The Irish Aristocratic Woman Who Almost Assassinated Mussolini in 1926: An Introduction to Violet Gibson

in History | March 24th, 2021

By 1926, Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni had become one of Europe’s most pop­u­lar lead­ers after con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er through vio­lence, turn­ing Italy into a police state, and pro­vid­ing a mod­el for bud­ding dic­ta­tor Adolf Hitler. Mussolini’s received pos­i­tive recog­ni­tion from the press, celebri­ties, and gov­ern­ments around the world, as well as the impri­matur of the Roman Catholic church. None of this mat­tered to one­time Irish socialite and fer­vent Catholic con­vert Vio­let Gib­son. She knew he must be stopped, and she almost did it, get­ting close enough to graze his nose with a bul­let in 1926 before she was tak­en into cus­tody, hand­ed over to British author­i­ties, and “con­signed to an asy­lum” for the next 29 years, “her sto­ry… all but for­got­ten,” Nora McGreevy writes at Smith­son­ian.

Gib­son grew up between Dublin and Lon­don, hail­ing “from a wealthy fam­i­ly head­ed by her father, Lord Ash­bourne, a senior judi­cial fig­ure in Ire­land.” She “served as a debu­tante in the court of Queen Vic­to­ria” and was raised among Euro­pean aris­toc­ra­cy. A sick­ly child, she also suf­fered from men­tal health issues and was diag­nosed with “hys­te­ria.” Per­haps the most defin­ing moment in Gibson’s life — before her assas­si­na­tion attempt on the Ital­ian fas­cist dic­ta­tor — came when she con­vert­ed to Catholi­cism in 1902. It was an event, argues Siob­han Lynam in the 2014 RTÉ radio doc­u­men­tary below, that would lead to “a sort muti­la­tion” in her rela­tion­ship with her fam­i­ly. “There’s a sort of sev­er­ing that hap­pens,” says Frances Stonor Saun­ders, author of The Woman Who Shot Mus­soli­ni.

Through­out the 1920s, Gib­son suf­fered attacks of men­tal ill­ness and was hos­pi­tal­ized after her brother’s death, “over­whelmed by grief and loss and the sheer exhaus­tion of phys­i­cal ill­ness.” She also fol­lowed cur­rent events close­ly, and she was appalled by Mussolini’s rise to pow­er. “Italy for her,” Stonor Saun­ders says, “is a place of… ide­al­ized val­ues.” Gib­son trav­eled to Italy in 1925 with a revolver, which she first used to shoot her­self in the chest. She sur­vived, then formed a plan to kill Mus­soli­ni instead, despair­ing of the world he was bring­ing about. She was able to get close to him, per­haps, because she fit the car­i­ca­ture to which she has been reduced as a his­tor­i­cal foot­note.

“This is a woman whom his­to­ry has stripped of all her dig­ni­ty,” says Stonor Saun­ders. “She exists as a series of real­ly dread­ful clich­es in a num­ber of texts, books that refuse her any kind of human­i­ty. She’s just a stereo­type of crazy Irish spin­ster.” As Lynam’s doc­u­men­tary, Stonor Saun­ders’ book, and a new doc­u­men­tary film cur­rent­ly screen­ing at film fes­ti­vals (see trail­er at then top) show, there was much more to Vio­let Gib­son; she was a com­mit­ted Catholic and anti-fas­cist and she near­ly changed his­to­ry in the most suc­cess­ful of the four attempts on Mussolini’s life. She was fifty years old at the time and she lived anoth­er 30 years in an insti­tu­tion, dying in 1956. She became known among the staff as the delu­sion­al old woman who believed she’d tried to kill Il Duce. No one remem­bered the event, her own rec­ol­lec­tions had been silenced, and she had vir­tu­al­ly fad­ed from the his­tor­i­cal record.

Now, in addi­tion to the media atten­tion, attempts to erect a plaque in Dublin in Gibson’s hon­or are con­tin­u­ing apace. But why was she ignored for so long? Dublin city coun­cil­lor Man­nix Fly­nn tells the BBC that while women are rarely giv­en their due for their role in his­tor­i­cal events, “for some strange rea­sons, Vio­let Gib­son became some sort of an embar­rass­ment, she got shunned, they tried to say she was insane to hide the shame.” Gibson’s fam­i­ly had a hand in this, imme­di­ate­ly using their pow­er to bar­gain for her release from Italy and her com­mit­ment in Britain. But she also became an embar­rass­ment to the pow­ers in Britain and the world at large who had hap­pi­ly embraced a fas­cist dic­ta­tor.

via The Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mus­soli­ni Sends to Amer­i­ca a Hap­py Mes­sage, Full of Friend­ly Feel­ings, in Eng­lish (1927)

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

in History, Maps | March 23rd, 2021

From a port set­tle­ment on the banks of the Thames that the Romans called Lon­dini­um came a thriv­ing city of “rough­ly 100,000 peo­ple” in Shakespeare’s time, “a cross-sec­tion of ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish cul­ture,” the British Library notes, includ­ing “roy­al­ty, nobil­i­ty, mer­chants, arti­sans, labor­ers, actors, beg­gars, thieves, and spies, as well as refugees from polit­i­cal and reli­gious per­se­cu­tion on the con­ti­nent.” The city thrived eco­nom­i­cal­ly and mer­chants from the known world passed through its ports. “As a result, Lon­don­ers would hear a vari­ety of accents and lan­guages as they strolled about the city — a cho­rus of voic­es from across Europe and from all walks of life.”

The cho­rus of voic­es became a cacoph­o­ny for many Lon­don­ers in the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry who res­ur­rect­ed a pas­toral ide­al and/or retired to the coun­try­side in the 1600s. The city swelled to a pop­u­la­tion of around half a mil­lion. “It is also a peri­od dur­ing which a high pro­por­tion of London’s inhab­i­tants were migrants,” writes the Pro­ceed­ings of the Old Bai­ley. “It was only by main­tain­ing this con­stant influx that the cap­i­tal could pos­si­bly main­tain its pop­u­la­tion growth,” slow as it was. “London’s pop­u­la­tion in this peri­od was also char­ac­ter­ized by its diver­si­ty,” and by stag­na­tion as plague and fire dev­as­tat­ed the city through­out the cen­tu­ry.

The city’s cos­mopoli­tan com­mu­ni­ties grew as Eng­land became a colo­nial world pow­er. Neo­clas­si­cal art and archi­tec­ture beau­ti­fied the city’s new wealth, and along with wealth came pover­ty, over­crowd­ing, immis­er­a­tion, and crime. “Here mal­ice, rap­ine, acci­dent, con­spire;  and now a rab­ble, now a fire,” wrote Samuel John­son in “Lon­don,” (1738), a poem writ­ten in imi­ta­tion of Juvenal’s satire on Impe­r­i­al Rome. In his “Lon­don” over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, William Blake saw “marks of weak­ness, marks of woe” on every face he met in the city — begin­ning a protest tra­di­tion that reached its zenith dur­ing the mas­sive pop­u­la­tion growth in Dick­ens’ time, and found new voice in glam, punk, grime, etc.

Peo­ple have come from all over the world to make their home in Lon­don for cen­turies. Each wave of migrants has had to nav­i­gate the city’s class hier­ar­chies — through plagues, fires, the Blitz, strikes, riots, protests, more fires, Brex­it.… Lon­don has burned, “Lon­don is drown­ing,” sang Joe Strum­mer. But Lon­don remains, a megac­i­ty of near­ly 9 mil­lion. In the video above, you can see the city’s growth mapped over a peri­od of 2,000 years, from the Romans to the Sax­ons; from Tudor to Stu­art, ear­ly and late Geor­gian, ear­ly and late Vic­to­ri­an, and into the wartorn 20th cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Lon­don Time Machine: Inter­ac­tive Map Lets You Com­pare Mod­ern Lon­don, to the Lon­don Short­ly After the Great Fire of 1666

Fly Through 17th-Cen­tu­ry London’s Grit­ty Streets with Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tions

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Rebellion with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay

in Art, History | March 23rd, 2021

When we think of Edvard Munch, we think of The Scream. Though not explic­it­ly a self-por­trait, that icon­ic 1893 can­vas does, to any­one who’s read up on the painter’s life, look like a plau­si­ble expres­sion of his trou­bled inter­nal state. But “Self-Por­trait with Cig­a­rette made two years lat­er, though less jar­ring, is just as con­cerned with Munch’s per­son­al psy­chol­o­gy and the dark under­side of his iden­ti­ty as The Scream is.” So argues Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his video essay “Edvard Munch: What A Cig­a­rette Means.” Through the artist’s smoke of choice, it seems, we can approach and under­stand the dif­fer­ent time in which he lived.

“At the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry,” Puschak explains, “the cig­a­rette exist­ed at the cen­ter of a lot of dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al forces.” In fact it had­n’t quite caught on, hav­ing yet to over­come its low­er-class image com­pared to cig­ars and pipes. But as with so much that even­tu­al­ly goes main­stream, the cig­a­rette was first wide­ly adopt­ed by bohemi­ans.

Among them Munch and his con­tem­po­raries “found their alter­na­tive to the suf­fo­cat­ing mid­dle-class val­ue sys­tem. They trad­ed in draw­ing rooms for late-night cafés, din­ner par­ties for night­clubs, and cig­ars for cig­a­rettes.” Puschak pulls up a paint­ing by Munch’s men­tor Chris­t­ian Kro­hg show­ing a 21-year-old Munch “light­ing up with his friends and fel­low painters in his stu­dio.”

Even as he inhab­it­ed it, Munch him­self also cap­tured this float­ing world in his art. In one of his etch­ings, “smoke snakes and fills up the atmos­phere of a café, where bohemi­an intel­lec­tu­als of both gen­ders drink and debate art and ideas.” To the social reform­ers of late 19th-cen­tu­ry Nor­way such scenes were anath­e­ma, and “the cig­a­rette was symp­to­matic of soci­ety’s degen­er­a­tion.” These fig­ures thought lit­tle more of Munch’s art, whether the work in ques­tion was a rel­a­tive­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic image like Self-Por­trait with Cig­a­rette or a vio­lent­ly expres­sion­ist one like The Scream. Regard­ed today as exam­ples of high, refined cul­ture, his paint­ings have in some sense lost their edge; but then so has the cig­a­rette, a one­time lib­er­at­ing sym­bol of social and artis­tic rev­o­lu­tion now reduced to a squalid pub­lic-health haz­ard.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Dig­i­tized and Free Online

The Life & Work of Edvard Munch, Explored by Pat­ti Smith and Char­lotte Gains­bourg

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing The Scream Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

Edvard Munch’s The Scream Ani­mat­ed to the Psy­che­del­ic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Win­ter Ver­sion

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021


What’s the world’s old­est com­put­er? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a cou­ple thou­sand years or so. The first known com­put­er may have been a hand­held device, a lit­tle larg­er than the aver­age tablet. It was also hand-pow­ered and had a lim­it­ed, but nonethe­less remark­able, func­tion: it fol­lowed the Meton­ic cycle, “the 235-month pat­tern that ancient astronomers used to pre­dict eclipses,” writes Rob­by Berman at Big Think.

The ancient arti­fact known as the Antikythera mech­a­nism — named for the Greek Island under which it was dis­cov­ered — turned up in 1900. It took anoth­er three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry before the secrets of what first appeared as a “cor­rod­ed lump” revealed a device of some kind dat­ing from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, mod­ern imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy had iden­ti­fied all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a vir­tu­al mod­el of it was released,” as we not­ed in an ear­li­er post.

The device could pre­dict the posi­tions of the plan­ets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Researchers study­ing the Antikythera mech­a­nism under­stood that much. But they couldn’t quite under­stand exact­ly how it worked, since only about a third of the com­plex mech­a­nism has sur­vived.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

Now, it appears that researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don have fig­ured it out, debut­ing a new com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. “Ours is the first mod­el that con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence and match­es the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engi­neer. In the video above, you can learn about the his­to­ry of the mech­a­nism and its redis­cov­ery in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and see a detailed expla­na­tion of Freeth and his team’s dis­cov­er­ies.

“About the size of a large dic­tio­nary,” the arti­fact has proven to be the “most com­plex piece of engi­neer­ing from the ancient world” the video informs us. Hav­ing built a 3D mod­el, the researchers next intend to build a repli­ca of the device. If they can do so with “mod­ern machin­ery,” writes Guardian sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple, “they aim to do the same with tech­niques from antiq­ui­ty” — no small task con­sid­er­ing that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have man­u­fac­tured such com­po­nents” with­out the use of a lathe, a tool they prob­a­bly did not pos­sess.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

The mech­a­nism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s mod­el works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there oth­er such devices? Hope­ful­ly, we won’t have to wait anoth­er sev­er­al decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Sci­en­tif­ic Reports arti­cle here. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

in Art, History | March 17th, 2021

The Bayeux Tapes­try, one of the most famous arti­facts of its kind, isn’t actu­al­ly a tapes­try. Tech­ni­cal­ly, because the images it bears are embroi­dered onto the cloth rather than woven into it, we should call it the Bayeux Embroi­dery. To quib­ble over a mat­ter like this rather miss­es the point — but then, so does tak­ing too lit­er­al­ly the sto­ry it tells in col­ored yarn over its 224-foot length. Com­mis­sioned, his­to­ri­ans believe, as an apolo­gia for the Nor­man con­quest of Eng­land in 1066, this elab­o­rate work of nar­ra­tive visu­al art con­veys events with a cer­tain slant. But in so doing, the Bayeux’s 75 dra­mat­ic, bloody, rib­ald, and some­times mys­te­ri­ous episodes also cap­ture how peo­ple and things (and even Hal­ley’s Comet) looked in medieval Europe.

It does this in great, if styl­ized detail, at which you can get a clos­er look than has ever before been avail­able to the pub­lic at the Bayeux Muse­um’s web site. The muse­um “worked with teams from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Caen Nor­mandie to dig­i­tize high-res­o­lu­tion images of the tapes­try, which were tak­en in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.

“A sim­ple inter­face was cre­at­ed to access the dig­i­tal ver­sion, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin trans­la­tions in French and Eng­lish.” Made of 2.6 bil­lion pix­els (which brings it to eight giga­bytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapes­try lets us zoom in so far as to exam­ine its indi­vid­ual threads — the same lev­el at which it was inspect­ed in real life ear­li­er last year in antic­i­pa­tion of its next restora­tion.

“A team of eight restor­ers, all spe­cial­ists in antique tex­tiles, car­ried out the detailed inspec­tion in Jan­u­ary 2020, a peri­od when the muse­um was closed to vis­i­tors,” says Medievalists.net. “Among their find­ings were that the tapes­try has 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrin­kles, 9,646 gaps in the cloth or the embroi­dery, 30 non-sta­bi­lized tears, and sig­nif­i­cant weak­en­ing in the first few metres of the work.” (Notably, the col­ors applied in a 19th-cen­tu­ry restora­tion have fad­ed much more than the veg­etable dyes used in the orig­i­nal.) Though cur­rent­ly a bit rough around the edges, the Bayeux Tapes­try looks pret­ty good for its 950 or so years, as any of us can now look more than close­ly enough to see for our­selves. This is a cred­it to its mak­ers — whose iden­ti­ties, for all the scruti­ny per­formed on the work itself, may remain for­ev­er unknown. Explore the high-res­o­lu­tion scan of the Tapes­try here.

via Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine and Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ani­mat­ed Bayeux Tapes­try: A Nov­el Way of Recount­ing The Bat­tle of Hast­ings (1066)

Con­struct Your Own Bayeux Tapes­try with This Free Online App

How the Ornate Tapes­tries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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17-Year-Old Adeline Harris Created a Quilt Collecting 360 Signatures of the Most Famous People of the 19th Century: Lincoln, Dickens, Emerson & More (1863)

in Art, History | March 17th, 2021

These days, any­one can reach out to hun­dreds of celebri­ties, artists, writ­ers, major heads of state, etc., on social media (or to the interns and assis­tants who run their accounts). Instan­ta­neous con­nec­tion also means hun­dreds of near-instan­ta­neous com­ments in near-real time. It can occa­sion­al­ly mean near-instan­ta­neous influ­encer fame. For 17-year-old Ade­line Har­ris, it would take sev­en years or so to get in touch with 360 of the biggest names in lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, and oth­er fields of her time. Giv­en that she start­ed in 1856, that’s a some­what extra­or­di­nary feat. It’s only one impres­sive fea­ture of her Tum­bling Block with Sig­na­tures Quilt, most­ly com­plet­ed some­time in 1863.

Har­ris’ quilt­mak­ing project uses a “tum­bling blocks pat­tern,” notes The His­to­ry Blog, “char­ac­ter­ized by a trompe l’oeil that gives it 3D cube effect. [She] show­cased excep­tion­al skill and mas­tery in her needle­work and fab­ric choice, empha­siz­ing the 3D effect with her arrange­ment of the var­ied pat­terns of silk pieces.”

The sig­na­tures on the white dia­monds atop each “tum­bling block” were mailed to Har­ris by request from a “who’s who” of mid-19th cen­tu­ry lumi­nar­ies, includ­ing “an aston­ish­ing eight pres­i­dents of the Unit­ed States (Mar­tin Van Buren, John Tyler, Mil­lard Fill­more, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abra­ham Lin­coln, Andrew John­son, Ulysses S. Grant).”

The quilt also con­tains the sig­na­tures of Union gen­er­als, con­gress­men, jour­nal­ists, aca­d­e­mics, cler­gy­men. Famous names include Samuel Morse, Horace Gree­ley, Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Wal­do Emer­son, Jacob Grimm, Alexan­der von Hum­boldt, Hen­ry Wadsworth Longfel­low, Julia Ward Howe, Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Alexan­dre Dumas, Oliv­er Wen­dell Holmes, William Make­peace Thack­er­ay, and Charles Dick­ens. She placed the names in cat­e­gories divid­ing the sig­na­to­ries by pro­fes­sion.

The full list “is noth­ing short of phe­nom­e­nal,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, adding that “accord­ing to her grand-daugh­ter the Lin­coln sig­na­ture was, due to a fam­i­ly con­nec­tion, actu­al­ly acquired in per­son, and Ade­line was meant to have even danced with Lin­coln at his inau­gu­ra­tion ball.” Har­ris — lat­er Ade­line Har­ris Sears — came from a wealthy Rhode Island tex­tile mill fam­i­ly and mar­ried a promi­nent cler­gy­man. She spent most of her life in the state, and mailed most of her sig­na­ture requests rather than deliv­er­ing them first­hand.

Sig­na­ture quilts were not new; they had been sewn for years to mark fam­i­ly occa­sions and oth­er events. But nev­er had they been a means of celebri­ty auto­graph-hunt­ing, nor been cre­at­ed by a sin­gle indi­vid­ual. Col­lect­ing auto­graphs, how­ev­er, was quite pop­u­lar. “Adeline’s taste for auto­graphs… betrays her roman­tic nature,” writes Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor Amelia Peck. “Among a cer­tain seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, it was believed that a person’s sig­na­ture revealed sig­nif­i­cant aspects of his or her per­son­al­i­ty.”

It’s hard not to see the seeds of our con­tem­po­rary cul­ture in the con­sump­tion of celebri­ty auto­graphs Peck describes: “By own­ing a sig­na­ture of an illus­tri­ous per­son, one could learn about the char­ac­ter­is­tics that made him or her great and emu­late those traits.” This mania for auto­graphs “par­al­leled the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry fas­ci­na­tion with oth­er types of pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic per­son­al­i­ty dis­cov­ery, such as phrenol­o­gy.” There were deep, mys­ti­cal mean­ings in Ade­line’s quilt, wrote edi­tor Sarah Hale, who also donat­ed a sig­na­ture. In her 1868 book Man­ners, Hap­py Homes and Good Soci­ety All the Year Round, Hale explained what made the quilt a mas­ter­piece:

In short, we think this auto­graph bedquilt may be called a very won­der­ful inven­tion in the way of needle­work. The mere mechan­i­cal part, the num­ber of small pieces, stitch­es neat­ly tak­en and accu­rate­ly ordered; the arrang­ing prop­er­ly and join­ing nice­ly 2780 del­i­cate bits of var­i­ous beau­ti­ful and cost­ly fab­rics, is a task that would require no small share of res­o­lu­tion, patience, firm­ness, and per­se­ver­ance. Then comes the intel­lec­tu­al part, the taste to assort col­ors and to make the appear­ance what it ought to be, where so many hun­dreds of shades are to be matched and suit­ed to each oth­er. After that we rise to the moral, when human deeds are to live in names, the con­sid­er­a­tion of the celebri­ties, who are to be placed each, the cen­tre of his or her own cir­cle! To do this well requires a knowl­edge of books and life, and an instinc­tive sense of the fit­ness of things, so as to assign each name its suit­able place in this galaxy of stars or dia­monds.

See more close-ups of the quilt at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, who hold this one-of-a-kind work of sig­na­to­ry fab­ric art in their col­lec­tions.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Solar Sys­tem Quilt: In 1876, a Teacher Cre­ates a Hand­craft­ed Quilt to Use as a Teach­ing Aid in Her Astron­o­my Class

Too Big for Any Muse­um, AIDS Quilt Goes Dig­i­tal Thanks to Microsoft

Bisa Butler’s Beau­ti­ful Quilt­ed Por­traits of Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, Nina Simone, Jean-Michel Basquiat & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Archeologists Reconstruct the Faces of 10-Century Medieval Dukes, Using DNA Analysis & 3‑D Models of Skulls

in History, Science | March 17th, 2021

Maybe you’ve sung the Christ­mas car­ol “Good King Wences­las” and won­dered who this good king was. The car­ol wasn’t writ­ten until the 19th cen­tu­ry, but “Wences­las was a real per­son,” writes NPR’s Tom Manoff, the patron saint of the Czechs and “the Duke of Bohemia, a 10th-cen­tu­ry Chris­t­ian prince in a land where many prac­ticed a more ancient reli­gion. In one ver­sion of his leg­end, Wences­las was mur­dered in a plot by his broth­er,” Boleslav, “under the sway of their so-called pagan moth­er,” Dra­homíra.

Wences­las’ grand­moth­er Lud­mil­la died a Chris­t­ian mar­tyr in 921 A.D. Her hus­band, Bořivoj, ruled as the first doc­u­ment­ed mem­ber of the Pře­mys­lid Dynasty (late 800s-1306), and her two sons Spyti­h­nĕv I (cir­ca 875–915) and Vratislav I (cir­ca 888–921), Wences­las’ father, ruled after their father’s death. The skele­tal remains of these roy­al Bohemi­an broth­ers were iden­ti­fied at Prague Cas­tle in the 1980s by anthro­pol­o­gist Emanuel Vlček. Due to advances in DNA analy­sis and imag­ing, we can now see an approx­i­ma­tion of what they looked like. (See Spyti­h­nĕv at the top and Vratislav at the bot­tom in the image below.)

A Czech-Brazil­lian research team cre­at­ed the recon­struc­tions, mak­ing “edu­cat­ed guess­es” about the broth­ers’ hair­styles, beards, and cloth­ing. “The team, which includ­ed archae­ol­o­gists Jiří Šin­delář and Jan Frol­ík, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mar­tin Frouz, and 3‑D tech­ni­cian Cicero André da Cos­ta Moraes,” Isis Davis-Marks writes at Smith­son­ian, “has pre­vi­ous­ly recon­struct­ed the faces of Zdisla­va of Lem­berk (cir­ca 1220–1252), patron saint of fam­i­lies, and Czech monarch Judi­ta of Thuringia (cir­ca 1135–1174), among oth­ers.”

The project pro­ceed­ed in sev­er­al stages, with dif­fer­ent experts involved along the way. “First,” notes Archae­ol­o­gy, “detailed images of the bones were assem­bled using pho­togram­me­try to form vir­tu­al 3‑D mod­els” of the skulls. Then, facial recon­struc­tion expert Moraes added mus­cle, tis­sue, skin, etc., rely­ing on “mul­ti­ple three-dimen­sion­al recon­struc­tion tech­niques,” Davis-Marks writes, “includ­ing anatom­i­cal and soft tis­sue depth meth­ods, to ensure the high­est pos­si­ble lev­el of accu­ra­cy.” DNA analy­sis showed that the broth­ers like­ly had blue eyes and red­dish-brown hair.

Spyti­h­nĕv and Vratislav’s oth­er fea­tures come from the best guess of the researchers based on “minia­tures or man­u­scripts,” says Frol­ík, “but we don’t real­ly know.” Do they look a bit like video game char­ac­ters? They look very much, in their dig­i­tal sheen, like char­ac­ters in a medieval video game. But per­haps we can antic­i­pate a day when real peo­ple from the dis­tant past return as ful­ly ani­mat­ed 3D recon­struc­tions to replay, for our edu­ca­tion and amuse­ment, the bat­tles, court intrigues, and frat­ri­cides of his­to­ry as we know it.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

20,000 Endan­gered Archae­o­log­i­cal Sites Now Cat­a­logued in a New Online Data­base

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

The His­to­ry of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Ani­mat­ed in 12 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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All Praise Lou Ottens: The Inventor of the Cassette Tape Dies at Age 94

in History, Music | March 12th, 2021

The cas­sette tape is so ubiq­ui­tous, so much a part of my life since I can even remem­ber music as a thing, that it was a shock to find out that the man who invent­ed it, Lou Ottens, passed away at the age of 94. Of course, some­body did have to invent the cas­sette tape, but in all these years I nev­er thought to look the per­son up. Such an inven­tion first makes you think of the world before it: records (dear­ly beloved, still around), and reel-to-reel tape (not so dear­ly beloved). The for­mer was a fixed object, an art object, immutable (until turntab­lists came along). The lat­ter was a way to record our­selves, but so much more was involved in the act. Peo­ple had to wind the spin­dle, to thread the tape through the cap­stan and heads, and record usu­al­ly in mono. You can see an overview of a mod­el from the 1950s here.

Ottens was a Dutch engi­neer work­ing at Philips who became head of new prod­uct devel­op­ment in Has­selt, Bel­gium. His assign­ment was to shrink the reel-to-reel and, like the radio, make it more portable. And here is the most impor­tant deci­sion: Ottens want­ed the for­mat to be licensed to oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers for free, so every­body could par­take. Con­sid­er­ing the end­less for­mat bat­tles that we fight every day, this deci­sion was as mon­u­men­tal as it was human­ist.

He designed his pro­to­type out of wood and sized it to fit into a pock­et for true porta­bil­i­ty. (This pro­to­type, by the way, dis­ap­peared from his­to­ry after he used it to prop up a jack when fix­ing a flat tire.) The actu­al com­pact cas­sette, pro­mot­ed as a cheap­er and small­er for­mat for major label releas­es, imme­di­ate­ly gained a sec­ond life as an artis­tic tool: a way for reg­u­lar folk to record what­ev­er they want­ed. Kei­th Richards report­ed­ly record­ed the riff for “Sat­is­fac­tion” on the portable cas­sette play­er near his bed. Peo­ple record­ed lec­tures, the tele­vi­sion, the radio, their rel­a­tives, their friends, the ran­dom sound of life. Peo­ple start­ed to curate: their favorite music, their favorite peo­ple, their favorite sounds. Peo­ple pre­tend­ed to be DJs, pre­tend­ed to be artists, pre­tend­ed to be tele­vi­sion hosts, pre­tend­ed to be authors, pre­tend­ed to be crit­ics. And some through pre­tend­ing became the things they want­ed to be.

Peo­ple made mix­tapes for friends and for lovers. They looked at the remain­ing tape on the spin­dle and won­dered if the song they had to end side two would fit. Peo­ple real­ized that cas­sette tape could be a col­lage of sounds, cut up by the pause but­ton.

Ottens may not have real­ized it, but he had cre­at­ed a com­plete­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic for­mat. In the 1980s, the back pages of music mag­a­zines flour­ished with the cat­a­logs of cas­sette-only album releas­es. If you had a Walk­man and a friend with a halfway decent tape recorder, you could car­ry around your favorite music and lis­ten to it when­ev­er you want­ed.

The record indus­try rebelled (for a while). They want­ed you to know that “home tap­ing is killing music” but did so with a skull and bones graph­ic that made it that much cool­er. In the end it didn’t real­ly mat­ter. The music fans repur­chased every­thing on CD any­way. (Apart from the peo­ple who taped CDs and even then after that *those* peo­ple down­loaded the mp3s.)

And here’s the thing. Ottens wasn’t pre­cious about any of it. He was part of the devel­op­ment of the Com­pact Disc. The cas­sette was just anoth­er step­ping stone.

But despite the numer­ous arti­cles that cas­settes were a dead medi­um, they kept com­ing back. Mix­tapes, the lifeblood of hip hop cul­ture con­tin­ued to thrive, even if by the end of the cen­tu­ry the idea was more of a con­cept. And then in the mid­dle of the 2010s cas­settes came roar­ing back after the vinyl resur­gence. For bands it was a cheap way to pro­vide a phys­i­cal prod­uct, what with vinyl still being very expen­sive to pro­duce. Band­camp, the place to go for cas­sette-only releas­es, offers artis­tic tapes for the same price as a dig­i­tal down­load. So why not get both and start your library again?

Ottens nev­er fore­saw any of this hap­pen­ing, but it speaks to some­thing very human: we want con­trol of our music, and dig­i­tal music, espe­cial­ly in the cloud, ain’t cut­ting it. We want to hold some­thing in our hands and claim it as our own.

So pour one out for Lou Ottens, who start­ed a rev­o­lu­tion that hasn’t fin­ished. Do *not* press pause.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape in the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

2,000+ Cas­settes from the Allen Gins­berg Audio Col­lec­tion Now Stream­ing Online

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

Stream a Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of Indie, Noise Indus­tri­al Mix­tapes from the 80s and 90s

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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