grade I made a diorama of a city of the future. This was the early 1990s and the diorama was supposed to represent the year 2000—somehow still lightyears away for a young kid during the George H. W. Bush administration. My little diorama city had cars that ran on a magnetic track, some tall awkwardly-shaped buildings, and a way of recycling rainwater that supposedly (at least in my juvenile mind) was great for the environment. Children of the 20th century (present bloggers excluded, perhaps) had some fascinating visions for the future. They tended to be pretty optimistic, but each generation betrays it

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Smithsonian researchers used optical technology to play back the unplayable records

The True Story of the Battle of Bunker Hill

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The last stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail is a shrine to the fog of war. “Breed’s Hill,” a plaque reads. “Site of the Battle of Bunker Hill.” Another plaque bears the famous order given American troops as the British charged up not-Bunker Hill. “Don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes.” Except, park rangers will quickly tell you, these words weren’t spoken here. The patriotic obelisk atop the hill also confuses visitors. Most don’t realize it’s the rare American monument to an American defeat. In short, the nation’s memory of Bunker Hill is mostly bunk. Which makes the 1775 battle a natural topic f

The Revolutionary Effect of the Paperback Book

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The iPhone became the world’s best-selling smartphone partly because Steve Jobs was obsessed with the ergonomics of everyday life. If you want people to carry a computer, it had to hit the “sweet spot” where it was big enough to display “detailed, legible graphics, but small enough to fit comfortably in the hand and pocket.” Seventy-five years ago, another American innovator had the same epiphany: Robert Fair de Graff realized he could change the way people read by making books radically smaller. Back then, it was surprisingly hard for ordinary Americans to get good novels and nonfiction. The country only had about 500 bookstores, all clustered in the bigg

The History of the Short-Lived Independent Republic of Florida

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In the predawn fog of September 23, 1810, about 50 men, led by Revolutionary War veteran Philemon Thomas, walked in the open gate of Fort San Carlos in Baton Rouge. An additional 25 men on horseback rode through a gap in the fort’s wall. Spanish soldiers discharged a handful of muskets before Thomas’ men let go a single volley that killed or wounded five Spaniards. The remaining soldados surrendered or fled. Revolutions come in all shapes and sizes, but the West Florida Rebellion holds the record as the shortest. In less than one minute it was over, setting in motion a chain of events that would transform the United States into a continental and, eventually, world power. The

Curses! Archduke Franz Ferdinand and His Astounding Death Car

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 02:29:03 GMT

A contemporary painting depicting—rather sensationally—the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. The events surrounding their deaths have attracted abundant rumor and legend, none stranger than the suggestion that the car that they were murdered in was cursed. It’s hard to think of another event in the troubled 20th century that had quite the shattering impact of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The archduke was heir to the throne of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire; his killers—a motley band of amateurish students—were Serbian nationalists (or possibly Yugoslav nationalists; historians remain divided on the topic) who

Nikola Tesla’s Amazing Predictions for the 21st Century

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:37:13 GMT

Photo of Nikola Tesla which appeared in the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future. Last year we looked at Tesla’s prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the Februar

A Peek Into the Jetsons Archive at Warner Brothers Animation

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:58:01 GMT

Early concept illustration of Rosey the Robot from the Warner Brothers animation archive (1962) Earlier this week I had the rare opportunity to meet with archivists from Warner Brothers and got a peek at their archive of Jetsons material. As you can imagine, I was in paleofuture nerd heaven. I shot a segment here in L.A. with “CBS Sunday Morning” (airing this Sunday April 28th) about the impact of “The Jetsons” on the way that we think about the future in the year 2013. We touched on my recently wrapped project that looked at all 24 episodes of the original series and, aside from being a nervous mess, I think the interview went well! Afterward I was able to tra

Document Deep Dive: What Was on the First SAT?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Explore the exam that has been stressing out college-bound high school students since 1926

Q+A with Chadwick Boseman, Star of New Jackie Robinson Biopic, ’42′

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:53:30 GMT

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment In 1947, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke major league baseball’s color barrier, the world was still 16 years away from the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement as just getting organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was eight years away and housing discrimination based on race would remain legal until 1968. In his first season with the MLB, Robinson would win the league’s Rookie of the Year award. He was a perpetual All-Star. And in 1955, he helped his team secure the championship. Robinson’s success was, by no means, inevitable and in fact he earned

‘I Remember’: An Artist’s Chronicle of What We Wore

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:29:01 GMT

A fashion spread, Hollywood movie or advertisement usually doesn’t reflect with accuracy what everyday people actually wore at a given time. Historically speaking, to really get a sense of the fashions of the times, old newsreels, photojournalism and catalogs offer more true-to-life examples of what was in style. The cover of Joe Brainard’s I Remember One literary source is the book-length poem I Remember, by writer and artist Joe Brainard. When it was originally published—in three parts between 1970 and 1973 by Angel Hair Books—the small print runs sold out quickly. Most recently it’s been published by Granary Books. The 1,000 entries in this work all begin with “I rememb

The Business of American Business Is Education

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

If you ask American leaders about the overall goal of the nation’s education system, you’d likely get a broad set of answers: to prepare young people for the workforce; to close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps; to create informed citizens ready to participate in popular democracy. Other western nations, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, provide their public schools with a national curriculum, roughly equalized budgets and government-produced exams. In contrast, the defining feature of American education is its localism; we have no shared curriculum, large funding disparities and little national agreement about what the purposes of schooling should be.

Edinburgh’s Mysterious Miniature Coffins

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:23:22 GMT

The “fairy coffins” discovered on Arthur’s Seat, a hill above Edinburgh, in 1836. Were they magical symbols, sailors’ memorials—or somehow linked to the city’s infamous mass murderers, Burke and Hare? Photo: National Museum of Scotland. It may have been Charles Fort, in one of his more memorable passages, who described the strange discovery best: London Times, July 20, 1836: That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’ burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out. Little cave. Seventeen tiny coffins. Three

How One Family Helped Change the Way We Eat Ham

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:18:05 GMT

A ginger sow and her piglets at the Ginger Pig’s Yorkshire farm. Photo: The Ginger Pig When we think about pigs today, most of us likely imagine the Wilbur or Babe-type variety: pink and more or less hairless. Mention pig farming and images of hundreds upon hundreds of animals crammed into indoor cages may come to mind, too. But it wasn’t always like this. Prior to the industrial revolution, pigs came in an astounding variety of shapes, sizes, colors and personalities. And the ham made from their cured meat was just as diverse. “The tale of ham’s innovation began around 200 years ago, and it paved the way for how ham is produced today,” said Nicola Swift,

The History of the Flapper, Part 5: Who Was Behind the Fashions?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:14:51 GMT

Ballerina Desiree Lubovska in a dress by Jean Patou. Photography by Adolf de Meyer, c. 1921. Have a look at the paintings of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and other Cubist painters whose work included hard, geometric forms and visible lines. As these artists were working in their studios, fashion designers, particularly those in France, were taking cues from their paintings. With la garçonne (the flapper, in French) in mind, the designers created fashions with the clean lines and angular forms we now associate with the 1920s-and with Cubism. The styles we’ve come to connect with Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore and other American actresses on the silve

Lilly Pulitzer: Remembering the ‘Queen of Prep’

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:08:39 GMT

Lilly Pulitzer fits a model with one of her creations. Carlo Allegri / Getty Images Anything is possible with sunshine and a little pink! —Lilly Pulitzer It all began with an orange juice-stained dress. American fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer, who died this weekend at age 81, started her iconic clothing line out of necessity. She had moved to Palm Beach, Florida, in the early 1950s after eloping with her then-husband, Peter Pulitzer, who owned citrus groves in the area. She opened an orange juice stand and while working there, discovered that squeezing juice was a messy business. To camouflage the inevitable stains, she said, she designed brightly printed sleeveless dresses. The st

One World Government and the War of Tomorrow

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:50:00 GMT

Illustration by Fred Siebel in the January 1950 issue of Redbook magazine A bright rainbow hangs in the sky, descending just over the horizon. The many people of Earth march slowly toward it, leaving behind the crumbling fist of war, oppression and international borders. Nothing less than the future is over that horizon; a future that is defined by a new world order where people are able to attain true happiness and leave behind the bleak conflicts of the early 20th century. At least that’s how it was imagined by illustrator Fred Siebel and writer Vincent Sheean in the January, 1950 issue of Redbook magazine. We may not have the one world government envisioned by Vincent Sheean

Document Deep Dive: The Heartfelt Friendship Between Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:38:29 GMT

Baseball brought the two men together, but even when Rickey left the Brooklyn Dodgers, their relationship off the field would last for years

Agony and Ecstasy at the Masters Tournament

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:37:47 GMT

Grantland Rice, Gene Sarazen and Craig Wood at the 1935 Augusta National Invitational Tournament. Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS There were already whispers that Craig Wood was a bad-luck golfer when, in late March of 1935, he accepted an offer from Bobby Jones to play in his second Augusta National Invitational Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Known as the “Blond Bomber,” Wood had literally made a splash at the 1933 British Open at St. Andrews—he had tied Denny Shute for the lead after 72 holes, but lost in a playoff when his booming drive found the famous Swilcan Burn, a thin channel of water that cuts across the first fairway. At the inaugural “Masters” (as it would later bec

Pay No Attention to the Spies on the 23rd Floor

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:41:05 GMT

The radio room on the top floor of the Hotel Viru in Tallinn, Estonia hasn’t been touched since the last KGB agent to leave turned out the lights in 1991. A sign stenciled on the door outside reads “Zdes' Nichevo Nyet”: There Is Nothing Here. The floor inside is yellowed linoleum. A cheap orange typewriter still has a sheet of paper in it; sheets filled with typed notes spill off the table and onto the floor. The dial of a light-blue telephone on the particleboard desk has been smashed. There’s a discarded gas mask on the desk and an olive-green cot in the corner. The ashtray is full of cigarette butts, stubbed out by nervous fingers more than 20 years ago. Mysteri

TV Will Tear Us Apart: The Future of Political Polarization in American Media

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:43:12 GMT

Portion of a magazine ad for Friedman-Shelby shoes showing an American family watching TV (1954) Imagine a world where the only media you consume serves to reinforce your particular set of steadfast political beliefs. Sounds like a pretty far-out dystopia, right? Well, in 1969, Internet pioneer Paul Baran predicted just that. In a paper titled “On the Impact of the New Communications Media Upon Social Values,” Baran (who passed away in 2011) looked at how Americans might be affected by the media landscape of tomorrow. The paper examined everything from the role of media technology in the classroom to the social effects of the portable telephone — a device not yet in e

The Story Behind Smithsonian Castle’s Red Sandstone

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:00:25 GMT

The Smithsonian Castle was built in the 1850s, using the red sandstone from the Seneca quarry. Author Garrett Peck tells the quarry’s story in his new book, The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry. Photo courtesy of Garrett Peck The red sandstone façade of the Smithsonian Castle makes it one of the most striking buildings in Washington, DC. The stone for the building was cut less than 30 miles away at the Seneca Quarry along the Potomac River in Maryland and shipped to the city in the 1850s when the building was first under construction. But the quarry’s story is a complicated one, involving death, floods, bankruptcy and presidential embarrassment. DC author and histor

Disney Kills LucasArts, My Childhood

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 02:32:09 GMT

Holographic home computer game of the future from the 1981 book Tomorrow’s Home by Neil Ardley Yesterday the most important company of my childhood killed the second most important company of my childhood. This past October, Disney purchased LucasFilm which included their venerable video game division LucasArts. But recently Disney decided that LucasArts no longer made financial sense for them to keep alive and just yesterday laid off all of the staff at LucasArts. Disney apparently reasoned that when it comes to video and computer games it makes more sense to simply license their stable of franchises (including Star Wars) to other game developers rather than produce games with

When New York City Tamed the Feared Gunslinger Bat Masterson

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:06:57 GMT

Bat Masterson, toward the end of his life, in New York City. Photo: Wikipedia Bat Masterson spent the last half of his life in New York, hobnobbing with Gilded Age celebrities and working a desk job that saw him churning out sports reports and “Timely Topics” columns for the New York Morning Telegraph. His lifestyle had widened his waistline, belying the reputation he had earned in the first half of his life as one of the most feared gunfighters in the West. But that reputation was built largely on lore; Masterson knew just how to keep the myths alive, as well as how to evade or deny his past, depending on whichever stories served him best at the time. Despite his dapper appearance an

The Worst Parade to Ever Hit the Streets of Boston

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:15:29 GMT

This tale is excerpted from Nathaniel Philbrick's upcoming book Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution, available for pre-order now and in stores on April 30, 2013. Boston had always been a town on tiptoe. Just a square mile in area, with a mere sliver of land connecting it to the mainland to the south, this tadpole-shaped island was dominated by three towering, lightly settled hills and a virtual forest of steeples. From Boston’s highest perch, the 138-foot Beacon Hill, it was possible to see that the town was just one in a huge amphitheatre of humped and jagged islands that extended more than eight and a half miles to Point Allerton to the southeast. Whether it was from a hill

The Jetsons Get Schooled: Robot Teachers in the 21st Century Classroom

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 03:48:14 GMT

This is the last in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The final episode of the first season (and only season until a mid-1980s revival) of “The Jetsons” originally aired on March 17, 1963, and was titled “Elroy’s Mob.” In the opening sequence of each episode of “The Jetsons” we see young Elroy dropped off at the Little Dipper School. Down he goes, dropped from the family car in his little bubble top flying saucer; his purple and green lunchbox in hand. Despite this, viewers of the show don’t get many peeks at what education in the future is supposed to

Ban Everything: Concern Over Future Blue Laws During the Lead Up to Alcohol Prohibition

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:37:34 GMT

1919 illustration in Life magazine showing a future exodus from the U.S. over new bans (Source: Predictions by John Durant) Anytime the government tries to ban something there are usually loud warnings about slippery slopes and guesses as to what perfectly reasonable American past-time might be banned next. If New York City bans trans fats (as it did in 2007), what’s next? Smoking in its parks? Oversized sodas? Oh, right. It banned those things too, with mixed success. Perhaps the most notorious ban in U.S. history was our national experiment in forced sobriety. The United States ratified the 18th Amendment in January of 1919 which outlawed the sale of alcohol and many people we

On the Menu This Easter in Newfoundland: Seal Flipper Pie

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:39:55 GMT

Photo by Kathleen Reckling. “Provisions were needed for tomorrow’s long drive to Springdale and were found at Bidgoods, just south of St. John’s in Goulds. Some local specialties, like seal flipper pie and caribou stew, were passed over while others, such as frozen partridge berries, made our mouths water…” In Newfoundland, having a “scoff” (the local word for “big meal”) includes some pretty interesting food items unique to the region: scrunchions (fried pork fat), cod tongues and fishcakes, for example. But perhaps the least appetizing dish, which is traditionally made during the Lenten season—specifically on Good Friday and Easter—is seal flipper pie. The m

A Gentile’s Guide to Keeping Kosher for Passover

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:57:30 GMT

Matzo, the unleavened bread. Image courtesy of Flickr user Avital Pinnick Updated on March 25, 2013 for the latest in Kosher for Passover news The Torah couldn’t make things any clearer. From Exodus 12:14 and 15: “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.” But in the centuries since, food has gotten a lot more complicated, an

Sad Jetsons: Depression, Buttonitis and Nostalgia in the World of Tomorrow

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:20:00 GMT

This is the 23rd in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 23rd episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on March 3, 1963 and was titled “Dude Planet.” In the year 2063, the people in the Jetsons’ universe work just a few hours a day. When they’re hungry, they just push a button or two and out pops a fully-formed, nutritious meal. Trips to distant planets are commonplace for a middle class family of four. And humanoid robots see to their every earthly need. But despite all this, the Jetsons are depressed. Not all of the time, mind you. They have fun p

Postwar Dreams of Flying in Style

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 05:15:54 GMT

Interior of the Northrop airplane of tomorrow (1948) During World War II, many Americans had high hopes for what life would be like in the future. Sometimes this was fueled by advertisers who promised that great things were just around the corner. Sacrifice for your country now they said, and all of your wildest high-tech dreams would come true after the war. As we’ve seen before, this attitude was sometimes tempered by skeptics who warned that while there may indeed be great things ahead, Americans should keep their shirts on. Once the war ended in 1945 inventors, corporations and advertisers kicked into high gear, scrambling to perhaps make good on some of the promises they

A Refreshing Take on Fashion Television: A Q&A with L.A. Frock Stars’ Star Doris Raymond

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:38:28 GMT

The Way We Wore team, from left, Jascmeen Bush, Shelly Lyn, owner Doris Raymond, Sarah Bergman, Kyle Blackmon (c) NHNZ If your wardrobe is seriously lacking the next time you have a red carpet event on the horizon, consider taking a trip to The Way We Wore. The vintage boutique, its proprietor Doris Raymond, and her upbeat staff are the subjects of a new series called “L.A. Frock Stars,” which premiered last week on the Smithsonian Channel. Over the course of six episodes, the docu-reality show follows Doris and members of her charismatic team as they travel from California to Texas to New York on the hunt for rare fashions to stock in her Los Angeles shop. We’re not tal

Has Gettysburg Kicked Its Kitsch Factor?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Climbing over a snake-rail fence, Peter Carmichael leads me across a field of grass stubble and gray boulders. On this wintry day in 2013, the field is frozen and silent. But 150 years ago it was filled with the shriek and smoke of the bloodiest battle in American history. “The Confederates who charged here were mowed down in minutes,” says Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. As evidence, he shows me photographs taken just after the battle of bullet-riddled corpses. Then he walks a few paces and lays the 1863 images on the ground. The field in the photographs aligns perfectly with the one we’re looking at in 2013, right down to clefts i

The Top Ten Most Influential Travel Books

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:21:33 GMT

William H.H. Murray's guidebook to the Adirondacks “kindled a thousand camp fires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature,” inspiring droves of American city-dwellers to venture into the wild and starting a back-to-nature movement that endures to this day. Of course, Murray's slender volume was part of a great literary tradition. For more than two millennia, travel books have had enormous influence on the way we have approached the world, transforming once-obscure areas into wildly popular destinations. A detailed selection would fill a library. So what follows is a brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics—some notorious, some barely remembered—

America’s Got a Case of Souvenir Mania

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

For days on end William Bird locked himself in a brightly lit storage room with hair clippings, a wood chip and two 80-year-old pieces of cake. There was also a punch bowl and the cuff of a woman’s blouse stained with Abraham Lincoln’s blood. Bird, known to friends as Larry (no Celtics jersey, but almost as tall), was digging through the American History Museum’s political history collection for overlooked gems to put in his new book, Souvenir Nation, out this month from Princeton Architectural Press, and the subject of an exhibit by the same title opening August 9 at the Smithsonian Castle. The things he exhumed didn’t usually look like treasure at all: b

Where Was the Birthplace of the American Vacation?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

One of the little-known turning points in the history of American travel occurred in the spring of 1869, when a handsome young preacher from Boston named William H.H. Murray published one of the first guidebooks to a wilderness area. In describing the Adirondack Mountains—a 9,000-square-mile expanse of lakes, forests and rivers in upstate New York—Murray broached the then-outrageous idea that an excursion into raw nature could actually be pleasurable. Before that date, most Americans considered the country’s primeval landscapes only as obstacles to be conquered. But Murray’s self-help opus, Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, suggested th

How the DC-3 Revolutionized Air Travel

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

On an early evening in late 1938, a gleaming American Airlines DC-3 departed Newark Airport, bound for Glendale, California. The takeoff, wrote a Fortune magazine reporter aboard to record the still-novel experience of cross-country air travel, was effortless. “Halfway along the runway,” he recounted, “she left the ground so smoothly that none of the first fliers in the cabin realized what had happened until they saw the whole field rushing away behind them and the factory lights winking through the Jersey murk ahead.” By the time the flight crossed over Virginia, passengers had already polished off a dinner of soup, lamb chops, vegetables, salad, ice cream and cof

Kon-Tiki Sails Again

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The most harrowing scene in Kon-Tiki, the new Oscar-nominated Norwegian film about the greatest sea voyage of modern times, turns out to be a fish story. In the 2012 reconstruction of this 1947 adventure, six amateur Scandinavian sailors—five of whom are tall, slim and valiant—build a replica of an ancient pre-Incan raft, christen it Kon-Tiki and sail westward from Peru along the Humboldt Current for French Polynesia, more than 3,700 nautical miles away. In mid-passage, their pet macaw is blown overboard and gobbled up by a big bad shark. During the scene in ques- tion, one of the tall and slim and valiant is so enraged by the bird’s death that he thrusts his bare hands

Projection Chic: Jane Jetson Tries on Clothes in the Future

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 02:38:00 GMT

This is the 22nd in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 22nd episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on February 24, 1963, and was titled “Private Property.” Like many that would come before it, this episode of “The Jetsons” centers around the business rivalry between Mr. Spacely and Mr. Cogswell. However, a short scene from the episode featuring Judy and Jane is far more interesting for our purposes than two middle-aged cartoon men yelling at each other about where their property lines begin and end. Jane “tries on” a green “ear

It’s Pineapple Season, But Does Your Fruit Come From Hawaii?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:23:51 GMT

An advertisement for Dole canned pineapple, circa 1940s. The most-visited tourist attraction in the state of Hawaii is the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument (also known as the Pearl Harbor bombing site). The second most visited attraction is about 20 miles north: the Dole pineapple plantation. In peak season between March and July, this tropical fruit evokes the 50th state in the Union for many. It’s a strange notion considering that, of the 300 billion pineapples farmed worldwide, only 400 million come from Hawaii. That’s only .13 percent. And while it’s true that Hawaii was once the big kahuna in global pineapple production, it’s an America

Kolaches: The Next Big Thing in Pastries and The Tex-Czech Community Behind Them

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:27:43 GMT

Doughy goodness is impossible to resist. Photo by Dawn Orsak Despite recent flirtations with secession and even being accidentally listed as a foreign destination by the State Department, Texas is not its own country. The Republic of Texas may have dissolved in 1845, but the Czech Republic of Texas is doing better than ever, thanks to a surge in interest in Tex-Czech’s most beloved dish: kolaches. The doughy pastry came over with a wave of Czech migration in the late 19th century and found a happy home in the rural communities like West, Texas (a town of fewer than 3,000 people but which serves as a touchstone for Czech culture in the region) and others at the heart of the stat

How David Mamet Became a Memorabilia Addict

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When they were young, I took my two eldest daughters browsing on London’s Portobello Road. Down in the basement stalls we found a fellow selling jam jars. These, when full, had held Dundee marmalade. They were now empty, and their apparent similarities fell before his lecture on the evolution of the jar. We were talked through the early Victorian birth of the great potteries, through the difference in tint from clay mined in the north and in the south; he explained how subtle changes in the lip of the jar were due to increased automation, and he taught us to date the jars by judging the smoothness of the glaze, and the brightness of the ink. It was the best learning experience we t

Remembering the Last Great Worldwide Sailing Expedition

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

At 3 p.m., August 18, 1838, six ships got under way on the ebb tide and made for the Cape Henry Lighthouse in Norfolk, Virginia. The vessels were packed with books, the latest scientific and navigational equipment, and a crew of 346 men—including a linguist, a mineralogist, two botanists and two artists. Behind them lay the young, ambitious United States. Ahead lay four arduous years at sea and almost 87,000 miles of ocean. Thus was the launch of the great United States South Seas Exploring Expedition, 175 years ago this summer, and it was as bold a venture as a mission to Mars would be today. The commander was a brilliant but stern 40-year-old Navy lieutenant named Charles Wilkes,

A Partial History of Headphones

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Koss SP3 headphones (image: Koss) It’s nearly impossible to walk around a city or college campus or shopping mall, or really anywhere these days, without seeing at least a few dozen people wearing little earbuds stuffed into their ears, or even huge headphones that look like something a 747 pilot might wear. The ubiquity of modern headphones could perhaps be attributed to the Sony Walkman, which debuted in 1979 and almost immediately became a pop culture icon. As the first affordable, portable music player, the Walkman became such an prominent characteristic of the young urban professional that it was even featured on the cover of The Yuppie Handbook. But of course, the history

The Vengeance of Ivarr the Boneless

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:54:03 GMT

Vikings as portrayed in a 19th-century source: fearsome warriors and sea raiders. Ninth-century Scandinavia has had good press in recent years. As late as the 1950s, when Kirk Douglas filmed his notorious clunker The Vikings—a movie that featured lashings of fire and pillage, not to mention Tony Curtis clad in an ahistorical and buttocks-skimming leather jerkin—most popular histories still cast the Denmark and Norway of the Dark Ages as nations overflowing with bloodthirsty warriors who were much given to horned helmets and drunken ax-throwing contests. If they weren’t worshiping the pagan gods of Asgard, these Vikings were sailing their longships up rivers to sack monasteries while ra

The Perils of Wearing Clothes

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 02:30:28 GMT

High, high heels. Courtesy of Wikicommons Last month, Chinese school uniforms made the news. Studies had shown that possibly as many as 25,000 children in Shanghai, China, were wearing mandated uniforms that were essentially poisoning them. The fabric contained toxic aromatic amines, thought to be carcinogens and found in plastics, dyes and pesticides. Ingesting, inhaling or absorbing the chemicals is considered hazardous and some countries have banned them. Students were told to stop wearing the outfits made by Shanghai Ouxia Clothing Company until a complete investigation had taken place. Horrifying, but not particularly surprising, considering how much China appears in the headlin

The Newspaper of Tomorrow: 11 Predictions from Yesteryear

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:16:00 GMT

Newspapers printed by radio right in the home in 1934 (Source: Novak Archive) Many of us here in the 21st century like to think of the newspaper as this static institution. We imagine that the newspaper was born many generations ago and until very recently, thrived without much competition. Of course this is wildly untrue. The role of the newspaper in any given community has always been in flux. And the form that the newspaper of the future would take has often been uncertain. In the 1920s it was radio that was supposed to kill the newspaper. Then it was TV news. Then it was the Internet. The newspaper has evolved and adapted (remember when TV news killed the evening edition newspape

Hey Vegans! There May Be Fish Bladder in Your Guinness

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:13:03 GMT

Since the mid to late 19th century, isinglass, a fish by-product has been used as a clarification agent in Guinness beer. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Guinness sells about 10 million pints a day across 100 countries. On St. Patrick’s Day, that number hops to 13 million. When Arthur Guinness set up shop in Dublin back in 1759, he never would’ve guessed that his stout would become the unofficial beer of the Irish and the go-to beverage to shout to the bartender come March 17 (besides Jameson). Even Obama honored his Irish lineage with a highly-publicized Guinness at a pub in Ireland last year. But the classic brew isn’t for everyone. For the hardline vegetarian

The Aughts: When People Wore Their Causes on Their Sleeves, Literally

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:06:27 GMT

John Kerry at a campaign rally, showing off his wristbands. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert At every stump speech, meet and greet, and town hall gathering during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry wore a very distinctive bracelet: the bright yellow LiveStrong wristband. He wasn’t the only recognizable figure to embrace the cancer cause through a silicone band. Usher, Lindsay Lohan and Ben Affleck were also some of the 80 million-plus people who made it known they supported a good cause, and felt cool doing it too. What followed was a charity wristband explosion, a distinctive way to wear your heart on your sleeve, or your cause on your wrist. Silicone gel “awareness bands&

Is Corned Beef Really Irish?

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:34:58 GMT

Corned Beef and cabbage. (Photo courtesy of flickr user TheCulinaryGeek.) It’s hard to think of St. Patrick’s Day without glittered shamrocks, green beer, leprechauns, and of course, corned beef and cabbage. Yet, if you went to Ireland on St. Paddy’s Day, you would not find any of these things except maybe the glittered shamrocks. To begin with, leprechauns are not jolly, friendly cereal box characters, but mischievous nasty little fellows. And, just as much as the Irish would not pollute their beer with green dye, they would not eat corned beef, especially on St. Patrick’s Day. So why around the world, especially in the US, is corned beef and cabbage synonymous with St. Paddy’s Day?

Events March 29-31: Parasitic Wasps, Joseph Henry and Victorian Portraits

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 02:07:35 GMT

The tiny parasitic wasps flourish by laying eggs inside other insects (above: a wasp punctures a fruit fly). Photo by USDAgov, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons Friday, March 29: The Secret Life of Parasitic Wasps Parasitic wasps are some of the creepiest bugs on the planet. To further their species, they hunt down other insects and inject eggs into them. When the eggs hatch, the baby parasitic wasp larvae feed on the host’s insides and grow, until they burst out Alien-style—eeeewww!! Today, Dr. Matthew Buffington of the USDA Systematic Entomology Lab is in the house to tell you everything you wanted to know about these wicked wasps. (You might want to avoid eating anything t

Mid-21st Century Modern: That Jetsons Architecture

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:04:00 GMT

This is the 21st in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 21st episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on February 17, 1963 and was titled “TV or Not TV.” Much like both “Elroy’s Pal,” and “Elroy’s TV Show,” this episode ostensibly gives viewers another look behind the scenes of television production. George and Astro are involved in a misunderstanding (isn’t that always the way?) where they think they’ve witnessed a robbery. In fact, it was just a TV shoot for “Naked Planet,” a spoof on the late 1950s A

Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:37:00 GMT

An original Harvey Ball smiley face (image: The World Smiley Foundation) In the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film, Forrest Gump stumbles into the history books as he runs across the country. At one point, he meets a poor T-shirt salesman who, Gump recalls, “wanted to put my face on a T-shirt but he couldn’t draw that well and he didn’t have a camera.” As luck would have it, a truck drives by and splashes Gump’s face with mud. He wipes his face on a yellow T-shirt and hands it back to the down-on-his-luck entrepreneur, telling him to “have a nice day.” The imprint of Gump’s face left a perfect, abstract smiling face on the bright yellow t-shirt.

The Most Audacious Australian Prison Break of 1876

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:04:00 GMT

The Irish Fenian prisoners known as the Fremantle Six. Photos: Wikipedia The plot they hatched was as audacious as it was impossible—a 19th-century raid as elaborate and preposterous as any Ocean’s Eleven script. It was driven by two men—a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic nationalist, who’d been convicted and jailed for treason in England before being exiled to America, and a Yankee whaling captain—a Protestant from New Bedford, Massachusetts—with no attachment to the former’s cause, but a firm belief that it was “the right thing to do.” Along with a third man—an Irish secret agent posing as an American millionaire—they devised a plan to sail halfway around the world to Fremantle, Australi

Why the Department Store Brought Freedom for the Turn of the Century Woman

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:48:22 GMT

The new series “Mr. Selfridge” begins airing March 31 on PBS. Historian Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery covers the best of pop culture and recently wrote about the film Cabaret. For Downton Abbey fans wondering how to spend their time until season four begins next year, PBS is offering a little something to dull the pain. Starting March 31st, we’ll be able to indulge our frothy fantasies with “Mr. Selfridge,” a new series replete with Edwardian finery, intricate plots and engaging actors. Inspired by Lindy Woodhead’s 2007 biography, Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge, about department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, the new Masterpie

The Secret Plot to Rescue Napoleon by Submarine

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 05:12:36 GMT

Tom Johnson, the famous smuggler, adventurer, and inventor of submarines, sketched in 1834 for the publication of Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt. Tom Johnson was one of those extraordinary characters that history throws up in times of crisis. Born in 1772 to Irish parents, he made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves and was earning his own living as a smuggler by the age of 12. At least twice, he made remarkable escapes from prison. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out, his well-deserved reputation for extreme daring saw him hired–despite his by then extensive criminal record–to pilot a pair of covert British naval expeditions. But Johnson also has a stra

Top Ten Afterlife Journeys of Notable People

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:08:20 GMT

For more than 500 years, the whereabouts of King Richard III of England, who was killed in the one of the last battles of the War of the Roses, were unknown. A skeleton was dug up in a parking lot in Leicester late last year, and last month, archeologists confirmed the centuries-old corpse belonged to the king. Death wasn’t the end for Richard, as experts study his remains and historians argue where they should finally be put to rest. It wasn’t over for these historical figures either, as told in great detail by Bess Lovejoy in “Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses,” out March 12. These men’s unfortunate corpses were hacked, stolen, transporte

Hot Air Balloon Travel for the Luxury Traveler of the 1800s

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:24:00 GMT

A colored print of La Minerve (image: National Air and Space Museum) From the moment the first hot-air balloon took flight in 1783, the earliest pioneers of human flight believed that the true future of aviation depended on the lighter-than-air inflatables and the creation of massive airships. Benjamin Franklin believed hot-air balloons “to be “a discovery of great importance, and one which may possibly give a new turn to human affairs.” He even suggested that they may herald an end to war. By the late 19th century balloons had been used for sport, travel, commerce, adventure, and, despite Franklin’s dreams, even war. But these designs rarely deviated from the

Kon Artist?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

One of the first lessons you learn going into the field as an anthropologist, archaeologist or journalist is never to come back empty-handed. The cost of the expedition, the need to gratify sponsors, the urge to make a name, all turn up the pressure to get the story. So it’s easy to forget the second great lesson of fieldwork: beware of a story that’s just a little too good. Thor Heyerdahl, who died in April at the age of 87, spent much of an active and sometimes inspiring life in the thrall of one good story. He believed that, long before Columbus, early ocean travelers—tall, fair-skinned, redheaded Vikings much like himself—spread human culture to the most remote

Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:12:21 GMT

The titular draughtsman looks through his perspective machine in this still from Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract 3D printers and digital mapping services are making it drastically easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A digital map can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone or computer and a replica of Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle. While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet reached the ubiquity of the home printer. B

The True-Life Horror that Inspired Moby-Dick

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:50:59 GMT

Herman Melville, circa 1860. Photo: Wikipedia In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined. And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale

Document Deep Dive: A Historic Moment in the Fight for Women’s Voting Rights

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:03:29 GMT

A cartoonist diagrammed the parade—5,000 suffragists strong—that defiantly marched in Washington 100 years ago

The Fishy History of the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish Sandwich

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:15:13 GMT

A Filet-O-Fish advertisement from 1976 featuring the elusive Phil A. O’Fish. Image courtesy of Archives, McDonald’s Corporation. For a burger joint like Mickey D’s, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich is surprisingly popular: Pirates would give their arm for one and apparently, whales eat “boatloads” of them. The Atlantic-Pollock based lunch item is consumed at a rate of 300 million a year— 23 percentof them are sold during Lent, and we can thank the Catholics in Ohio and a struggling businessman for the fast food classic. When Lou Groen opened the first McDonald’s in the Cincinnati area in 1959, business was tough. McDonald’s was new to the area—the McDonald broth

In 1989, Life Magazine Said Goodbye To Video Stores, Mailmen and Pennies…

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:25:00 GMT

Portion of the cover of the February 1989 issue of Life magazine The February 1989 issue of Life magazine predicted that, by the year 2000, many staples of modern American life might find themselves on the scrapheap of history. Life predicted that by the year 2000 people would need to say goodbye to everything from film (pretty much) to all-male clergy in the Catholic church (not so much). Bid ta-ta to LPs, fur coats and sugar. Toodle-oo to checkbooks, oil and swimming in the ocean. Happy trails to privacy, porno theaters and who knows, maybe even Democrats. It’s not just animals and vegetation that are departing the planet (currently one species every 15 minutes). With

The American Plan to Build Nuclear Power Plants in the Ocean

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 07:02:31 GMT

An artist’s 1972 drawing of an offshore nuclear power plant A new nuclear power plant hasn’t been built in the U.S. in over 30 years. But in the 1970s nuclear power was still in many ways a low-emissions dream of the future. In 1975, nuclear power accounted for about 4 percent of the electrical energy generated in the United States. But some people at that time were predicting that by the dawn of the 21st century, nuclear power might supply over 50 percent of electrical energy needed in this country. (Nuclear power currently produces 19.2 percent of electricity in the U.S.) In the early 1970s, plans were set into motion which would have seen eight to ten offshore nucle

The History of the Flapper, Part 4: Emboldened by the Bob

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:30:59 GMT

Actress Louise Brooks with bob and bee-stung lips, 1920s. On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a short story about a sweet yet socially inept young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to lop off her hair. With her new do, she is castigated by everyone: Boys no longer like her, she’s uninvited to a social gathering in her honor, and it’s feared that her haircut will cause a scandal for her family. In the beginning of the 20th century, that’s how serious it was to cut off your locks. At that time, long tresses epitomized a pristine kind of femininity exemplified by the Gibson girl. Hair may have been wor

10 Vintage Menus That Are a Feast for the Eyes, If Not the Stomach

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:17:48 GMT

The company’s top-seller, a 1940s menu from a Chicago seafood restaurant, is also one of the most visually striking. The Chicago seafood restaurant J. H. Ireland Grill opened in 1906 and had a colorful client list. It attracted everyone from gangster John Dillinger (who preferred the grill’s frog legs) to lawyer Clarence Darrow, who went there to celebrate big wins. But the co-founders of Cool Culinaria, which finds and sells prints of vintage menus, remember it for a different reason: its menu design. As colorful as its past, the best-selling menu uses bright colors to convey the fresh and vibrant ingredients to be found inside. Menus from across the country featured fant

The Dead Woman Who Brought Down the Mayor

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:22:50 GMT

An early 20th century street scene in New York City. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Leo Bar PIX IN MOTION Besides her killers, the elevator operator was the last person to see Vivian Gordon alive late on the evening of February 25, 1931. A petite redhead about 40 years old, Gordon was wearing an ankle-length mink coat, a platinum watch and a two-carat diamond ring when she left her posh, three-room apartment at 156 East 37th Street in Manhattan around 11 p.m. and got into a Cadillac. As the toxicologist would discover, at around 1 a.m. she probably ate some sauerkraut, raisins, “the white of egg, onions and celery” and had enough to drink so that her blood alcohol was 0.2 percent. Shor

George Jetson Navigates a Series of Tubes

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:33:00 GMT

This is the 20th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. “We may take it for granted that every well-equipped business office will be in direct communication, by means of large-calibred pneumatic tubes, with the nearest post-office. And however rapidly and however frequently the trains or airships of the period may travel, the process of making up van loads of mail matter for despatch to remote centres, and redistribution there, is far too clumsy for what commerce will demand a hundred years hence. No doubt the soil of every civilised country will be permeated by vast networks of pneuma

Photo Interactive: The Civil War, Now in Living Color

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 07:29:15 GMT

How one author adds actual blues and grays to historic photographs

VIDEO: The Show, Lincoln’s Washington at War, Depicts the Transformation of Washington

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 01:30:08 GMT

A scene from the Smithsonian Channel’s new documentary, Lincoln’s Washington at War. Courtesy of Smithsonian Channel In 1861, with the Civil War at Washington’s doorstep, President Lincoln was haunted by an terrifying dream foretelling his own assassination. Years later, on their last day together in 1865, Lincoln and his wife shared their dreams for the future over a carriage ride. She wished to see the European capitals and he hoped to take in California’s gold mines. Later that night, as the assassin’s bullet cut short the president’s life, Lincoln’s premonition from four years earlier came true. That poignant piece of history is just part

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Soviet Sniper

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:26:56 GMT

Lyudmila Pavlichenko arrived in Washington, D.C., in late 1942 as little more than a curiosity to the press, standing awkwardly beside her translator in her Soviet Army uniform. She spoke no English, but her mission was obvious. As a battle-tested and highly decorated lieutenant in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, Pavlichenko had come on behalf of the Soviet High Command to drum up American support for a “second front” in Europe. Joseph Stalin desperately wanted the Western Allies to invade the continent, forcing the Germans to divide their forces and relieve some of the pressure on Soviet troops. She visited with President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to

The Shocking Savagery of America’s Early History

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur. Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 a

Robot Vanna, Trashy Presidents and Steak as Health Food: Samsung Sells Tomorrow

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:07:57 GMT

Portion of a 1988 Samsung ad in Smithsonian magazine Advertisers love to use futurism as a way to position their products as forward-thinking. Often, that connection to futurism comes with a healthy dose of humor — jokes that from the vantage point of the future look less ridiculous than they were probably intended. In 1988, Samsung’s ad agency (Deutsch) produced a tongue-in-cheek magazine ad campaign to position their home electronics as the products you’ll be using long after Vanna White is replaced by a robot. Or long after shock jocks run for president. The ad below ran in the October 1988 issue of Smithsonian magazine and featured Morton Downey, Jr. with a ciga

Automating Hard or Hardly Automating? George Jetson and the Manual Labor of Tomorrow

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:05:00 GMT

This is the 19th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. “Yesterday, I worked two full hours!” George Jetson complains. “Well, what does Spacely think he’s running? A sweatshop!?!?” Jane replies. George and Henry push buttons to summon various cleaning robots (1963) The 19th episode of “The Jetsons” first aired on February 3, 1963, and was titled “G.I. Jetson.” The episode begins with George having a nightmare about his tyrannical boss, Mr. Spacely. Apparently Mr. Spacely thinks he can get away with forcing people to work what’

The History of the Flapper, Part 3: The Rectangular Silhouette

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:19:16 GMT

Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts & Sciences, 1925-1926. If a woman in the 1920s had a boyish figure and was naturally skinny, she was all set to slip on a slim sheath, a signature look of the 1920s. But if she was plump and curvaceous, she might choose certain undergarments to help achieve the fashionable unisex flapper shape. The flapper silhouette was distinctive, and if you’re a fan of PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” you’ve seen it in full effect this season: angular (basically rectangular), androgynous, slender and straight. It was influenced by Braque, Picasso, Leger and others artists whose work had hard, geometric forms and visible lines. Under

Into the Cave of Chile’s Witches

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 03:29:54 GMT

A photo sometimes said to depict members of Chiloé’s murderous society of warlocks—founded, so they claimed, in 1786 and destroyed by the great trial of 1880-81. There is a place in South America that was once the end of the earth. It lies close to the 35th parallel, where the Maule River empties into the Pacific Ocean, and in the first years of the 16th century it marked the spot at which the Empire of the Incas ended and a strange and unknown world began. South of the Maule, the Incas thought, lay a land of mystery and darkness. It was a place where the Pacific’s waters chilled and turned from blue to black, and where indigenous peoples struggled to claw the basest of li

Libra: The 21st Century (Libertarian) Space Colony

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:59:27 GMT

Title slate from the 1978 short film “Libra” by World Research Inc There’s nothing hotter right now than starting your own libertarian-minded community from scratch. Or at least threatening to do so. Glenn Beck imagines building a community/theme park somewhere in the United States called Independence Park which would celebrate entrepreneurship and sustainable living. Others envision Idaho as the perfect spot to build a fortress-like libertarian utopia called The Citadel, where “Marxists, Socialists, Liberals, and Establishment Republicans” need not apply. Still others — like PayPal founder Peter Thiel – are drawn to the idea of floating citie

The Last Massive Exploding Meteor Hit Earth in 1908, Leveling 800 Square Miles of Forest

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 04:54:00 GMT

Trees blown over by the shock wave of the 1908 Tunguska meteor. Photo: Vokrug Sveta / Wikimedia Commons Early this morning in Russia, when a meteor broke up a few dozen kilometers above ground, its supersonic flight and mid-air death generated shock waves that rattled houses, broke windows, and sent dozens to the hospital. The meteor’s break-up released energy equivalent to a few hundred thousand tons of TNT. But while it was surely scary for those whose heads it passed over, compared to a disaster that took place a few thousand miles to the east more than 100 years ago, today’s meteor was rather puny. On June 30, 1908, says NASA, a truly massive meteor exploded near the Pod

Document Deep Dive: The Most Influential Art Show You’ve Never Heard Of

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:59:34 GMT

Van Gogh, Cezanne and Degas lined the walls of the famed Armory Show 100 years ago, but it was Marcel Duchamp who stole the thunder

Jane Jetson and the Origins of the “Women Are Bad Drivers” Joke

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 04:24:00 GMT

This is the 18th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. “The problem with these skyways is that by the time they’re built they’re obsolete. This traffic is the worst I’ve seen yet,” George Jetson proclaims as he zips around in his flying car. The 18th episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on January 27, 1963, and was titled “Jane’s Driving Lesson.” As one might expect with a title like that, the episode deals with the flying cars of the year 2063. Specifically, female drivers of the year 2063. Jane Jetson gets a driving lesso

The Origins of Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:46:50 GMT

Actress Raquel Torres, by Ruth Harriet Louis, 1920s. Courtesy VintageGal It was during the Roman Empire that St. Valentine is said to have left a note to his jailer’s daughter, “From your Valentine” before his execution on February 14. Today, thanks to St. Valentine, cards expressing one’s heartfelt emotions, a. k. a. valentines, are given to that special someone. To defer to a classic idiom: It’s a day to wear our heart on our sleeve. We use the phrase casually, to mean exposing our true emotions, making ourselves vulnerable and letting it all hang out. The phrase is so pervasive that from Ringo Starr to Eminem to Carrie Underwood, those words-turned-lyrics have found their way int

Reckless Breeding of the Unfit: Earnest Hooton, Eugenics and the Human Body of the Year 2000

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 04:43:25 GMT

Illustration of the human bodies of the future by Abner Dean in the January 1950 issue of Redbook magazine In the early 1950s, many people speculated that the average American’s body would look dramatically different by the early 21st century. Some thought that the average woman of the year 2000 might be over six feet tall, incredibly athletic and just as strong as the average man. Others believed that modern conveniences like the automobile would have disastrous effects on the human body of the 21st century, creating a society of fat weaklings and scrawny depressives. You can place Earnest A. Hooton in the latter school of thought. The January 1950 issue of Redbook magazine inc

Harry Truman’s Adorable Love “List” to His Wife, Bess

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 04:15:47 GMT

As a celebration of 38 years of marriage, the former president shared his memories, both fond and bittersweet, from each anniversary

The Masked Merriment of Mardi Gras

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 02:57:52 GMT

Vintage Mardi Gras postcard, date unknown. Shrove Tuesday is a day to be remembered by strangers in New Orleans, for that is the day for fun, frolic, and comic masquerading. All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake in active operation. Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and ma

The Battle Over Richard III’s Bones…And His Reputation

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:34:32 GMT

Richard III may have died an unloved king, humiliated in death, tossed naked into a tiny grave and battered by history. But with two British cities trying to claim the last Plantagenet king’s remains 500 years after his death, maybe his reputation is finally turning a corner. The discovery of his remains last fall (and the confirmation of the results this week) was the culmination of a four-year search instigated by Phillipa Langley of the Richard III Society. Both the search and the discovery were unprecedented: “We don’t normally lose our kings,” says Langley. But it’s perhaps not too surprising that Richard’s bones were misplaced. Richard gained and

Viva Las Venus: The Jetsons and Wholesome Hedonism

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:09:00 GMT

This is the 17th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The January 20, 1963, episode of The Jetsons was titled “Las Venus” and along with the second episode of the series, “A Date With Jet Screamer,” is a great futuristic example of what I’ve come to call “wholesome hedonism.” What’s this wholesome hedonism that we see continually pop up in the Jetsons universe? Well, it’s sex, drugs and rock and roll. But unlike the more carefree version of these things that would become popularized in American culture during the late 1960s, this was s

The History of the Flapper, Part 2: Makeup Makes a Bold Entrance

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:14:16 GMT

Clara Bow with compact, 1920s. Let us take a look at the young person as she strolls across the lawn of her parents’ suburban home, having just put the car away after driving sixty miles in two hours. She is, for one thing, a very pretty girl. Beauty is the fashion in 1925. She is frankly, heavily made up, not to imitate nature, but for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes—the latter looking not so much debauched (which is the intention) as diabetic. Her walk duplicates the swagger supposed by innocent America to go with the female half of a Paris Apache dance. Flapper Jane by Bruce Bliven The New Republic September 9, 1925

The History of the Flapper, Part 1: A Call for Freedom

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:55:16 GMT

Women’s dress of the 1910s. In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate. Then the 1920s hit and things changed rapidly. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Women began attending college. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Alice Paul in 1923. World War I was over and men wanted their jobs back. Women, though, who had joined the workforce while the men were at war,

Should the Constitution Be Scrapped?

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 04:31:33 GMT

When James Madison and his fellow statesmen drafted the Constitution, they created our system of government, with its checks, balances and sometimes awkward compromises. The laws of the United States are based on this document, along with the Bill of Rights, and for more than 200 years, Americans have held it sacred. But Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman says that adherence to the Constitution is both misguided and long out of date. In his incendiary new book, On Constitutional Disobedience, the scholar who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues that giving up on the Constitution would improve American political discourse and government, freeing us from wh

The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:20:28 GMT

Nikola Tesla. Image courtesy of LIbrary of Congress By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination. Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him. “If E

A Brief History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:53:51 GMT

The chicken wing, now a ubiquitous bar food, was often thrown out or cooked into stock as recently as the 1960′s. Image via Flickr user Mike Saechang With the Super Bowl around the corner, it seems that buffalo chicken wings may have become the country’s favorite football-watching food. While the annual rumors that we’re running out of wings simply aren’t true, wings have indeed become the most expensive part of the chicken due to their popularity when fried and covered in buffalo sauce. Few of us realize, though, that less than 50 years ago, wings were considered one of the least desirable cuts of the chicken—a throwaway part often cooked into stock—and “

The Uncertain Promise of Freedom’s Light: Black Soldiers in The Civil War

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:17:08 GMT

Martin Robinson Delany worked to recruit soldiers for black Union regiments and met with Lincoln to allow these units to be led by black officers. He approved the plan and Delany became the first black major to receive a field command. Hand-colored lithograph, 1865. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery Black soldiers could not officially join the Union army until the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. But, on the ground, they had been fighting and dying from the beginning. When three escaped slaves arrived at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, in May, 1861, Union General Benjamin Butler had to make a choice. Under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, he was compelled

3D-TV, Automated Cooking and Robot Housemaids: Walter Cronkite Tours the Home of 2001

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 06:36:40 GMT

Walter Cronkite gives a tour of the home office of 2001 on his show The 21st Century (1967) Legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite’s regular half-hour CBS documentary program “The 21st Century” was a glorious peek into the future. Every Sunday night viewers of the late 1960s were shown all the exciting technological advancements they could expect to see just 30 or 40 years down the road. The March 12, 1967, episode gave people a look at the home of the 21st century, complete with 3D television, molded on-demand serving dishes, videophones, inflatable furniture, satellite newspaper delivery and robot servants. Exterior of the house of the future (1967) Cronkite spend

Falernum: The Elusive Cocktail Syrup to Name Drop At Your Next Party

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:30:34 GMT

Falernum, a syrup that originates in Barbados, pairs nicely with rum. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In a time of $15, infused vodka cocktails with too many ingredients (add a dash of pretentiousness), a simple drink is hard to come by. “Portlandia,” as always, captured it best: “That is a ginger-based bourbon drink infused with honey lemon and chard ice. Then building off of that base, we’ve got cherry tomato, lime zest. I actually made the bitters myself at home. We’ve got egg whites, eggshell, egg yellows. Rotten banana.” The fancy mixologist forgot one ingredient, though: falernum. This rum-based syrup with lime and spices—typically almond or ginger—originated in Barbados a

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 03:56:17 GMT

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few t

Future Calling: Videophones in the World of The Jetsons

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 02:25:00 GMT

This is the 16th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The Jetsons episode “The Little Man” originally aired on ABC on Sunday January 13, 1963. The story revolves around the accidental shrinking of George to no more than a foot high by Mr. Spacely’s new MiniVac machine. Miniaturizing humans was a somewhat popular theme of b-movies that preceded The Jetsons, like Dr. Cyclops (1940) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). The episode is one of the weakest of the series, but it does have one of the more interesting versions of the ubiquitous videophone: A miniaturized Georg

Ordering Pizza Online in the Retrofuture

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:47:25 GMT

Sandra Bullock’s character in The Net (1995) orders a pizza online “Internet introverts are socially dysfunctional; they write online, talk online, view the world from online, order books and pizza online.” Ordering pizza… online? Who ever dreamt of such crazy a thing? This warning about our increasingly isolated and dysfunctional lives reads like it could’ve been written today. But it actually comes from the May 3, 1996 edition of the Los Angeles Times, where Michael Shulman assured readers that ordering pizza online was the exclusive domain of the cyberspace hermit. I like pizza. Like I really like pizza. But it’s difficult being a pizza lover in Los

Everything Was Fake but Her Wealth

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 01:48:09 GMT

Ida Mayfield Wood in the 1860s. From The Recluse of Herald Square. Ida Wood never had any intention of renewing contact with the outside world, but on March 5, 1931, death made it necessary. At four o’clock that afternoon, the 93-year-old did something she hadn’t done in 24 years of living at the Herald Square Hotel: she voluntarily opened the door, craned her neck down the corridor, and called for help. “Maid, come here!” she shouted. “My sister is sick. Get a doctor. I think she’s going to die.” Over the next 24 hours various people filtered in and out of room 552: the hotel manager, the house physician of the nearby Hotel McAlpin and an undertaker, who summoned two lawyers from th

President Obama’s Autopen: When is an Autograph Not an Autograph?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:33:29 GMT

The modern Autopen “Atlantic” models (original image: Autopen.co) President Obama was in Hawaii when he signed the fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C. last week. Of course, it’s now common for us to send digital signatures back and forth every day, but the President of the United States doesn’t just have his signature saved as a JPEG file like the rest of us lowly remote signatories. Instead, he uses the wonder that is the autopen – a device descended from one of the gizmos in Thomas Jefferson’s White House. President Barack Obama’s signature. It would take a well-trained eye to spot the difference between a hand-written signature and an autosig

Lost and Found Again: Photos of African-Americans on the Plains

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Douglas Keister has spent the past four decades traveling the country to photograph subjects as varied as architecture, folk art and cemeteries. Over the years, as he moved from his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to several different cities in California, he carted around a heavy box of 280 antique glass-plate negatives that he’d bought when he was 17 from a friend who’d found them at a garage sale. “I thought, ‘Why the heck am I keeping these things?’” he says. Then, in 1999, Keister’s mother sent him an article she’d seen in the Lincoln Journal Star saying historians in Lincoln had unearthed a few dozen glass negatives that featured portra

When Did Humans Come to the Americas?

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans. For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse. Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History opened a formal excavation in one particular sink. Below a layer of undisturbed sediment they found nine stone flakes that a person must h

The History of Rocket Science

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:26:44 GMT

“Rocket science” is synonymous with intellectual complexity, but new research shows that rocketry owes its existence to baffled Chinese alchemists and a party trick that went horribly wrong. Previous scholarship places the rocket’s origins in China during the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1279). The first known use of the military rocket occurred in 1232 when the Chinese used fei huo tsiang (flying fire lances) against Mongols besieging the city of Kai-fung-fu. But that weapon didn’t come out of the blue, and scholars have long craved details about its development. Who invented the first rocket and the gunpowder that fueled it? Was the rocket conceived from the very begi

Air Pollution Has Been a Problem Since the Days of Ancient Rome

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Before the Industrial Revolution, our planet’s atmosphere was still untainted by human-made pollutants. At least, that’s what scientists thought until recently, when bubbles trapped in Greenland’s ice revealed that we began emitting greenhouse gases at least 2,000 years ago. Célia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands led 15 scientists from Europe and the United States in a study that charted the chemical signature of methane in ice samples spanning 2,100 years. The gas methane naturally occurs in the atmosphere in low concentrations. But it’s now considered a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change because of emissions from landfills, la

NAACP Leader Roy Wilkins Predicts: “We’ll Elect A Negro President”

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 06:58:26 GMT

Roy Wilkins (left) with Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House on November 29, 1963 (Library of Congress) Back in 1970 the idea of a black person being elected president of the United States sat somewhere between flying cars and robot servants in the realm of futuristic possibility. The ink was barely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had only recently ruled in 1967 that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and there were just 10 black members of the House of Representatives and one black member of the U.S. Senate. A black president was still very much the domain of science fiction. But civil rights activist Roy Wilkins thought Americans elec

“The Grave Looked So Miserable”

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:49:48 GMT

The funeral of James Idle in the village of Hullavington, on August 29, 1914. Picture the British countryside and the chances are that you are picturing the unmatched beauty of the Cotswolds, in England’s green heart, west of London. Picture the Cotswolds, and you have in your mind’s eye a place like Hullavington: a handful of cottages, some thatched, but all clustered around a village green, a duck pond and a church. The latter will most likely be ancient, 600 or 700 years old, and its graveyard will be filled with generation after generation of villagers, the same family names carved on tombstones that echo down the centuries even as they weather into slabs of rock. Visi

That Time a Chicken Crashed Nixon’s Inaugural Ball and Other Crazy Inaugural Tales

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:35:00 GMT

Not officially on the guest list for Richard Nixon’s 1973 inaugural ball, this chicken decided to check out the scene anyway. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives With Richard Nixon’s first inauguration, the president threw a party not to be beat. “Nixon girls” from the campaign served as hostesses for six inaugural balls. One ball at the Smithsonian was so popular, the cloakrooms were overrun, according to the Boston Globe, forcing guests to carry their minks and umbrellas with them during the celebrations. But the party animals had competition from real animals for the spotlight. Remembering Nixon’s first inauguration, Bob Schieffer of CBS

The Unsuccessful Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:33:30 GMT

As he awaited the outcome of the voting on election night, November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln sat expectantly in the Springfield, Illinois, telegraph office. The results came in around 2 a.m.: Lincoln had won. Even as jubilation erupted around him, he calmly kept watch until the results came in from Springfield, confirming that he had carried the town he had called home for a quarter century. Only then did he return home to wake Mary Todd Lincoln, exclaiming to his wife: “Mary, Mary, we are elected!” At the new year, 1861, he was already beleaguered by the sheer volume of correspondence reaching his desk in Springfield. On one occasion he was spotted at the post office filling

What Django Unchained Got Wrong: A Review From National Museum of African American History and Culture Director Lonnie Bunch

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:53:00 GMT

Jamie Foxx as Django. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Digital Inc. For more than two centuries slavery dominated American life, the shadow of slavery shaped everything from politics to the economy, from Westward expansion to foreign policy, from culture to commerce and from religion to America’s sense of self. And yet, contemporary America has little understanding or tolerance for discussions about the enslavement of millions. In many ways, slavery is the last great unmentionable in American public discourse. So I was hopeful and interested when I learned that Quentin Tarantino was to tackle the subject of slavery in his movie Django Unchained. At nearly three hours

PHOTOS: Who Were the Six Indian Chiefs in Teddy Roosevelt’s Inaugural Parade?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:57:00 GMT

Marching in the parade. Courtesy of the National Museum of American Indian/LOC Among the 35,000 people who participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade on March 4, 1905, were six men on horseback wearing elaborate headdresses. Each was an Indian chief and each had at one time or another been at odds with the American government. They were Quanah Parker of the Comanche, Buckskin Charlie from the Ute, Hollow Horn Bear and American Horse of the Sioux, Little Plume from the Blackfeet and the Apache warrior Geronimo. As they rode through the streets of Washington on horseback, despite criticism, Roosevelt applauded and waved his hat in appreciation. They are the subject of t

War and Peace of Mind for Ulysses S. Grant

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:41:00 GMT

Ulysses S. Grant working on his memoirs just weeks before his death in 1885. Photo: Library of Congress After serving two terms as president, Ulysses S. Grant settled in New York, where the most famous man in America was determined to make a fortune in investment banking. Wealthy admirers like J. P. Morgan raised money to help Grant and his wife, Julia, make a home on East 66th Street in Manhattan, and after two decades at war and in politics, the Ohio-born son of a tanner approached his 60s aspiring to join the circles of the elite industrialists and financiers of America’s Gilded Age. But the Union’s preeminent Civil War hero had never been good at financial matters. Be

Garrison Keillor’s 1996 Predictions for the Future of Media

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:39:00 GMT

“Nostalgia Man” by Amy Crehore 1996, oil painting (9 1/2″ x 10 1/2″) www.amycrehore.com There are many different ways to talk about the future, but few are more self-centered than guessing how the generations of tomorrow may judge you and yours. Garrison Keillor did just that with his article, “The Future of Nostalgia,” which appeared in the September 29, 1996, issue of The New York Times Magazine. Some of Keillor’s observations ring true for those of us here in the year 2013: he predicts that the future of air travel will only become more and more cumbersome and he imagines that Americans’ growing dissatisfaction with stagnant wages m

Document Deep Dive: The Menu From President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:17:32 GMT

What delicacies and confectionaries were found on the 250-foot-long buffet table?

What’s Inside a 2,000-Year-Old, Shipwreck-Preserved Roman Pill?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 08:01:00 GMT

Though submerged in a shipwreck for millennia, the ancient Roman medicinal tablets were kept sealed in tin containers (left), ensuring the pills inside remained dry (right). Image via PNAS/Giachi et. al. Around 120 B.C.E., the Relitto del Pozzino, a Roman shipping vessel, sank off the coast of Tuscany. More than two millennia later, in the 1980s and 90s, a team sent by the Archeological Superintendency of Tuscany began to excavate the ruins, hauling up planks of rotting wood. “It wasn’t an easy task. The wreck is covered by marine plants and their roots. This makes it hard to excavate it,” underwater archaeologist Enrico Ciabatti told Discovery News in 2010. “

The Jetsons and the Future of the Middle Class

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:32:00 GMT

This is the 15th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The world of “The Jetsons” is fundamentally a conservative vision of the future. Whenever I mention this people tend to give me a strange look. But what I mean by “conservative” is not some political “red versus blue” or “Democrat versus Republican” idea, but rather conservative in the advocacy of the status quo — aside from technology, that is. The show projects into the future what was seen by some in 1963 as the ideal American family. They may have flying cars and vacations to the

From Washington to Obama, Inaugural History

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:08:05 GMT

Everything you've wanted to know about the upcoming Presidential Inauguration

The Gadgets of the Future From the Electrical Shows of Yesterday

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 04:15:00 GMT

Postcard from the Chicago Electrical Show circa 1908 The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which concluded last week in Las Vegas, is where the (supposed) future of consumer technology gets displayed. But before this annual show debuted in 1967, where could you go to find the most futuristic gadgets and appliances? The answer was the American electrical shows of 100 years ago. The first three decades of the 20th century was an incredible period of technological growth for the United States. With the rapid adoption of electricity in the American home, people could power an increasingly large number of strange and glorious gadgets which were being billed as the technological solut

The Candor and Lies of Nazi Officer Albert Speer

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 03:06:26 GMT

Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943. Photo: Wikipedia On April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought toward the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in street-to-street combat, Adolf Hitler put a gun to his head and fired. Berlin quickly surrendered and World War II in Europe was effectively over. Yet Hitler’s chosen successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, decamped with others of the Nazi Party faithful to northern Germany and formed the Flensburg Government. As Allied troops and the U.N. War Crimes Commission closed in on Flensburg, one Nazi emerged as a man of particular interest: Albert Speer, the brilliant architect, minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich and a clos

The Murky History of Foosball

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 08:43:14 GMT

In the best tradition of skulduggery, claim and counterclaim, foosball (or table football), that simple game of bouncing little wooden soccer players back and forth on springy metal bars across something that looks like a mini pool table, has the roots of its conception mired in confusion. Some say that in a sort of spontaneous combustion of ideas, the game erupted in various parts of Europe simultaneously sometime during the 1880s or ’90s as a parlor game. Others say that it was the brainchild of Lucien Rosengart, a dabbler in the inventive and engineering arts who had various patents, including ones for railway parts, bicycle parts, the seat belt and a rocket that allowed artiller

Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About San Francisco’s Cable Cars

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:04:01 GMT

Ever since they became a part of the city’s transit system, they have been iconic mainstays of its cityscape

George Jetson Gets A Check-Up

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:44:00 GMT

This is the 14th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 14th episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired in the U.S. on December 30, 1962, and was titled “Test Pilot.” This episode (like so many others) centers around the competition between Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs. Both companies have developed an invincibility suit which can supposedly withstand anything from gigantic sawblades to missiles being fired directly at it. The only trouble is that neither Mr. Spacely nor Mr. Cogswell can find any person brave enough (or dumb enough) to act as a human guinea

Antigua’s Disputed Slave Conspiracy of 1736

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 05:26:36 GMT

Prince Klaas, leader of the supposed slave rebellion on Antigua, on the wheel. Breaking on the wheel was the most horrific punishment ever visited on a convicted criminal. It was a form of crucifixion, but with several cruel refinements; in its evolved form, a prisoner was strapped, spreadeagled, to a large cartwheel that was placed axle-first in the earth so that it formed a rotating platform a few feet above the ground. The wheel was then slowly rotated while an executioner methodically crushed the bones in the condemned man’s body, starting with his fingers and toes and working inexorably inward. An experienced headsman would take pride in ensuring that his victim remained con

The Children Who Went Up In Smoke

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 02:28:18 GMT

Billboard about the Sodder children, who went missing on Christmas Eve, 1945. From www.appalachianhistory.net. For nearly four decades, anyone driving down Route 16 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, could see a billboard bearing the grainy images of five children, all dark-haired and solemn-eyed, their names and ages—Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; Betty, 5—stenciled beneath, along with speculation about what happened to them. Fayetteville was and is a small town, with a main street that doesn’t run longer than a hundred yards, and rumors always played a larger role in the case than evidence; no one even agreed on whether the children were dead or alive. What everyone knew fo

That Time 150 Years Ago When Thousands of People Watched Baseball on Christmas Day

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:10:00 GMT

On a Christmas morning in South Carolina 150 years ago, two teams took the field for a game of what was not yet the national pastime. The epic Christmas Day faceoff between two teams representing New York regiments stationed on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, may be one of the most significant contests in baseball’s early decades, even though it retains a whiff of mystery. Details are scarce. We don’t even know the final score. But it was played before an enormous audience: various sources say 40,000 people watched the game on Hilton Head—also known then as Port Royal—on that Christmas morning. We do know one of the players: A.G. Mills. Then a young p

The History of the Teddy Bear: From Wet and Angry to Soft and Cuddly

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 03:00:00 GMT

This 1902 cartoon in the Washington Post was the inspiration behind the birth of the “teddy bear.” Photo: Wikipedia Boxed and wrapped in paper and bows, teddy bears have been placed lovingly underneath Christmas trees for generations, to the delight of tots and toddlers around the world. But the teddy bear is an American original: Its story begins with a holiday vacation taken by President Theodore Roosevelt. By the spring of 1902, the United Mine Workers of America were on strike, seeking shorter workdays and higher wages from a coal industry that was suffering from oversupply and low profits. The mine owners had welcomed the strike because they could not legally shut down

Santa Claus Builds A Flying Machine

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 04:15:48 GMT

Postcard showing “Santa Claus of the Future” from 1908 (Source: Novak Archive) Some people are up in arms over a recent update to Santa Claus that excised his smoking habit. However you feel about Santa losing his pipe, let me assure you that this won’t be the last time that Santa gets a makeover. It’s easy for some people to forget that every generation has “updated” Santa to fit with the times — or in some cases to fit with the future. As the 1800s gave way to the 1900s, many Americans felt like perhaps Santa Claus needed a new way of getting from house to house. Since the early 19th century, old Saint Nick had been using a sleigh and reinde

The Boy Who Became a World War II Veteran at 13 Years Old

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:58:51 GMT

Calvin Graham, the USS South Dakota‘s 12-year-old gunner, in 1942. Photo: Wikipedia With powerful engines, extensive firepower and heavy armor, the newly christened battleship USS South Dakota steamed out of Philadelphia in August of 1942 spoiling for a fight. The crew was made up of “green boys”—new recruits who enlisted after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—who had no qualms about either their destination or the action they were likely to see. Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, made no secret of the grudge he bore against the Japanese. “No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific,” one

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:37:00 GMT

The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district. Six members of the Lykov family lived in this remote wilderness for more than 40 years–utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement. Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the

Document Deep Dive: Emancipation Proclamation

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When freeing the slaves 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln traded in his famous lyricism for a dry, legal tone. Harold Holzer explains why

The Decline and Fall of the Space Action Hero

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:40:00 GMT

This is the thirteenth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 13th episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on December 16, 1962, and was titled “Elroy’s Pal.” The episode looks at Elroy’s obsession with the fictional TV show “Nimbus the Greatest,” about a heroic fighter of space pirates. The show is sponsored by Moonies breakfast cereal and Elroy enters a contest for the chance to meet Nimbus in person. As it turns out, Elroy wins the contest but the actor who plays Nimbus is ill and can’t visit Elroy at home. When George finds out

The Vegas Hotspot That Broke All the Rules

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The newest casino in Vegas was a 40-foot trailer in a vacant lot. Inside, gamblers in shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps fed quarters into video-poker machines. Outside, weeds sprouted through the sun-scorched pavement of a forlorn stretch of Bonanza Road near Three Star Auto Body and Didn’tDoIt Bail Bonds. A banner strapped to the trailer announced that this was the “Site of the Famous Moulin Rouge Casino!” That was the point: Due to one of myriad quirks of Nevada law, some form of gambling must occur here every two years or the owners lose their gaming license. This desolate city block had practically no value except as the site of a hotel-casino that closed more than

Where Did Pabst Win that Blue Ribbon?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:56:00 GMT

A vintage Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement from the mid 1950s. “Go get me a blue ribbon.” I must’ve heard my grandpa utter those words hundreds of times as we sat together fishing off our small dock. Even before I could read I knew which beer to grab for him – the one with the first prize ribbon on the can. I didn’t realize it as a child of course, but that ease of recognition was a testament to the power of branding. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer –PBR to its friends– may today be best known as the preferred beer of old Midwestern fisherman and mustachioed hipsters, but that instantly recognizable ribbon is more than just a symbol or marketing ploy.

How the Emancipation Proclamation Came to Be Signed

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

On July 20, 1862, John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, predicted in a letter that the president “will not conserve slavery much longer.” Two days later, Lincoln, wearing his familiar dark frock coat and speaking in measured tones, convened his cabinet in his cramped White House office, upstairs in the East Wing. He had, he said, “dwelt much and long on the subject” of slavery. Lincoln then read aloud a 325-word first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, intended to free slaves in Confederate areas not under United States authority. Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury, stated that he would give the measure his “cordial support.” Secreta

The Little-Known Legend of Jesus in Japan

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai. The rest of the world knows him as Jesus Christ. It turns out that Jesus of Nazareth—the Messiah, worker of miracles and spiritual figurehead for one of the world’s foremost religions—did not die on the cross at Calvary, as widely reported. According to amusing local folklore, that was his kid brother,

Fun Places on the Internet (in 1995)

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 07:29:03 GMT

The Smithsonian homepage in 1995 “Who hasn’t heard about the Internet? It’s mentioned on television, in the magazines, and on the radio. Everyone’s talking about it, and everyone wants to get connected to it.” So began the 1995 book, simply titled The Internet by Kerry Cochrane. Do you remember your first time on the Internet? Mine was pretty typical for a kid in suburban America. It was 1995 and my parents had signed up for a free America Online trial using one of the millions of CD-ROMs that seemed to arrive at our house daily. My dad bought an external 14.4k modem for our Mac Performa and I remember tying up the phone line while talking in random chatr

White Gold: How Salt Made and Unmade the Turks and Caicos Islands

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 07:18:22 GMT

The remains of a windmill, once used to pump brine into the salt pans of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Photo credit: www.amphibioustravel.com. Salt is so commonplace today, so cheap and readily available, that it is hard to remember how hard to come by it once was. The Roman forces who arrived in Britain in the first century C.E reported that the only way the local tribes could obtain it was to pour brine onto red-hot charcoal, then scrape off the crystals that formed on the wood as the water hissed and evaporated. These were the same forces that, according to a tradition dating to the time of Pliny the Elder, gave us the word “salary” because they once received their wages

Sit Back and Plug In: Entertainment in the Year 2000

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 08:26:21 GMT

Artist David Stone Martin imagines the Telesense entertainment device of the year 2000 (1950) In the January, 1950, issue of Redbook author Philip Wylie laid out his predictions for the year 2000. Wylie’s predictions focused on the world of leisure and, depending on your point of view, it’s either a delightfully hedonistic vision of utopian living finally realized — or a darkly hedonistic vision of sloth and sin. This version of the 21st century includes new drugs that will replace the old-fashioned booze and painkillers of mid-century; an interactive television which includes a special suit that allows you to engage all five senses; and vacations to Mars whenever yo

The Best Gifts to Give (or Receive) About Paleofuturism

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:51:57 GMT

If you’re looking for the perfect gift for that paleofuturist in your life, might I suggest a few of the books and DVDs currently sitting on my shelf? Well, not these books exactly. But different copies of these books that you can buy from a reputable retailer. You get the picture. Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future by Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan ($31.95) I’ve often called Yesterday’s Tomorrows the retro-futurist’s bible. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it quite literally changed my life by allowing me to see this silly topic I loved so much (meal pills, flying cars and jetpacks) as something that was worthy of seri

A Futuristic Golf Game in the Sky

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:43:00 GMT

This is the twelfth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 12th episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired in the U.S. on December 9, 1962 and was titled “Astro’s Top Secret.” Personally, this is my least favorite episode in the entire series. It has odd pacing, is visually uninteresting, and the animation seems abnormally sloppy. The episode opens with a voiceover introducing us to George and Astro as having a relationship that’s a bit strained at the moment. We’re then shown Mr. Spacely and Mr. Cogswell — two business rivals playing a game

Drinking Tea Was Once Considered an Irresponsible, Reckless Pursuit for Women

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 06:53:00 GMT

Photo: Kelsey Christina Karstrand Poor Irish women who drank tea in the 19th century might as well have been chugging a bottle of whiskey. Critics viewed the provocative kettle as stifling to their country’s economic growth and the tea-chugging habit as reckless and uncontrollable. Tea was a waste of time and money, luring working girls away from their never ending husband and home-tending duties. Here are some “improvement pamphlet” messages from the time (circa 1811-1826), delivered to poor households and warning about the horrors awaiting if a damsel dared drink for the pot: Lady Seraphine, the improving landowner, comments on the absence of tea cups in the kitche

Motopia: A Pedestrian Paradise

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:45:43 GMT

Motopia as illustrated in 1960 by Arthur Radebaugh for “Closer Than We Think” (Source: Novak Archive) “No person will walk where automobiles move,” is how British architect Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe described his town of the future, “and no car can encroach on the area sacred to the pedestrian.” Jellicoe was talking to the Associated Press in 1960 about his vision for a radically new kind of British town—a town where the bubble-top cars of tomorrow moved freely on elevated streets, and the pedestrian zipped around safely on moving sidewalks. For a town whose main selling point was the freedom to not worry about getting hit by cars, it would have a rath

The Day Henry Clay Refused to Compromise

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:48:00 GMT

Henry Clay, c. 1850-52. Photo: Library of Congress To this day, he is considered one of the most influential politicians in U.S. history. His role in putting together the Compromise of 1850, a series of resolutions limiting the expansion of slavery, delayed secession for a decade and earned him the nickname “the Great Pacificator.” Indeed, Mississippi Senator Henry S. Foote later said, “Had there been one such man in the Congress of the United States as Henry Clay in 1860-’61 there would, I feel sure, have been no civil war.” Clay owned 60 slaves. Yet he called slavery “this great evil…the darkest spot in the map of our country” and di

The Kennedy Assassin Who Failed

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:58:08 GMT

Posted from Dan Lewis' fantastic Now I Know newsletter. Subscribe here or follow him on Twitter. In November of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States. Three years later, he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while in a motorcade going through Dallas, Texas. Had Richard Paul Pavlick gotten his way, Oswald would have never gotten to pull the trigger. Because Pavlick wanted to kill JFK first. On December 11, 1960, JFK was the president-elect and Richard Paul Pavlick was a 73-year-old retired postal worker. Both were in Palm Beach, Florida. JFK was there on a vacation of sorts, taking a trip to warmer climates as he prepared to assume the office of the

Your Genetic Future: Horse-Dogs, Plantimals and Mini-Rhino Pets

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 06:40:00 GMT

The mini-rhino of the future, accomplished through genetic engineering (1982) Maybe you’ve heard the internet meme-ish question: would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses. Well, I’ve got a new one for you: would your rather own a kitty-cat sized-rhino or a rhino-sized kitty-cat? Because children of the 1980s were told that in the future they might just get such a choice. The 1982 book The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog imagined what the world of genetic engineering might mean to the people, plants and animals of the 21st century. The book presented genetic engineering as a natural progression in the course of human history, pointing out

Grandpa Jetson is Way Cooler Than Grandpa Simpson

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 03:04:00 GMT

This is the eleventh in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The 11th episode of The Jetsons opens with a police officer pulling over Montague Jetson — George’s grandfather and a man whose abundant energy and enthusiasm for life dominate the episode. The cop observes that Grandpa Jetson is, “110… and still acting like a man of 75.” With that, we learn that the promises of the 20th century were true: not only will people of the future live longer, they’ll be much happier and healthier. Titled, “A Visit From Grandpa,” the episode first aired on D

In the 1920s, Shoppers Got Punk’d By Fake Televisions

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 05:51:00 GMT

Faked TV demonstration illustrated in the August 1926 issue of Science and Invention Today advertisers use futuristic tech like jetpacks and robots in their TV ads so that potential consumers think of their brand as forward thinking and innovative. In the 1920s, the cutting edge gadget that advertisers most wanted to associate themselves with was television. But, since the technology was still in its infancy, they faked it. The August 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine included two illustrations showing ways that businesses could create “fake” television demonstrations to lure customers inside their stores. The illustration above depicts a bogus TV demo in a st

Crockford’s Club: How a Fishmonger Built a Gambling Hall and Bankrupted the British Aristocracy

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 07:11:35 GMT

William Crockford—identified here as “Crockford the Shark”—sketched by the great British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson in about 1825. Rowlandson, himself an inveterate gambler who blew his way through a $10.5 million family fortune, knew the former fishmonger before he opened the club that would make his name. The redistribution of wealth, it seems safe to say, is vital to the smooth operation of any functioning economy. Historians can point to plenty of examples of the disasters that follow whenever some privileged elite decides to seal itself off from the hoi-polloi and pull up the ladder that its members used to clamber to the top of the money tree. And while there alwa

Document Deep Dive: Rosa Parks’ Arrest Records

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:45:53 GMT

Read between the lines of the police report drawn up when the seamstress refused to give up her seat 57 years ago

The Episode Where George Jetson Rages Against the Machine

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:28:00 GMT

This is the tenth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. From the very first episode “The Jetsons” promised a push-button future of leisure. But this vision of easy-living sometimes has a dark side. A side where robots might cease helping you—and begin stealing your job. In the tenth episode titled “Uniblab,” which originally aired on November 25, 1962, the action is largely driven by George and an antagonist robot by the name of Uniblab. This episode is arguably the darkest in its message to kids that one day you may very well be replaced by a machine. Before

Madame Restell: The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 04:16:13 GMT

A likeness of Madame Restell, published in the National Police Gazette, 1847. From The Wickedest Woman in New York. Victorian-era women experiencing “female trouble” could pick up a daily newspaper, scan the advertisements and translate the euphemisms. A dash of “uterine tonic,” an application of a “female wash,” a brushing of “carbolic purifying powder” or any product with “French” in the title promised to prevent conception, while a “female regulator,” “rose injections” or a dose of “cathartic pills” could alleviate “private difficulties” and “remove obstructions.” They knew the key ingredients—pennyroyal, savin, black draught, tansy tea, oil of cedar, ergot of rye, mallow, motherwor

Future Classics: Readers of 1936 Predict Which Authors Will Endure

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 08:41:15 GMT

Ernest Hemingway’s 1923 passport photo (Source: National Archives) In 1936, a quarterly magazine for book collectors called The Colophon polled its readers to pick the ten authors whose works would be considered classics in the year 2000. Sinclair Lewis, author of the 1935 hit It Can’t Happen Here, was a natural choice for the top spot. Just five years earlier Sinclair had been the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. But some of the authors are likely forgotten names to even the most ardent reader here in the year 2012: - Sinclair Lewis - Willa Cather - Eugene O’Neill - Edna St. Vincent Millay - Robert Frost - Theodore

The History of Pardoning Turkeys Began With Tad Lincoln

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:28:01 GMT

Tad Lincoln, 1853-1871. Photo: Matthew B. Brady, Library of Congress President Barack Obama pardoned his fourth turkey today, in what many believe is a Thanksgiving tradition dating back to 1947, when President Harry Truman, standing outside the White House, was presented with a holiday bird by the National Turkey Federation. But there’s no evidence that Truman did anything different from his successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, who, with his family, consumed all eight birds the NTF presented them. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy became the first president to see the word “pardon” used with reference to a Thanksgiving turkey, but he did not officially spare a bird in a pre-Thank

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 09 – Elroy’s TV Show

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:40:00 GMT

This is the ninth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. When I was a kid I didn’t quite understand how TV and movies were made. Around the age of four or five, I had a basic understanding of how live TV was recorded with cameras and beamed to homes all around the country. And I understood that every time I put my Captain EO VHS tape (I think we recorded it off TV, since it was never issued officially) into the VCR, I would get to watch Michael Jackson singing and dancing. But I conflated the two and believed that every time I put in that VHS tape I was somehow telling people in some d

Looking at the Battle of Gettysburg Through Robert E. Lee’s Eyes

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Anne Kelly Knowles loves places where history happened. She traces this passion to family trips she took as a girl in the 1960s, when her father would pile his wife and four children into a rented RV for odysseys from their home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to iconic sites from America’s past. “We’d study the road atlas and plot trips around places like the Little Bighorn and Mount Rushmore,” Knowles recalls. “Historical landmarks were our pins in the map.” Between scheduled stops, she and her father would leap out of the RV to take pictures of historical markers. “I was the only one of the kids who was really jazzed about history. It was my strongest

The Tucker Was the 1940s Car of the Future

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Francis Ford Coppola’s car connection began at birth, or even before. He was delivered at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, and Henry Ford himself sometimes attended rehearsals of the Detroit Symphony, where Coppola’s father played first flute. “In a family tradition of giving the middle name to an important family acquaintance, they gave me ‘Ford,’” the Godfather director explains. But Coppola would soon come to admire a more obscure automotive icon: Preston Tucker, father of the unlucky Tucker ’48, a cutting-edge car that was never mass-produced because of the inventor’s legal and financial woes. “As a child, my father told me ab

The Early History of Faking War on Film

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:17:00 GMT

Frederic Villiers, an experienced war artist and pioneer cinematographer, was the first man to attempt to film in battle—with deeply disappointing results. Who first thought of building a pyramid, or of using gunpowder as a weapon? Who invented the wheel? Who, for that matter, came up with the idea of taking a movie camera into battle and turning a profit from the horrible realities of war? History offers no firm guidance on the first three questions, and is not entirely certain even on the fourth, although the earliest war films cannot have been shot much earlier than 1900. What we can say, fairly definitely, is that most of this pioneer footage tells us little about war as it

A Scholarly Approach to Innovation

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

From about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens looked pretty much as we do today, and had ample brainpower, but as the historian Jared Diamond has written, “something was missing.” Their tools were rudimentary, sharp rocks at best. Suddenly came an explosion of innovation—finely hewn knives, carved figurines, hearths—roughly coinciding with the arrival of language. Which came first is a topic of debate, but without question this was humankind’s great “Aha!” moment, unleashing a wave of change that led to Homo sapiens quickly becoming the most widely dispersed species on earth. In the superb book What Technology Wants, the journalist Kevin Ke

Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist: Eliminating Undesirables by 2100

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 06:29:00 GMT

Photo of inventor Nikola Tesla from the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine Interest in the life of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla has seen a tremendous resurgence in the past two decades. And with good reason. The man was a genius who was able to take so many of the ideas swirling around in the 19th century ether and turn them into fantastic new inventions — both real and imagined. Tesla’s wondrous imagination made him quite the futurist and here at the Paleofuture blog we’ve looked at some of his remarkably prescient predictions over the past few years. But the 21st century’s rather fashionable interest in Tesla has had some disturbing side effects.

The Fight that Wouldn’t Stay Fixed

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 06:58:00 GMT

Battling Siki in 1925. Photo: Wikipedia Despite the promoters’ best efforts, the 1922 light-heavyweight fight between the popular European champion Georges Carpentier and an obscure Senegalese brawler named Amadou Mbarick Fall, better known as “Battling Siki,” wasn’t supposed to be much of a fight. In the run-up to the September 22 event, newspapers confidently reported that fight fans could “expect to see the French idol win inside of six rounds.” And yet more than 50,000 Parisians flocked to the Buffalo Velodrome, creating the first “million-franc” boxing match. Carpentier was a war hero beloved by his countrymen, and even though he h

Henry Wiencek Responds to His Critics

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 03:10:00 GMT

The cover story of Smithsonian’s October 2012 issue, “Master of Monticello” by Henry Wiencek, presented a new and controversial portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Wiencek writes that the founding father was far from a reticent slaveholder but instead was heavily involved and invested in maximizing profits at his slave-dependent estate. Since the release of Wiencek’s book of the same name (and which provided the excerpt for the magazine), a new controversy has arisen, this time about the accuracy and diligence of Wiencek’s scholarship. Writing for Slate, Jefferson historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes, “Suffice it to say that the problems with Master of the Mo

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 08 – Rosey’s Boyfriend

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 03:30:00 GMT

This is the eighth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The personal humanoid robotic assistant (or robot maid; robot butler; whatever you’d like to call it) easily makes the short list of retro-futuristic dreams still unfulfilled — up there with the flying car, the jetpack and the meal-in-a-pill. Sure, some people have the Roomba — that Cheetos-hungry robo-pet that crawls around your living room floor — but the dream of the humanoid robot, the robot that can interact with the family naturally, the robot that can speak and understand commands; this is the robot we kno

Geronimo’s Appeal to Theodore Roosevelt

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:08:00 GMT

Geronimo as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1898. Photo: Frank A. Rinehart, Wikipedia When he was born he had such a sleepy disposition his parents named him Goyahkla—He Who Yawns. He lived the life of an Apache tribesman in relative quiet for three decades, until he led a trading expedition from the Mogollon Mountains south into Mexico in 1858. He left the Apache camp to do some business in Casa Grandes and returned to find that Mexican soldiers had slaughtered the women and children who had been left behind, including his wife, mother and three small children. “I stood until all had passed, hardly knowing what I would do,” he would recall. “I had no

Five Past Visions of Our Political Future

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 05:06:02 GMT

Electronic government of the future from the 1981 kids book, World of Tomorrow by Neil Ardley Twentieth-century Americans saw many different predictions for what the world of politics might look like in the 21st century. Some people imagined a world where politics ceased to matter much in daily life. Others saw a world where computers would allow for direct democracy and people voting from their homes. Some people thought that once women were allowed to vote, men would soon lose that privilege. Still others saw the complete conquest of the western hemisphere by American forces — and a president from Montreal by the year 2001. Today Americans head out to the polls and while they

Uncovering the Truth Behind the Myth of Pancho Villa, Movie Star

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:25:00 GMT

Pancho Villa, seen here in a still taken from Mutual’s exclusive 1914 film footage. But did the Mexican rebel really sign a contract agreeing to fight his battles according to the ideas of a Hollywood director? The first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico since 1876, what was left of the central government in Mexico City found itself fighting several contending rebel forces—most notably the Liberation Army of the South, commanded by Emiliano Zapata, and the Chihuahua-b

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 07 – The Flying Suit

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:42:00 GMT

This is the seventh in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The seventh episode of “The Jetsons” premiered on American television November 4, 1962, and was titled “The Flying Suit.” In this episode we’re introduced to Mr. Cogswell (we don’t learn until the 1980s that his first name is Spencer) whose company Cogswell’s Cosmic Cogs is Mr. Spacely’s direct competitor. We discover that the cigar-chomping Cogswell is trying to merge with Spacely Sprockets in a sort of 21st century semi-hostile takeover. Cogswell’s company has developed the X-1500

PHOTOS: The History of Abraham Lincoln on Film

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:34:59 GMT

The 16th president has been a Hollywood star and box office attraction since the earliest days of Hollywood

Indexed: Fire by the Numbers

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:00:59 GMT

Fire can destroy in an instant—or burn for centuries

Aldous Huxley’s Predictions for 2000 A.D.

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 02:36:44 GMT

There seems to be two occasions when people most enjoy making predictions: anniversaries (think the American Bicentennial, New Year’s, etc) and dates that include round numbers (any year ending in zero). Such was the case in 1950 when many people halfway through the 20th century enjoyed predicting what life would be like in the year 2000 — obviously the roundest numbered year of our modern age. The January 1950 issue of Redbook magazine asked, “What will the world of 2000 A.D. be like? Will the machine replace man? How will our children and grandchildren spend their leisure? How, indeed, will they look?” The mag asked four experts — curiously all men, given

When Republicans Were Blue and Democrats Were Red

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:00:20 GMT

Television’s first dynamic, color-coded presidential map, standing two stories high in the studio best known as the home to “Saturday Night Live,” was melting. It was early October, 1976, the month before the map was to debut—live—on election night. At the urging of anchor John Chancellor, NBC had constructed the behemoth map to illustrate, in vivid blue and red, which states supported Republican incumbent Gerald Ford and which backed Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. The test run didn’t go well. Although the map was buttressed by a sturdy wood frame, the front of each state was plastic. “There were thousands of bulbs,” recalled Roy Wetz

The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 01:57:00 GMT

The Fox sisters, from left to right: Leah, Kate and Maggie. From “Radical Spirits.” One of the greatest religious movements of the 19th century began in the bedroom of two young girls living in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. On a late March day in 1848, Margaretta “Maggie” Fox, 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, waylaid a neighbor, eager to share an odd and frightening phenomenon. Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture—raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared wi

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 06 – The Good Little Scouts

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:25:00 GMT

This is the sixth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. As a child, did you ever think that one day you might be able to vacation on the moon? You weren’t alone. A permanent settlement on the moon wasn’t some crackpot scheme only touted by fringe elements in the mad science community. Scientists, politicians, clergymen and journalists were all promising that once humans inevitably set foot on the moon, permanent settlements (and vacation resorts!) were sure to follow. The sixth episode of “The Jetsons” revolved around this assumption that the moon would soon be the per

Before Salem, There Was the Not-So-Wicked Witch of the Hamptons

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 06:05:20 GMT

Thirty-five years before the infamous events of Salem, allegations of witchcraft and a subsequent trial rocked a small colonial village. The place was Easthampton, New York. Now a summer resort for the rich and famous—and spelled as two words, East Hampton—at the time it was an English settlement on the remote, eastern tip of Long Island. There, in February, 1658, 16-year old Elizabeth Gardiner Howell, who had recently given birth to a child, fell ill. As friends ministered to her, she terrified them by suddenly shrieking: "A witch! A witch! Now you are come to torture me because I spoke two or three words against you!” Her father, Lion Gardiner, a former military offic

And the Winner Is: 2012 Inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 07:41:23 GMT

Screenshot of the robot WALL-E from the 2008 Disney/Pixar animated film (Disney) The 2012 inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon have been announced. And sadly, Rosey the robot didn’t make the cut. She was beat out in the entertainment category by WALL-E — a worthwhile choice, but kind of like putting Justin Bieber in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I mean, Bieber hasn’t even gone through his inevitable Chris Gaines period yet.* Naturally I was hoping for a Rosey victory, as we’re five episodes deep into looking back at every episode of “The Jetsons.” But there’s always next year. A sincere

A Halloween Massacre at the White House

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:26:18 GMT

President Gerald Ford in April 1975 with Dick Cheney (left), who would become the youngest White House chief of staff in history, and Donald Rumsfeld, who would become defense secretary. Photo: Wikipedia In the fall of 1975, President Gerald Ford was finding trouble wherever he turned. He’d been in office just over a year, but he remained “acutely aware” that he was the only person in U.S. history to become the chief executive without being elected. His pardon of Richard Nixon, whose resignation after the Watergate scandal had put Ford in the White House, was still controversial. Democratic voters had turned out in droves in the congressional midterm elections, taking 49 seats fr

The Speech That Saved Teddy Roosevelt’s Life

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

On October 14, 1912, just after eight o’clock in the evening, Theodore Roosevelt stepped out of the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and into an open car waiting to take him to an auditorium where he would deliver a campaign speech. Although he was worn out and his voice nearly gone, he was still pushing hard to win an unprecedented third term in the White House. He had left politics in 1909, when his presidency ended. But his disappointment in the performance of William Howard Taft, his chosen successor, was so great that in 1912 he formed the National Progressive Party (better known as the Bull Moose Party). He was running against Taft and the Republicans, the Democrats&r

"Confederates Try to Burn New York"

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

People had paid five bucks a seat that night to catch all three Booth brothers in their togas. Edwin, the brightest star, with Junius, who'd recently become his Broadway rival, and dastardly John Wilkes, the pale assassin, who rode up on the train from Baltimore. The Winter Garden Playhouse was so jammed they had to put up benches in the aisles, and, when a bottle of Greek fire flew in from the street, a wild commotion spread throughout the house. Edwin, alone on stage, would calm the crowd while still in character, exhorting them, sententiously, as Brutus, to sit back down and disregard the hubbub. Out strode John Wilkes, who glared and crossed his arms, aping the “Coriolanus&rdqu

UPDATE: The Reaction to Karen King’s Gospel Discovery

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

This story is an update of the news broken by Smithsonian magazine on September 18, 2012. Up a cobblestone driveway in the heart of Rome, across from the soaring Tuscan columns of St. Peter’s Square, juts a narrow building watched over by a heavy-lidded statue of Saint Augustine. The Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum was founded in 1970, in the shadow of the Vatican, to renew the teachings of Church fathers. On most days, its glinting marble halls echo with the footsteps of theology students immersing themselves in doctrine, canon law and sacred Scripture. On September 18, however, the building played host to a secular gathering that some would soon see as profane: the Internati

“A Very Common Delusion”: Spiritualism and the Fox Sisters

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 02:50:48 GMT

One of the greatest religious movements of the 19th century began in the bedroom of two young girls living in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. On a late March day in 1848, Margaretta “Maggie” Fox, 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, waylaid a neighbor, eager to share an odd and frightening phenomenon. Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture—raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared with their parents. While Maggie and Kate huddled together on their bed, their mother, Margaret, began the demonstratio

A Brief History of the Teleprompter

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:14:28 GMT

As President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney enter the home stretch of their campaigns, they've now been touring the country and delivering the same stump speech three times per day for the past ten months straight. Both of the candidates read their words while looking out at the crowds, instead of down at a piece of paper, conveying the idea that they’ve memorized their speeches and are connecting with their audiences. And while conservatives take great pleasure in mocking President Obama’s reliance on a machine to help him deliver his speeches, the truth is that both candidates—along with politicians for more than a generation—read off o

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 05 – Jetson’s Nite Out

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:07:00 GMT

This is the fifth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The fifth episode of “The Jetsons” aired on Sunday October 21, 1962, and was titled “Jetson’s Nite Out.” The episode revolves around George’s plans to watch the robot football championship game and the various obstacles that get in his way. Eventually, through the scheming of his boss Mr. Spacely, George is able to see the game in person, but is found out as a liar by his wife when he’s shown on TV. The episode gave viewers of 1962 a peek at some often predicted technological advancements of the 21s

Mr. Lincoln Goes to Hollywood

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:37:00 GMT

In Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg movie opening this month, President Abraham Lincoln has a talk with U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens that should be studied in civics classes today. The scene goes down easy, thanks to the moviemakers’ art, but the point Lincoln makes is tough. Stevens, as Tommy Lee Jones plays him, is the meanest man in Congress, but also that body’s fiercest opponent of slavery. Because Lincoln’s primary purpose has been to hold the Union together, and he has been approaching abolition in a roundabout, politic way, Stevens by 1865 has come to regard him as “the capitulating compromiser, the dawdler.” The congressman wore with aplomb, an

Sex and Space Travel: Predictions from the 1950s

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:40:00 GMT

Illustration by L. Sterne Stevens in the March 1956 issue of Sexology magazine (source: Novak Archive) In September of 1992 astronauts Jan Davis and Mark Lee became the first married couple to leave the planet together. But NASA didn’t originally plan on it happening that way. NASA had an unwritten rule that married astronauts couldn’t be sent into space together. Davis and Lee had been assigned to the mission in 1989 but were later married in January 1991. After the agency learned of their marriage, NASA took two months to review the situation and believed that both were too important to the mission (the second flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour) for either of them to be

Sophie Blanchard – The High Flying Frenchwoman Who Revealed the Thrill and Danger of Ballooning

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:00:09 GMT

The aeronaut Sophie Blanchard in 1811. Illustration: Wikipedia When Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner leaped from a capsule some 24 miles above earth on October 14, 2012, millions watched on television and the internet as he broke the sound barrier in a free fall that lasted ten minutes. But in the anticipation of Baumgartner’s jump (and his safe parachute landing), there was little room to marvel at the massive balloon that took him to the stratosphere. More than 200 years ago in France, the vision of a human ascending the sky beneath a giant balloon produced what one magazine at the time described as “a spectacle the like of which was never shewn since the world began.” Early mann

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 04 – The Coming of Astro

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 06:28:00 GMT

Astro and the robot dog ‘Lectronimo with George Jetson (screenshot from “The Coming of Astro”) This is the fourth in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The fourth episode of “The Jetsons” originally aired on October 14, 1962 and was titled “The Coming of Astro.” After Elroy brings home a dog and convinces his mother Jane to let him keep it, the family makes their case for getting a dog to George over the videophone. George isn’t too keen on getting a dog, but wants to keep the peace within his family. George consults the company computer to

A New Great Depression and Ladies on the Moon: 1970s Middle School Kids Look to the Year 2000

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 02:15:07 GMT

People in a space colony of the future (by Rick Guidice, 1977) The February 26, 1977 edition of the Herald-Star in Steubenville, Ohio published dozens of predictions for the year 2000 made by the people of Steubenville, a working class town in eastern Ohio (and the birthplace of Dean Martin). Some of these letters came from local middle school kids 10-12 years old and they provide a fascinating snapshot of the era; unique in their ability to reflect the pessimism stirred by a down economy and shaken faith in government in a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War era, while also laying bare the irrational optimism of youth. Many of the predictions are clearly influenced by the energy crisis,

The Traumatic Birth of the Modern (and Vicious) Political Campaign

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:01:48 GMT

Thousands of Dust Bowl farmers and unemployed men from the Great Plains headed West during the Great Depression, creating a broad base for Upton Sinclair’s populist End Poverty in California (EPIC) plan in 1934. Photo: Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration With the election just weeks away and with the Democratic candidate poised to make his surging socialist agenda a reality, business interests across the country suddenly began pouring millions of dollars into a concerted effort to defeat him. The newspapers pounced, too, with an unending barrage of negative coverage. By the time the attack ads finally reached the screens, in the new medium of staged newsreels, millions

Document Deep Dive: What Did Analysts Find in the Recon Photographs From the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:48:47 GMT

Dino Brugioni explains how he and other CIA photo analysts located Soviet missiles just 90 miles away from the United States

Recapping ‘The Jetsons’: Episode 03 – The Space Car

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Screenshot from the third episode of The Jetsons, The Space Car (originally aired October 7, 1962) This is the third in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. Each and every year at least one company goes knocking on the doors of the major news outlets and announces to the world that the futuristic vision of a flying car will be a practical reality within a few short years. Some of these companies appear to be making these promises in earnest, fully recognizing that their flying cars — should they ever hit the market — will be wildly expensive and essentially just road-legal airplan

What (or Who) Caused the Great Chicago Fire?

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 04:30:08 GMT

Late one night, when we were all in bed, Mrs. O’Leary lit a lantern in the shed. Her cow kicked it over, then winked her eye and said, “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!” — Chicago folksong An unflattering depiction of Catherine O’Leary inside her infamous barn. From “The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.” There is no known photograph of Catherine O’Leary, and who could blame her for shunning the cameras? After those two catastrophic days in October 1871, when more than 2,000 acres of Chicago burned, reporters continually appeared on Mrs. O’Leary’s doorst

Predictions From The Father of Science Fiction

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:39:53 GMT

Men watch baseball on a color television of the future (July 1922 Science and Invention magazine) Hugo “Awards” Gernsback was many different things to different people. To his fans, he was a visionary who started some of the most influential (not to mention the first) science fiction magazines of the early 20th century. Ray Bradbury was quoted as saying, “Gernsback made us fall in love with the future.” To his detractors, he was “Hugo the Rat,” known to men like H. P. Lovecraft for being a crooked publisher who sometimes stiffed his writers when payment was due. But above all else, he was a tireless self-promoter. In 1904, Gernsback emigrated from L

Revisiting Epcot Center on its 30th Birthday

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 07:06:55 GMT

Commemorative ticket from EPCOT’s opening day on October 1, 1982 EPCOT Center opened on October 1, 1982 as the single most expensive private construction project the world had ever seen. It was immediately viewed by Disney purists as a shadow of Walt Disney’s utopian dream to build a dynamic city of technology and innovation. EPCOT was originally supposed to be a real city; alive with mass transit systems, a vibrant city center and a healthy dose of residential life. Corporations, as Walt explained in a 1966 film produced just a few months before his death, were to use Epcot as a proving ground for new innovations. One imagines this might include new chemical solvents or fo

Eight Lessons for the Presidential Debates

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 05:47:16 GMT

What are the key dos and don'ts the candidates should remember when campaigning for the White House?

Recapping “The Jetsons”: Episode 02 – A Date With Jet Screamer

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:15:00 GMT

45 RPM record of the Jetsons theme song and “Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah” from 1962 (misspelled “OOP”) This is the second in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. Read the recap of Episode 1. The second episode of “The Jetsons” aired September 30, 1962 and was titled “A Date With Jet Screamer.” Arguably the most famous of all the Jetsons episodes, it’s also certainly the most hedonistic; with sex (well, dating), drugs (cigarettes and booze), rock and roll (lotsa rock and roll) and easy living (just lousy with push buttons) dominating the story arc.

The Unsolved Mystery of the Tunnels at Baiae

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 06:23:34 GMT

Baiae and the Bay of Naples, painted by J.M.W. Turner in 1823, well before modernization of the area obliterated most traces of its Roman past. Image: Wikicommons. There is nothing remotely Elysian about the Phlegræan Fields, which lie on the north shore of the Bay of Naples; nothing sylvan, nothing green. The Fields are part of the caldera of a volcano that is the twin of Mount Vesuvius, a few miles to the east, the destroyer of Pompeii. The volcano is still active–it last erupted in 1538, and once possessed a crater that measured eight miles across–but most of it is underwater now. The portion that is still accessible on land consists of a barren, rubble-strewn plateau. Fire bursts

The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 09:27:34 GMT

Anti-Rightest Movement in China, following Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957. Photo: Wikipedia In February 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong rose to speak to a packed session of China’s Supreme State Conference in Beijing. The architect and founding father of the People’s Republic of China was about to deliver what one scholar described as “the most important speech on politics that he or anyone else had made since the creation of the communist regime” eight years before. Mao’s speech, titled, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” began with a broad explanation of socialism and the relationship between China’s bourgeoisie and working class. Joseph Sta

Recapping “The Jetsons”: Episode 01 – Rosey the Robot

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:26:00 GMT

Jane Jetson working out her strained fingers in the premiere episode of “The Jetsons” (1962) This is the first in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. Episode 01: “Rosey the Robot,” originally aired: September 23, 1962 If you flipped through the Cedar Rapids Gazette on September 23, 1962 the news looked fairly typical for the early 1960s. There was a short item about a Gandhi memorial being planned in London. There was an article about overcrowded schools and the need for new junior high schools, since the baby boom had inundated the schools and enrollment in the Ced

Trains of Tomorrow, After the War

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 03:40:56 GMT

Illustration from a magazine ad for the Association of American Railroads (1944) American advertisers made a great number of promises for the future during World War II. The American people were told that if they could just be patient with wartime rationing, or the number of resources being devoted to the war effort, we would all be assured better lives after the war. The Association of American Railroads was no different, and in the March 18, 1944 issue of Collier’s magazine they ran an ad which promised great things in train travel after World War II was through. It’s interesting for those of us perched from the vantage point of the future to remember that other methods

Play the Great American History Puzzle

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 01:16:00 GMT

Jeopardy! Champion Ken Jennings takes you on a challenging adventure through the secrets of American history. Will you be our grand prize winner?

The Copper King’s Precipitous Fall

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 04:40:07 GMT

Frederick Augustus Heinze, 1910. Photo: Wikipedia Frederick Augustus Heinze was young, brash, charismatic and rich. He’d made millions off the copper mines of Butte, Montana, by the time he was 30, beating back every attempt by competitors to run him out of business. After turning down Standard Oil’s $15 million offer for his copper holdings, Heinze arrived in New York in 1907 with $25 million in cash, determined to join the likes of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller as a major player in the world of finance. By the end of the year, however, the Copper King would be ruined, and his scheme to corner the stock of the United Copper Co. would lead to one of the worst financial cri

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph: The Story Behind the Famous Shot

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 03:39:03 GMT

On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, 11 ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the project’s near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football; a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all 11 ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling 850 feet above the city’s streets.st You’ve seen the photograph before—and probably some of the playful parodies it has spawned too. My brother

50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:29:00 GMT

The Jetsons title slate from 1962 It was 50 years ago this coming Sunday that the Jetson family first jetpacked their way into American homes. The show lasted just one season (24 episodes) after its debut on Sunday September 23, 1962, but today “The Jetsons” stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism. More episodes were later produced in the mid-1980s, but it’s that 24-episode first season that helped define the future for so many Americans today. It’s easy for some people to dismiss “The Jetsons” as just a TV show, and a lowly cartoon at that. But this little show—for better and for worse—has had a profound impa

Meet the Real-Life Vampires of New England and Abroad

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A little more than a century ago, vampires stalked Rhode Island. Or rather, New England farm families were digging up dead relatives suspected of being vampires and desecrating the bodies in a misguided effort to protect the living. Often these latter-day vampire hunters removed and burned their loved ones’ hearts. Though the corpses were typically re-buried, modern scholars continue to unearth the stories of real-life “vampires,” whose historic tragedies underlie classics like Dracula as well as Hollywood’s latest guilty pleasures. The practice of disinterring accused vampires likely began in Eastern Europe, spreading to western countries including France and Eng

The Surprisingly Colorful Spaces Where the World’s Biggest Decisions Get Made (PHOTOS)

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Photographer Luca Zanier looks at the view from where the decision-makers sit

From the Editor

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The most beautiful secret I know sits a block from my office, near the corner of Independence and Seventh avenues in Washington, tucked neatly into one of the sexy curves outside the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It’s a message written on two sinuous waves of copper joined by a piece of petrified wood—a graceful sculpture called Antipodes crafted by Jim Sanborn 15 years ago. The copper scrolls unfurl in a maddening Babel of Cyrillic letters on one side and Roman on the other. The Cyrillic code was broken in 2003: It includes a passage from a classified KGB memo about dissident Andrei Sakharov, and matches the text on another Sanborn sculpture installed in Charlotte, No

The Photographs That Prevented World War III

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On October 23, 1962, a U.S. Navy commander named William B. Ecker took off from Key West at midday in an RF-8 Crusader jet equipped with five reconnaissance cameras. Accompanied by a wingman, Lt. Bruce Wilhelmy, he headed toward a mountainous region of western Cuba where Soviet troops were building a facility for medium-range missiles aimed directly at the United States. A U-2 spy plane, flying as high as 70,000 feet, had already taken grainy photographs that enabled experts to find the telltale presence of Soviet missiles on the island. But if President John F. Kennedy was going to make the case that the weapons were a menace to the entire world, he would need better pictures. Swooping o

The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited. They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency. But suddenly the driver’s hand-held rad

The World’s Most Famous Filing Cabinet

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Recently, I met with Daniel Ellsberg, now 81, at his house in the hills above Berkeley, California, to get the ultimate insider’s inside account of exposing deception by successive administrations about Vietnam, from the man who is arguably the nation’s most important whistleblower. In particular, I was inquiring about a battered but otherwise seemingly ordinary four-drawer file cabinet, which sits today at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH). The cabinet once stood in the Los Angeles office of Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst. On September 3, 1971, three men led by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt broke into the office and crowbarred op

The Great New England Vampire Panic

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull. Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them

The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With five simple words in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776: “From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” In his original draft of the Declaration, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce ...this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strict

The Adventures of the Real Tom Sawyer

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On a rainy afternoon in June 1863, Mark Twain was nursing a bad hangover inside Ed Stahle’s fashionable Montgomery Street steam rooms, halfway through a two-month visit to San Francisco that would ultimately stretch to three years. At the baths he played penny ante with Stahle, the proprietor, and Tom Sawyer, the recently appointed customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman and bona fide local hero. In contrast to the lanky Twain, Sawyer, three years older, was stocky and round-faced. Just returned from firefighting duties, he was covered in soot. Twain slumped as he played poker, studying his cards, hefting a bottle of dark beer and chain-smoking cigars, to which he ha

The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 05:10:59 GMT

In our November 2012 issue, writer Ariel Sabar reported from Rome on the reaction to King's discovery, both among the religious and academic communities. Read the full version of his report here. Harvard Divinity School’s Andover Hall overlooks a quiet street some 15 minutes by foot from the bustle of Harvard Square. A Gothic tower of gray stone rises from its center, its parapet engraved with the icons of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I had come to the school, in early September, to see Karen L. King, the Hollis professor of divinity, the oldest endowed chair in the United States and one of the most prestigious perches in religious studies. In two weeks, King was set to announce a

Kennedy After Dark: A Dinner Party About Politics and Power

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:00:00 GMT

On January 5, 1960, just three days after announcing that he would run for president, Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, held a small dinner party in Washington, D.C. Their guests included Ben Bradlee, then Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, and his then-wife, Tony, and Newsweek correspondent James M. Cannon. Cannon taped the conversation for research on a book he was writing. After he died, in September 2011, the tapes became part of the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston; a transcript is published for the first time in the new book Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, edited by Ted Widmer. In this exclusi

The Blazing Career and Mysterious Death of “The Swedish Meteor”

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 03:49:00 GMT

The mummified head of Charles XII, photographed at the time of his exhumation in 1917, and showing the exit wound–or was it?–left by the projectile that killed him during the siege of Fredrikshald in 1718. Sweden has had her share of memorable monarchs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it seemed that every other ruler crowned in Stockholm was astonishing in one way or another. Gustav Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Queen Christina, Charles XI–between them, to the surprise of generations of students who have presumed that the conjunction of the words “Swedish” and “imperialism” in their textbooks is some sort of typographical error, they turned the cou

The Unknown Story of "The Black Cyclone," the Cycling Champion Who Broke the Color Barrier

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 04:39:00 GMT

Marshall “Major” Taylor in 1900. Photo: Wikipedia At the dawn of the 20th century, cycling was the most popular sport in both America and Europe, with tens of thousands of spectators drawn to arenas and velodromes to see highly dangerous and even deadly affairs that bore little semblance to bicycle racing today. In brutal six-day races of endurance, well-paid competitors often turned to cocaine, strychnine and nitroglycerine for stimulation and suffered from sleep deprivation, delusions and hallucinations along with falls from their bicycles. In motor-paced racing, cyclists would draft behind motorcycles, reaching speeds of 60 miles per hour on cement-banked tracks, where

The Anti-Skyscraper Law That Shaped Sydney, Australia

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 05:48:25 GMT

Sydney Town Hall circa 1900 (Powerhouse Museum/Flickr) When we look at visions of the future from the 20th century we often imagine the lone inventor or solitary artist concocting the fantastical world of tomorrow in isolation. But it’s amazing how frequently both government regulation and the lack of regulation can influence the future of a given city in ways we don’t often think about. While researching a column I wrote recently for BBC Future about fighting the skyscraper fires of tomorrow I came across a fascinating anti-skyscraper law from 1912 that would have a lasting impact on Australia’s largest city. Fearing that fighting fires was nearly impossible in tall

The Ugliest, Most Contentious Presidential Election Ever

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 02:28:00 GMT

Samuel Jones Tilden, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1876. Photo: Wikipedia For Rutherford B. Hayes, election evening of November 7, 1876, was shaping up to be any presidential candidate’s nightmare. Even though the first returns were just coming in by telegraph, newspapers were announcing that his opponent, the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, had won. Hayes, a Republican, would indeed lose the popular vote by more than a quarter-million, but he had no way of knowing that as he prepared his concession speech. He went to bed a gloomy man and consoled his wife, Lucy Webb. “We soon fell into a refreshing sleep,” Hayes wrote in his diary, “and the affair seemed over.

Big Apple Apocalypse: 200 Years of Destroying New York City

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:07:15 GMT

A powerful wave destroys New York City in the disaster film Deep Impact (1998) Futurist thinkers have rarely been kind to New York City. In fact, writers and artists have spent the better part of two centuries destroying the Big Apple. Whether by flood or fire, nuclear explosion or alien invasion, New York more than any other city bears the brunt of our most apocalyptic futures. And perhaps no historian understands this better than Max Page. In 2001, University of Massachusetts-Amherst history professor Max Page started work on what was supposed to be a fun, light-hearted project. Working with the New York Historical Society, Page was assembling an exhibit proposal about the various w

My Robot Helper of Tomorrow

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:26:42 GMT

The helper robot brings the child of the future something to drink in bed (1981) When I was a kid growing up in the late 1980s and early ’90s there were only two things that I was certain of when it came to my future: I was going to grow up to be an animator for Disney, and I was going to have a robot. Sadly, my drawing skills peaked around the age of 10 and I still don’t have a robot. The 1980s saw a steady rise in the use of industrial robots (especially in Japan) which led people to believe that domestic robots were indeed just around the corner. We’ve already looked at two different restaurants of the mid-1980s — one in Southern California, the other in To

That Time a German Prince Built an Artificial Volcano

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:39:47 GMT

The smoke began rising above the farm fields and tidy forests of Woerlitz last Saturday morning, puffs of white and black that signaled something unusual. By sunset, thousands of people had gathered on the shores of an artificial lake, listening avidly to ominous rumbles. Dozens more, tipsy with schnapps and wine, floated in candlelit gondolas on the still water. They were all here to see Europe's biggest, oldest and—as far as anyone knows—only artificial volcano. Completed in 1794, the Stone Island of Woerlitz is a little-known wonder of the Enlightenment, a provincial prince's attempt to bring a bit of Italian drama and grandeur to the farmers of Germany. Today it's part of

“Murder Wasn’t Very Pretty”: The Rise and Fall of D.C. Stephenson

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 01:12:00 GMT

David Curtis Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, 1922. From “The Dragon and the Cross.” On March 16, 1925, in the muted morning light of a hotel room in Hammond, Indiana, 29-year-old Madge Oberholtzer reached into the pocket of the man sleeping next to her. She found the grip of his revolver and slid it out, inch by inch, praying he wouldn’t stir. The man was D.C. Stephenson, political power broker and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in 23 Northern states. With shaking hands she aimed the gun between his closed eyes. What passed for a lucid thought came to mind: She would disgrace her family if she were to commit murder; instead, she would kill herself. S

The Neverending Hunt for Utopia

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 03:22:14 GMT

A photograph supposed to show a pair of Australian convicts photographed in Victoria c.1860; this identification of the two men is inaccurate–see comments below. Between 1788 and 1868, Britain shipped a total of 165,000 such men to the penal colonies it established on the continents’ east and the west coasts. During the colonies’ first quarter-century, several hundred of these men escaped, believing that a walk of as little as 150 miles would take them to freedom in China. What is it that makes us human? The question is as old as man, and has had many answers. For quite a while, we were told that our uniqueness lay in using tools; today, some seek to define humanity in terms of an inna

The Top 10 Political Conventions That Mattered the Most

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:00:52 GMT

As the two main party conventions approach—the Republicans kick off today, August 27, in Tampa, Florida, followed by the Democrats in Charlotte, North Carolina, next week—pardon the nation’s collective yawn. National conventions, once riveting political theater that held America in suspense for days, have been reduced to a made-for-television, political promo for the two parties. Since primary elections now routinely determine the candidates, this quadrennial dog-and-pony show offers a ho-hum pageant, in which windy speeches are delivered, party platforms hammered out and often ignored, and delegates don silly hats and hold up handmade signs extolling the virtues of cand

The Conversation: Steve Jobs' Greatest Contribution

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 03:15:30 GMT

In the September 2012 Style & Design issue, our cover story by biographer Walter Isaacson looks back on Steve Jobs as a designer, citing Jobs as saying, "We have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves."

The Robot Hall of Fame: Vote Rosey 2012

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 07:03:48 GMT

Screenshot from The Jetsons episode “Rosey’s Boyfriend” (originally aired November 11, 1962) Americans are gearing up for the presidential election this coming November, but many people are sadly unaware of an even more important vote taking place right now: 2012 inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame. For the first time since its founding in 2003, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robot Hall of Fame is allowing the public to vote on which robots will be inducted. The robots are divided into four categories: Education and Consumer, Entertainment, Industry & Service, and Research. The final decision on which robots make the cut will be based half on the public vote

Document Deep Dive: What Did the Zimmermann Telegram Say?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:07:01 GMT

See how British cryptologists cracked the coded message that propelled the United States into World War I

No, Really, There is No Secret Code in the Pyramids

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This past May, a Venezuelan state TV host announced he had discovered a conspiracy to assassinate the elder brother of President Hugo Chavez. His evidence? A newspaper crossword puzzle. He pointed out that the crossword contained the word asesinen (“murder”), intersecting horizontally with the name of Chavez’s brother, Adan. And directly above the name was the word ráfagas, meaning either “gusts of wind” or, more ominously, “bursts of gunfire.” David Kahn, an American historian and journalist, would call this a classic example of the “pathology of cryptology.” In his seminal 1967 book, The Codebreakers, Kahn marveled at the ab

How a New Yorker Article Launched the First Shot in the War Against Poverty

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On January 19, 1963, the New Yorker published a 13,000-word essay, “Our Invisible Poor,” the longest book review the magazine had ever run. No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Ostensibly a review of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, which had all but disappeared since its publication in 1962, “Our Invisible Poor” took in a slew of other titles, along with a series of dreary economic reports, to demonstrate these facts: The poor are sicker than everyone else, but they have less health insurance; they have less money, but they pay more taxes; and they live where people with money seldom go. What D

From the Editor

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by beautiful designs, many created by my father, the designer of Sub-Zero refrigerators and chairs made by Herman Miller and Knoll. He worked in a studio at one end of my childhood home, a wildly creative piece of architecture that he also designed. At a time when people were still traveling to Europe to shop for state-of-the-art furniture and products, I had them in my living room and kitchen. My father taught me a great many of the lessons Steve Jobs would later make famous: the elegance of simplicity, form fused with function, a laserlike attention to detail. I thought it was important to create this special issue to highlight the Smithsonian&rsquo

The Smoothest Con Man That Ever Lived

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:57:30 GMT

“You have conned me,” Victor “Count” Lustig, told the police. Photo: Wikipedia On a Sunday night in May 1935, Victor Lustig was strolling down Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side. At first, the Secret Service agents couldn’t be sure it was him. They’d been shadowing him for seven months, painstakingly trying to learn more about this mysterious and dapper man, but his newly grown mustache had thrown them off momentarily. As he turned up the velvet collar on his Chesterfield coat and quickened his pace, the agents swooped in. Surrounded, Lustig smiled and calmly handed over his suitcase. “Smooth,” was how one of the agents described him, noting a “livid

Crowdfunding a Museum for Alexander Graham Bell in 1922

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 04:31:47 GMT

Hugo Gernsback’s 1922 proposal for a monument to Alexander Graham Bell Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are great for bands trying to finance an album or independent filmmakers hoping to shoot a movie. But it’s interesting to see these alternative finance tools being used more and more for projects that are often associated with large public institutions — namely, monuments and museums. Last year, a group in Detroit raised over $67,000 to build a Robocop statue. And as of this writing Matthew Inman of the popular webcomic The Oatmeal has raised over $700,000 (of his $850,000 goal) to build a Tesla Museum. Trevor Owens, a digital archivist with the

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: How a Smithsonian Exhibit I Never Saw Changed My Life

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 05:21:51 GMT

Co-curator Brian Horrigan at the opening of Yesterday’s Tomorrows in 1984 Twenty-eight years ago this month an exhibit called Yesterday’s Tomorrows opened to the public at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. I wasn’t even a year old yet, but this 1984 exhibit would have a profound effect on my life many years later after I discovered the exhibit book by Smithsonian curators Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan. Back in 2007, the Paleofuture blog was still just a hobby for me, but once I discovered Yesterday’s Tomorrows I felt a sense of validation that this weird and wonderful topic of retro-futurism was indeed worthy of serious study. Maybe my blog more

Going Nuclear Over the Pacific

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 03:44:14 GMT

Starfish Prime 0 to 15 seconds after detonation, photographed from Maui Station, July 9, 1962. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory The summer of 2012 will be remembered as a time when people around the world were caught up in events in the skies above Mars, where the rover Curiosity eventually touched down onto the red planet. Fifty years ago this summer there were strange doings in the skies above earth as well. In July 1962, eight airplanes, including five commercial flights, plummeted to the ground in separate crashes that killed hundreds. In a ninth incident that month, a vulture smashed through the cockpit window of an Indian Airlines cargo plane, killing the co-pilot. Higher i

How Would You Rank the Greatest Presidents?

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 01:18:32 GMT

In an interview in January 2010, President Obama told Diane Sawyer of ABC News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” The comment didn’t really jibe well with Robert W. Merry, an acclaimed biographer of James Polk, who served as president from 1845 to 1849. Polk is ranked as a “near great” president in polls by scholars, but he is an exception. “History has not smiled upon one-term presidents,” wrote Merry in an editorial in the New York Times. “The typical one-term president generally falls into the ‘average’ category, occasionally the ‘above average.’ ” In