Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics

in History, Science | June 27th, 2022

For her groundbreaking research on radioactivity, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize. Or rather, she won two, one for physics and another for chemistry, making her the only Nobel Laureate in more than one science. What’s more, her first Nobel came in 1903, the very same year she completed her PhD thesis at the Sorbonne. In Recherches sur les substances radioactives (or Research on Radioactive Substances), Curie “talks about the discovery of the new elements radium and polonium, and also describes how she gained one of the first understandings of the new physical phenomenon of radioactivity.”

So says science Youtuber Toby Hendy in the introduction below to Curie’s thesis–a thesis that made her the first woman in France to receive a doctoral degree in physics. “Following on from the discovery of X‑rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895 and Henri Becquerel’s discovery that uranium salts emitted similar penetration properties,” says The Document Centre, Curie “investigated uranium rays as a starting point, but in the process discovered that the air around uranium rays is made to conduct electricity.”

Her deduction that “the process was caused by properties of the atoms themselves” — a revolutionary finding that overturned previously held notions in physics — led her eventually to discover radium and polonium, which would get her that second Nobel in 1911.

Unlike her Nobel Prize in physics, which she shared with her husband Pierre and the physicist Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie won her Nobel Prize in chemistry alone. By 1911 Pierre had been dead for half a decade, but Marie’s scientific genius couldn’t be stopped from continuing their pioneering research as far as she could take it in her own lifetime. She clearly knew how vast a field her work, with and without her husband, had opened up: “Our researches upon the new radio-active bodies have given rise to a scientific movement,” she writes at the end of Recherches sur les substances radioactives. That movement continues to make discoveries more than a century later — and her original thesis itself remains radioactive.

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I

How American Women “Kickstarted” a Campaign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radium, Raising $120,000 in 1921

Marie Curie Attended a Secret, Underground “Flying University” When Women Were Banned from Polish Universities

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive 100+ Years Later

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywood Director George Stevens (1944)

in Film, History | June 24th, 2022

The above footage of Paris’ liberation in August 1944 looks and feels not dissimilar to a Hollywood movie. Part of its power owes to its being in color, a vanishingly rare quality in real film of World War II. But we must also credit its having been shot by a genuine Hollywood filmmaker, George Stevens. Having got his start in pictures as a teenager in the early nineteen-twenties (not long before making the cinematic-historical accomplishment of figuring out how to get Stan Laurel’s light-colored eyes to show up on film), Stevens became a respected director in the following decade. Swing Time, Gunga Din, The More the Merrier: with hits like that, he would seem to have had it made.

But it was just then, as F. X. Feeney tells it in the DGA Quarterly, that the war became unignorable. “The dangerous artistry of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 valentine to Adolf Hitler, Triumph of the Will, moved Stevens to volunteer for frontline service in World War II despite his being old enough to dodge a uniform and sit things out.”

In vivid color, Stevens and his U.S. Army Signal Corps crew shot “the D‑Day landings, where he was one of the first ashore; the liberation of Paris; the snowy ruins of bombed-out villages en route to the Battle of the Bulge; and, most unforgettably, the liberation of the death camp at Dachau.” (Even the celebratory events in Paris had their harrowing moments, such as the sniper attack captured at 11:54.)

Stevens went to war a filmmaker and came home a filmmaker. The long postwar act of his career opened with no less acclaimed a picture than I Remember Mama, and went on to include the likes of A Place in the Sun, Shane, and The Diary of Anne Frank, whose material no doubt resonated even more with Stevens given what he’d seen in Europe. Not all of it, of course, was the aftermath of death and destruction. These Paris liberation clips alone offer glimpses of such admirable figures as resistance fighter Simone Segouin, Generals de Gaulle and Leclerc, and even Lieutenant Colonel Stevens himself. He appears presiding over the shoot just as he must once have done back in California — and, with the war’s end in sight, as he must have known he would do again.

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II

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Time Travel Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remarkably High-Quality 1940s Video

31 Rolls of Film Taken by a World War II Soldier Get Discovered & Developed Before Your Eyes

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

in Architecture, History, Museums, Video - Arts & Culture | June 23rd, 2022

Most 21st-century Brooklyn public elementary schoolers have taken or will take a field trip to the Wyckoff House, a modest wooden cabin surrounded by tire shops and fast food outlets.

The oldest building in NYC by a longshot, it was also the first structure in the five boroughs to achieve historic landmark status.

Primary sources place the original occupants, Pieter Claesen Wyckoff and his wife, Grietje Van Ness-Wyckoff, in the original part of the house around 1652. A single room with a packed earth floor, unglazed windows, a large open hearth, and doors at either end, it would have been pretty tight quarters for a family of 13, as host Thijs Roes of the history series New Netherland Now notes, during his above tour of the premises.

Two parlors were added in the 18th-century, and three bedrooms in the early 19th. Typical Dutch Colonial features include an H frame structure, shingled walls, split Dutch doors, and deep, flared “spring” eaves.

Its survival is a miracle in a metropolis known for its constant flux.

In the early 20th-century, descendants of Pieter and Grietje partnered with community activists to save the home from demolition, eventually donating it to the New York City Parks Department.

A late 70s fire (possibly not the first) necessitated major renovations. (And last year, flooding from Hurricane Ida clobbered its HVAC and electrical system, putting a temporary kibosh on public visits to the interior.)

Back in 2015, Roes’ companion, architectural historian Heleen Westerhuijs, was invited to inspect the attic, where she discovered impressive original beams alongside 20th-century reinforcements.

While the directors of the homestead actively recognize the community that now surrounds it with events like an upcoming celebration of Haitian culture and Vodou, and hands on activities include urban farming and composting, the original settlers of New Netherland (aka New Amsterdam, aka New York City) remain a major focus.

Any American or Canadian with the surname Wyckoff (or one of its more than 50 variants) can and should consider it their ancestral home, as they are almost certainly descended from Pieter and Grietje. While many thousands now bear the name, Pieter was the first. Volunteer genealogist Lynn Wyckoff explains:

After the English assumed control of New Netherland, residents practicing patronymics (a naming system that utilized one’s father’s name in place of a surname) were required to adopt, or freeze, surnames that could be passed down each generation. Pieter Claesen chose the name Wykhof, which most of his descendants have spelled Wyckoff. Despite many unfounded claims over the years regarding both Pieter’s ancestry and choice of surname, there is no record of Pieter’s parentage; but there is substantial evidence that he chose the name Wykhof in recognition of a farm by the same name outside of Marienhafe, Germany where his family were likely tenants.

A handful of Wyckoff family members left comments on the New Netherland Now video, including Donald, who wrote of his visit:

It was an odd feeling to touch the hand-hewn surface of a supporting beam cut and installed by my ancestor, hundreds of years ago. Since I am a Wyckoff, I was allowed to see some of the “off tour” bits of the house. I live over 3k miles away, so my feet will probably never touch the ground there again. But I’m glad NY and a lot of wonderful people have maintained my ancestral home so well and for so many years. Hopefully it has many hundreds of years of life remaining so that people can recall a time when Flatbush was more of a farm than a city.

If you are a Wyckoff (or one of its variants), you’re invited to keep the Wyckoff Association’s family tree up to date by sending word of births, deaths, marriages, and any pertinent genealogical details such as education, military service, profession, places of residence and the like.

Explore a collection of educational activities, lessons, and color pages related to the Wyckoff House here.

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- Ayun Halliday is the author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Her family’s trips to the Wyckoff House were included in the latest, NYC museum-themed issue of her zine, the East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

in Art, History, Poetry, Religion | June 22nd, 2022

Given his achievements in the realms of both poetry and painting, to say nothing of his compulsions to religious and philosophical inquiry, it’s tempting to call William Blake a “Renaissance man.” But he lived in the England of the mid-eighteenth century to the near mid-nineteenth, making him a Romantic Age man — and in fact, according to the current historical view, one of that era’s defining figures. “Today he is recognized as the most spiritual of artists,” say the narrator of the video introduction above, “and an important poet in English literature.” And whether realized on canvas or in verse, his visions have retained their power over the centuries.

That power, however, went practically unacknowledged in Blake’s lifetime. Most who knew him regarded him as something between an eccentric and a madman, a perception his grandly mystical ideas and vigorous rejection of both institutions and conventions did little to dispel.

Blake didn’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger underlying truths using his formidable imagination, exercised both in his art and in his dreams. Cultivating this capacity allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it merely hints at the depth and breadth of his worldview — indeed, his view of all existence. His entire corpus, written, painted, and printed, constitutes a kind of atlas of this richly imagined territory to which “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake” provides an overview. Though very much a product of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clearly drew less inspiration from the world around him than from the world inside him. Reality, for him, was to be cultivated — and richly — within his own being. Still today, the chimerical conviction of his work dares us to cultivate the reality within ourselves.

William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations

William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

William Blake Illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Literature, Original Stories from Real Life (1791)

William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Revolutionary Paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay

in Art, History | June 17th, 2022

“The idea of the unrecognized genius slaving away in a garret is a deliciously foolish one,” says artist and critic Rene Ricard, as portrayed by Michael Wincott, in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. “We must credit the life of Vincent Van Gogh for really sending this myth into orbit.” And “no one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh. In this town, one is at the mercy of the recognition factor.” The town to which he refers is, of course, New York, in which the titular Jean-Michel Basquiat lived the entirety of his short life — and created the body of work that has continued not just to appreciate enormously in value, but to command the attention of all who so much as glimpse it.

As a film Basquiat has much to recommend it, not least David Bowie’s appearance as Andy Warhol. But as one would expect from a biopic about an artist directed by one of his contemporaries, it takes a subjective view of Basquiat’s life and career. “The Revolutionary Paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the video essay by Youtube Blind Dweller above, adheres more closely to the historical record, telling the story of how his wild imagination spurred him on to become the hottest phenomenon on the New York art scene of the nineteen-eighties. By the middle of that decade, the young Brooklynite who’d once lived on the street after dropping out of school found himself making over a million dollars per year with his art.

At that time Basquiat “had collectors knocking on his door nearly every day demanding art from him, yet simultaneously asking for specific colors or imagery to match their furniture,” which resulted in “him slamming the door in a lot of collectors’ faces.” He refused to produce art to order, consumed as he was with his own interests — the law, sainthood, African culture, black American history, the built environment of New York City — and their incorporation into his work. He also possessed a keen sense of how to maintain a tantalizing distance between himself and his public, for instance by deliberately crossing out text in his paintings on the theory that “when a word is more obscured, the more likely an observer will be drawn to it.”

This would have been evident to Warhol, himself no incompetent when it came to audience management. His association with Basquiat secured both of their places in the zeitgeist of eighties America, but his death in 1987 marked, for his young protégé, the beginning of the end. “He began dissociating himself from his downtown past, attending more parties reserved for the super-rich, and becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of being accepted by certain crowds,” says Blind Dweller, and his final heroin overdose occurred the very next year. Basquiat is remembered as both beneficiary and victim of the phenomenon to which we refer (now almost always positively) as hype — countless cycles of which have since done nothing to diminish the vitality exuded by his most striking paintings.

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Revolutionary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large Format Book by Taschen

The Story of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graphic Novel

An Animated Introduction to the Chaotic Brilliance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Homeless Graffiti Artist to Internationally Renowned Painter

The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978–82)

When David Bowie Played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Film, Basquiat

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ziggy Stardust Turns 50: Celebrate David Bowie’s Signature Character with a Newly Released Version of “Starman”

in History, Music | June 17th, 2022

David Bowie’s fans have now been enjoying the character of Ziggy Stardust for a full five decades. That’s hardly a bad run, given that the opening track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars announces that the end of the world will come in just five years. Released on June 16th, 1972, that album gave the public its introduction to the title character, an androgynous rock star from a distant star who one day arrives, messiah-like, on the dying Earth. But as the musical story goes, the resulting fame proves too much for him: the hapless Ziggy ends up in shambles, victimized by Earthly desires in all their manifestations.

One could read into all this certain aspirations and fears on the part of Ziggy Stardust’s creator-performer, the young David Bowie. Broad critical consensus holds that it was on the previous year’s Hunky Dory that Bowie first showed his true artistic potential.

Though that album, his fourth, boasted signature-songs-to-be like “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, Bowie declared (no doubt to the label’s frustration) that he wouldn’t bother promoting it, since he was just about to change his image. This turned out to be a shrewd move, since his subsequent transformation into Ziggy Stardust launched him out of the realm of the respected niche singer-songwriter and into the stratosphere of the bona fide rock star.

Why did Ziggy Stardust drive so many listeners to near-maniac appreciation half a century ago? In Bowie’s native England, many cite his July 1972 performance of “Starman” the BBC’s Top of the Pops as the turning point. Though only mildly psychedelic, the segment celebrated the colorfully askew glamour of Bowie-as-Ziggy and his band the Spiders from Mars just when it was desperately needed. As music critic Simon Reynolds writes, “It is hard to reconstruct the drabness, the visual depletion of Britain in 1972, which filtered into the music papers to form the grey and grubby backdrop to Bowie’s physical and sartorial splendor.” Today you can hear a newly released 2022 mix of “Starman” constructed from the tracks recorded for Top of the Pops those 50 years ago.

Imagine the impact on a young English pop-music fan in 1972 who happened to be watching on color (or rather, colour) television, itself introduced only a few years earlier. Though Bowie may have chosen just the right historical moment to debut the first of his musical personae, he didn’t create Ziggy Stardust ex nihilo. Elements of the character have clear precedents earlier in Bowie’s career, not least in the promotional film for 1968’s “Space Oddity,” the 2001-inspired single that first associated him with the realms beyond our planet. But Ziggy was Bowie’s first genuine alter ego, a character perfectly suited to the era of “glam rock” who could conveniently be retired when that era passed. Glam rock may be long gone, but Ziggy Stardust still looks and sounds as if he’d only just landed on Earth.

The Story of Ziggy Stardust: How David Bowie Created the Character that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Became Ziggy Stardust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Original Footage

Hear Demo Recordings of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” “Space Oddity” & “Changes”

David Bowie Remembers His Ziggy Stardust Days in Animated Video

How David Bowie Delivered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Ziggy Stardust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Wealthy Women (Like the Mona Lisa) Got Dressed in Renaissance Florence

in Art, Fashion, History | June 16th, 2022

“The inhabitants of fifteenth-century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo,” writes essayist and venture capitalist Paul Graham. “There are roughly a thousand times as many people alive in the U.S. right now as lived in Florence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us.” But “to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450”: its community of artists, and indeed everyone of all classes who constituted its uncommonly fruitful society.

Florence’s cultural flourishing lasted into the sixteenth century. Above, you can see a morning in the life of one Florentine of the 1500s recreated in a video by Crow’s Eye Productions. Previously featured here on Open Culture for their re-creations of the dressing processes of the fourteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they show us this time how a woman would put herself together — or by the help, be put together — in turn-of-the-sixteenth-century Florence, which, “like many other Italian regions, had developed its own distinctive fashion style.” The camurra gown, the separate golden sleeves, the informal guarnello over-gown: all evoke this particular time and place.

As each garment and accessory is applied to the model, she may begin to look oddly familiar. “In 1503, a silk merchant from Florence, Francesco del Giocondo, commissioned a portrait of his young wife to adorn a wall in their new home, and perhaps to celebrate the safe arrival of their third child,” the video’s narrator tells us. “The artist commissioned was Leonardo da Vinci.” His portrait of Madonna Giacondo is “an intimate portrayal of a young married woman,” expensively but modestly dressed, wearing a smile “that seems intended for Francesco’s eyes only.” Yet until Leonardo’s death, the picture never left his own possession — perhaps because he sensed it had a destiny much greater than the wall of the del Giocondos’ bedchamber.

How Fashionable Dutch Women (Like the Girl with a Pearl Earring) Got Dressed in 1665

How Ladies & Gentlemen Got Dressed in the 18th Century: It Was a Pretty Involved Process

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes

Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Two Courses by Beloved Yale Historian John Merriman (RIP): “France Since 1871” and “European Civilization, 1648 to 1945”

in History, Life | June 14th, 2022

On May 22, historian John Merriman died at the age of 75. A professor at Yale since 1973, Merriman became an “early practitioner of the history ‘from the ground up, that swept academic study in the 1970s,” notes an obituary in Yale News. There, historian Alice Kaplan adds: “John Merriman became our greatest historian of the French left and its repression, of the Communards, the Anarchists, and the French police, whose experiences he brought to life in books and lectures informed by his work in archives in every region of France…”

The New York Times remembers him as “a rumpled figure who used his storytelling gifts to animate his lectures on French and European history.” And they recall how author Ta-Nehisi Coates “watched some of Professor Merriman’s recorded lectures online and described him … as a ‘kind of freestyle rapper’ who riffed off his material — anecdotes, quotes and observations — and ‘had this weird ability to inhabit the history.’ ”

You, too, can watch his lectures online. A number of years ago, Merriman made two of his beloved courses, “France Since 1871” (top) and “European Civilization, 1648 to 1945” (below) available on Yale Open Courses. If you click on the preceding links, you can find the syllabus and books for each course. These courses are permanently listed in our collection of Free Online History Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in 22 Lectures

French in Action: Cult Classic French Lessons from Yale (52 Episodes) Available Online

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics

Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywood Director George Stevens (1944)

The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter

The Revolutionary Paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay

Ziggy Stardust Turns 50: Celebrate David Bowie’s Signature Character with a Newly Released Version of “Starman”

How Wealthy Women (Like the Mona Lisa) Got Dressed in Renaissance Florence

Watch Two Courses by Beloved Yale Historian John Merriman (RIP): “France Since 1871” and “European Civilization, 1648 to 1945”

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