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The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.
Born into bondage, Robert Smalls rose from slavery to the Halls of Congress. In between, he helped the Union win the Civil War by doing what no black American had ever done before -he commanded a naval vessel.
AT HOME ON THE WATER
Robert Smalls was born a slave on April 5, 1839, in the coastal town of Beaufort, South Carolina. His first taste of a sailor’s life came at 12 years old when his master hired him out to work at a shipyard in Charleston Harbor. Smalls took to it, displaying a natural talent for seamanship. By 19, he had risen to the highest sea rank available to a slave: a ship’s pilot. Although Smalls could neither read nor write, his photographic memory recalled every bar, shoal, and current in Charleston Harbor.
In 1858 Smalls married another slave, Hannah Jones, and two years later they had a son, Robert, Jr. Being a respected sea pilot, Smalls life was better than that of most slaves …but he was still a slave. Longing to be his own master, he set out to buy his family’s freedom. And he almost did it -Smalls had saved $700 of the $800 purchasing price when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Then everybody’s life was put on hold.
STEALING A SHIP
The Confederate army immediately put the 22-year-old Smalls to work doing what he did best: piloting a vessel. He was given the wheel of the CSS Planter (formerly the USS Planter), a 147-foot-long steamboat. With Smalls at the helm taking order from Captain Charles Relyea, the ship hauled ordnance and supplies to the rebel forts guarding Charleston. A few miles offshore lay a fleet of blockading Union ships, and Smalls knew that freedom awaited him in that blockade. He formed a plan.
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It might be a little late now, but these great Valentines cards by Ben Kling are simply fantastic, not to mention punny as all heck.
Link Via Geekosystem
Bonnie & Clyde, Napoleon & Josephine and Louis XV & Madame de Pompadour…they’re all great love stories -on paper at least. But when you actually learn the whole story for all of these romances, they’re a lot less sweet.
History is full of stories of grand gestures or sacrifices people made for love. And sometimes it worked out just fine; other stories are tragic. But they still inspire us, sometimes hundreds of years later. For example, President William McKinley’s wife, Ida, suffered from seizures and general ill health.
But when McKinley took office in 1897, he didn’t hide Ida from view. Instead, defying the protocol of the day, he insisted that his wife be seated beside him at state dinners, so he could help if a seizure struck, or cover her face with a hankerchief to ward off an impending attack.
And when President McKinley was fatally shot in 1901, his thoughts were of fragile Ida, whispering to his secretary: “My wife—be careful…how you tell her.”
Read all ten of these stories at Smithsonian magazine. Link
If Thomas Edison were alive today, he would be celebrating his 165th birthday. Jeremiah Warren made this quick overview of his life and work, so you’ll know more than just “Edison invented the light bulb.” -Thanks, Jeremiah!
It happens every time some new technology threatens to put people out of work: a public campaign to save jobs. One example was in the 1920s and ’30s, when synchronized sound was added to movies, which meant that theaters no longer had to pay live musicians to accompany the films. The Music Defense League sprang into action, with a $500,000 advertising budget to rally the public against soundtracks recorded by just “300 musicians in Hollywood.” Read about the battle against canned music in theaters at Paleofuture. Link
When we heard of the death of Florence Green, the final surviving veteran of World War I, many people stopped and thought about the old people who are our living links to history. Robert Krulwich at NPR has a list of people and stories that span a lot of years, like the guy he met in 1973 who recalled living near Rasputin, the mad monk of Imperial Russia.
How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn’t seem possible. Yet the old guy said, “Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea.”
I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.
Other stories involve an eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination who appeared on television, Civil War widows who saw the 21st century, and the man who met both President John Quincy Adams and President John Kennedy. Link -via Breakfast Links
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th U.S. president, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. He died the next day. Okay, what is this, a history class? Everybody knows that! But who shot Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Well, let’s find out by looking into the life of one of the strangest, little-known men who had a part in United States history. Let’s look at the strange life of Boston Corbett.
Thomas Corbett was born in England in 1832. He immigrated to Boston where he became a born-again Christian. He adopted the city’s name in honor of his conversion. But Corbett wasn’t your normal convert. His religious zeal knew no bounds.
Fearing temptation by prostitutes, he used a pair of scissor to castrate himself. After which, he casually attended a prayer meeting (he did receive medical attention afterwards). Corbett had been married earlier, but his wife died in childbirth.
During the Civil war, Corbett became a Cavalry sergeant. After the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln, his unit took part in the search for John Wilkes Booth. On April 26th, his unit surrounded the barn where Booth was hiding and set it on fire. Corbett saw Booth through a crack in the barn and fired a single shot, mortally wounding him.
“Providence guided my hand,” Corbett told his commanding officer. By an odd coincidence, Corbett’s bullet had struck Booth in the same spot Booth’s shot had hit president Lincoln. When told of this, Corbett said, “What a fearful God we serve.”
His reward money for killing Booth was $1,653.84, the exact same amount as every other man in his unit.
Corbett instantly became famous as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” He was flooded by requests for autographs and cheered when he walked the streets. But fame, once hot and heavy, gradually died down.
Boston Corbett started suffering from severe delusions. He imagined John Wilkes Booth’s men were stalking him and thought he was in grave danger. He fled to Kansas.
In 1887, he was given
a job as doorman to the Kansas House of Representatives. One day he showed up waving a gun, declaring the House adjourned. Corbett was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The following year he escaped, and no one ever heard of Boston Corbett again.
He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minnesota. There is no conclusive proof of this, but the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1894 lists a “Thomas Corbett” on the list of the dead or missing.
Corbett was a hatter by trade. The mercury used to cure beaver pelts is thought to have contributed to his madness.
Visit guest author Eddie Deezen at his website.
These Victorian style portraits of Star Wars characters by Terry Fan lead one to believe that C3PO is powered by steam, and that droids actually enjoy wearing three piece suits. Everyone knows that these things are untrue, of course, but it’s a romantic version of the Space Opera that hasn’t been fully explored yet, so let’s just go with it.
In this series you get Darth Vader looking quite dapper, Yoda with a top hat that somehow makes his head look even smaller (and his ears even bigger), C3apo as a gentleman about town and Boba Fett fresh from overseas service in the military. These portraits look like they were taken a long long time ago, in a place that’s not so far away after all…
Link –via Rampaged Reality
If you ever opened a pouch of Big League Chew and pretended you were a baseball player chewing tobacco, then you’ll enjoy the story behind it. Yesterday was the anniversary of the date in 1979 that the first batch of the bubblegum was shredded up by two baseball players, Rob Nelson and Jim Bouton of the Portland Mavericks, who didn’t chew tobacco.
As Rob recalled, in January of 1979 he found a homemade bubble gum kit from an article in People magazine, and he “ordered a bunch, from a company out of Arlington, Texas.” He baked those first batches of bubble gum in the kitchen of the Maverick’s bat boy, Todd Field. [Trivia: Todd is now a renowned Hollywood film director.] From there, he cut up the gum with a pizza knife, and then mocked up a package to see how a rough prototype might look, so they would have something to show. For those early samples, they emptied out foil tobacco pouches, and the gum went in – creating what was probably the very first pouches of shredded bubble gum.
And that’s just the beginning of the story. Yesterday was also the launch of the blog CollectingCandy, on which this is the very first post. Included are lots of retro package designs. Link -via Metafilter
Confucius has never looked so creepy! Sculpted by Zhang Huan in waaaay more than life sized scale (32 feet tall!), this is one version of the Chinese philosopher that you’ll want to steer clear of when it’s feeding time.
It’s so startlingly realistic that I have to wonder if Zhang hired a giant figure model for reference while sculpting. I kinda want to climb on top of giant Confucius’ head and pretend I’m Remy from the Pixar movie Ratatouille.
Link –via Geekosystem
Image Via allspice1 [Flickr]
If you didn’t already hear, Saturday was Thank A Mailman Day. While we missed the holiday itself, the fact is that mail carriers rarely get the respect and appreciation they deserve, which is why we’ve decided to go ahead and “deliver” you these fascinating facts about the USPS with the hope that you’ll find time in the upcoming week to say “thank you” to your mail carrier.
America got its first postal service in 1692 when King William gave Thomas Neale the power to erect “offices for the receiving and dispatching letters and pacquets,” essentially making him the US’s first Postmaster General.
The post office is so well-established in the states that the Constitution specifically grants congress the right “to establish post offices and post roads. In fact, Benjamin Franklin helped create the United States Post Office and served as the first Postmaster General.
After 1792 and up until the post office was divided from the government in 1971, the Postmaster General was a position on the Presidential cabinet and the person in the role served as the last person in the presidential line of succession –meaning that if the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Attorney General and every other cabinet member died in some sort of freakish accident, the leader of the post office would suddenly be in charge of the nation. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m certainly glad it never came to that.
The first adhesive stamps were issued in 1842 and postage rates became standardized in 1845. Congress officially authorized postage stamps in 1847 and the first two general issue stamps featured Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The two men were the only images seen on stamps until 1856, when a Thomas Jefferson stamp was issued. Throughout this time, other payment methods were still accepted but in 1856, postage stamps became mandatory for mail sent through the Post Office.
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Do you remember the awesome letter attributed to Jourdon Anderson, the freedman who was asked by his ex-master to return to work? Jason Kottke and David Galbraith dug through census and newspaper records to learn more about his life. Anderson may have stayed in Ohio and died in 1905 at the age of 79. Check out Kottke’s post, which he is frequently updating as he finds more information.
Jason Torchinsky of Jalopink wrote ten statements about American Presidents and automobiles. Only five of them are true. Can you figure out which ones? Check out the answers at the link:
1. The first President to serve at a time when there was an American-built automobile was Thomas Jefferson.
2. The first car a President ever rode in was a Locomobile.
3. The only President to have owned a rear-engine car prior to becoming President was George H. W. Bush (41), who owned a Chevrolet Corvair from 1962-1966.
4. There are eight car company names in Presidents’ names, divided between seven Presidents.
5. Dwight Eisenhower was the first sitting President to lay rubber, in a Willys Jeep during a visit to Fort Benning in 1959.
6. The Secret Service operates a refresher driving school for Presidents leaving office, most of whom have not driven themselves for four to eight years.
7. Herbert Hoover held the world land speed record for 24 minutes in 1927, when he was allowed to drive Henry Segrave’s “1000hp” Sunbeam at Daytona Beach prior to the record-setting attempt. Hoover clocked in at 161.4 mph, beating the old record of 145.9 mph, just before Segrave set the new record of 203.8 mph.
8. The first car used at a Presidential inauguration was a Packard.
9. President Jimmy Carter had two specially prepared black Chevrolet Chevettes purchased for his official use, to show his commitment to energy efficiency. They were never used, and are now in the Harrah’s collection in Las Vegas.
10. President Nixon mentioned his personal car in his famous “Checkers” speech — a 1950 Oldsmobile.
Link | Photo: US National Archives
I figure that the guy who made this creepy model just wanted to persuade people around him to give him some space. At least, that’s what I’d do if my bunkmate made it. Pictured above is a twenty inch tall model of a guillotine made from bones. According to the British family that recently sold it, a French prisoner of war during the Napoloenic Wars made it while captive in the UK.
Link -via Nerdcore | Photo: Duke’s Auctions
President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981. This picture was taken shortly before the incident.
The man in the white raincoat is Secret Service agent Jerry Parr; after the shooting, it was Parr who pushed Reagan into a limousine, noticed he was bleeding, and directed the driver to take them to a hospital, probably saving Reagan’s life.
Parr had been inspired to pursue his career by the 1939 film The Code of the Secret Service, in which dashing agent “Brass” Bancroft survives a shooting in Mexico. Bancroft was played by a 28-year-old Ronald Reagan.
You have to wonder what Jerry Parr thought of the coincidence. According to the book Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan, Parr believed afterward that saving the president’s life was God’s plan for him. When he retired from the Secret Service, he became a minister. Link -via Nag on the Lake
The important developments in flight are shown in just three minutes, courtesy of Utah Valley University Aviation Science Department. -via the Presurfer
By August 1865, the American Civil War was over. Many Southerners wanted to restore some semblance of normality — as they saw it — in their homes and communities. So Col. P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee wrote to one of his former slaves, requesting that he come back and work on the farm for wages. The freedman Jourdan Anderson would have none of that, unless there were serious changes in the way in which the Colonel and his family conducted themselves. He allegedly dictated a letter which was reprinted in many Northern newspapers. Here’s the ending:
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
Read the rest at Letters of Note.
Link | Somewhat related photo via the National Park Service
Everyone knows Ansel Adams was a master of landscape photography, a master of black and white naturalist photography, and one heck of an innovative artist. What most people don’t know, however, is that Ansel also enjoyed documenting life in the city through the lens of his view camera.
Flavorwire has posted a gallery of images that were commissioned by Fortune Magazine in the 1940s, in order to document Los Angeles’ aviation industry as only Ansel Adams could.
See what the City of Angels used to look like, compared to what it has become, by taking a fascinating trip back in time through these magnificent photos.
Suggested soundtrack music-Come Fly With Me by Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, or Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition by The Merry Macs.
Link –image credit: Ansel Adams
I’m quite certain that Mao never wanted his image to become an icon of pop culture, especially because of the rampant commercialism associated with popular art, and the fact that his image is often used in a tongue-in-cheek manner, poking fun at corporations and at Mao himself.
But pop artists from Andy Warhol to Kozik have enjoyed using his smug visage in their works for decades, and even if Mao himself crawls out of his grave and starts chomping on brains, the flood of works featuring his image will never end. There’s a nice little gallery of Mao inspired artworks at the link below, from flashy to antiquated and everything in between. The revolution lives on!
Link –via JazJaz –image credit: Romero Britto
On March 21, 1920, the Sandusky Register reported on an astonishing invention in which W. W. Macfarlane, traveling in a car (driven by a chauffeur), held a conversation with his wife back at the garage -500 yards down the road! The article is reprinted at Paleofuture. Link
John Tyler (1790-1862), the tenth President of the United States, left office in 1845. Though quite old, he fathered a son in 1853. That son himself fathered two sons at an advanced age in 1924 and 1928. Those two men, the grandsons of President Tyler, are still alive:
That means just three generations of the Tyler family are spread out over more than 200 years. President Tyler was also a prolific father, having 15 children (8 boys and 7 girls) with two wives.
He even allegedly fathered a child, John Dunjee, with one of his slaves.
Some context on Tyler’s progeny: Jane Garfield (granddaughter of James Garfield) is 99, making her the oldest living grandchild of a former president, even though Garfield took office 40 years after Tyler.
Former Ambassador John Eisenhower is the oldest living presidential child, turning 89 this past August.
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo via GearedBull
You’ve probably heard that the Kodak company has filed for bankruptcy. Kodak introduced its first camera 120 years ago, and revolutionized the way we see the world. The Kodak No.1 expanded photography from professionals to anyone who wanted to take a picture.
The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’
The idea was resurrected many years later with the “development” of the disposable film camera. Link -via the Presurfer
Are Women People? is a book of poetry by Alice Duer Miller, published in 1915. Lili Loofbourow downloaded the book through Project Gutenberg and was delighted to find that it was a book of satirical suffragist poetry, and passed along several of the passages to us. Here is a excerpt from the poem called Women:
I went into a factory
to earn my daily bread:
Men said: “The home is woman’s sphere.”
“I have no home,” I said.But when the men all marched to war,
they cried to wife and maid,
“Oh, never mind about the home,
but save the export trade.”For it’s women this and women that, and home’s the place for you,
But it’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do,
There’s outside work to do, my dears, there’s outside work to do,
It’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do.
Read the rest of it, and more poetry of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, at The Hairpin. Link -via Metafilter
George Lucas’ new movie Red Tails open today, about the exploits of the unit known as the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. Before you see it, read the real story of Tuskegee Airman Dr. Roscoe Brown.
“The most difficult part is something that the movie refers to: overcoming the negative beliefs about blacks that we couldn’t do certain things. Our training was relatively fair; however, once we went into combat, initially they didn’t want us to be in the high-responsibility positions escorting the bombers. Once they realized they were losing so many bombers, they wanted as many people as possible to escort them; we were given that mission, and we did it extremely well. Then, once people began to hear about us, they said, ‘We want those guys, they’re really good!’ We were probably as good as many of the white pilots, but many of the white pilots would leave the bombers and shoot down planes to become heroes; our commander insisted that we stay with the bombers, which is why the bombers would like seeing our Red Tails flying over them.
Brown also talks about how he came to be a pilot, some close calls, and the indignities the Airmen endured in the military. Link
Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the first gunshots of the Civil War -and the first gunshot wounds. As it turns out, the bloodiest war in American history was also one of the most influential in battlefield medicine. Civil War surgeons learned fast, and many of their MacGyver-like solutions have had lasting impact. Here are some of the advances and the people behind them.
Life Saving Amputation: The General who Visited his Leg
The old battlefield technique of trying to save limbs with doses of TLC (aided by wound-cleaning rats and maggots) quickly fell out of favor During the Civil War, even for top officers. The sheer number of injured was too high, and war surgeons quickly discovered the best way to stave deadly infections was to simply lop off the area -quickly.
Among those saved by the saw was Daniel E. Sickles, the eccentric commander of the 3rd Army Corps. In 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, the major general’s right leg was shattered by a Confederate shell. Within the hour, the leg was amputated just above the knee. His procedure, publicized in the military press, paved the way for many more. Since the new Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. had requested battlefield donations, Sickles sent the limb to them in a box labeled “With the compliments of Major General D.E.S.” Sickles visited his leg yearly on the anniversary of its emancipation.
Daniel Sickles' leg on display at the the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
(Image credit: Wikipedia user Nis Hoff)
Amputation saved more lives than any other wartime medical procedure by instantly turning complex injuries into simple ones. Battlefield surgeons eventually took no longer than six minutes to get each moaning man on the table, apply a handkerchief soaked in chloroform or ether, and make the deep cut. Union surgeons became the most skilled limb hackers in history. Even in deplorable conditions, they lost only about 25 percent of their patients -compared to a 75 percent mortality rate among similarly injured civilians at the time. The techniques invented by wartime surgeons -including cutting as far from the heart as possible and never slicing through joints- became the standard.
As for the nutty-sounding behavior of the leg-visiting commander, Sickles can be justifiably accused. In 1859, while serving in Congress, he shot and killed U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key for sleeping with Sickles’ wife. Charged with murder, Sickles became the first person in the United States to be found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
The Anesthesia Inhaler: A Knockout Breakthrough
In 1863, Stonewall Jackson’s surgeon recommended the removal of his left arm, which had been badly damaged by friendly fire. When a chloroform-soaked cloth was placed over his nose, the Confederate general, in great pain, muttered, “What an infinite blessing,” before going limp.
English is a fascinating language, particularly in that most of our words come from other languages. While most words come from some sort of root words that have travelled from ancient languages to more modern lexicons, some come from myths and stories of gods and goddesses, particularly from stories from ancient Greece. Here are a few fascinating English words with roots dating back to stories of Zeus and his fellow gods.
If you’re familiar with Greek myths, then you’ll immediately recognize the name of the Titan who was forced to hold up the heavens after angering the Olympians. Even if you didn’t recognize his name from myth though, you certainly recognized the modern use of the term for a group of maps. The connection is logical, but it wasn’t used in the cartography until the sixteenth century.
Image Via Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez [Wikipedia]
These words may not seem to have much in common definition-wise, but there is a good reason they start with the same root –they are both related to time. Chronology deals with the way events happened over the course of time and chronic describes something that takes place over a long period of time. Wondering where we got these words? Well, they are all related to Chronos, the god of time.
Image Via Jorbasa [Flickr]
This is one of the more famous Greek stories-turned-words. In the ancient tales, Echo was a mountain nymph who talks excessively with her gorgeous voice. Her voice was so lovely that she would often distract Zeus’ wife Hera with her long and entertaining stories while Zeus would sneak away and make love with the other mountain nymphs. When Hera found out about Echo’s role in her husband’s activities, she punished her by taking away her ability to speak, except in repetition of the words of others.
There are many differing ends to the story, but in all of them, Echo eventually dies in some heartbreaking manner, leaving her voice to haunt the earth, where it can still be heard to this day.
Yesterday marked 100 years since Robert Falcon Scott and the others of his expedition reached the South Pole. Photographer Herbert Ponting recorded images of the journey, although he did not personally accompany Scott all the way to the Pole.
Staying behind likely saved Ponting’s life: Upon reaching the Pole, Scott and his team discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had gotten there first, on December 14, 1911. (Find out how Amundsen won the Pole, in his own words.) Then, weakened by extreme cold and dwindling supplies, Scott’s entire party died on the return journey, in late March 1912.
Ponting’s photographs survived as well, to this day. National Geographic News has a gallery of those historic images posted in honor of the 100th anniversary. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Herbert G. Ponting/National Geographic)
The famed Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen had a nose ring. It’s true! This video shot and produced in Antarctica by people living there (Antarcticans?) proves it! Take an intoxicated journey into the early history of Antarctic exploration in the style of Derek Waters’s Drunk History series. Content warning: foul language.
– Thanks to Laura Omdahl on Ross Island!
What would America look like if various secession movements of the past had been successful? The company Urban Mapping created maps that follow 30 such movements, and what the results may have been. Link to story. Link to interactive map. -Thanks, Ian!
