Category Archive: HISTORY
The Truth About Truth
Not as it seems (photo by CGP Grey)
8 July, 1947: The Army Air Field at Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press statement about salvaging the remnants of a “flying disc” from a nearby ranch and taking it to the air field, where it was quickly spirited to an undisclosed location. It wasn’t till about 30 years later (probably after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)) that dozens of people started asserting they’d seen aliens, flying saucers, men in black, and so on. It was good business for a long time. But it wouldn’t even pass muster with Stephen Glass. Truth remains an elusive,…
Continue Reading →Better Never Than Late
Joan gets the Call (by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879)
July 7, 1456: an ecclesiastic court of appeal acquits Joan of Arc of all and any ‘crimes’. Only hitch: she’d been burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. Some French folks maintain that Jeanne d’Arc was the last thing the English cooked properly. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Saint Joan (she was canonised in 1920), called her “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” In GBS’s play, the final scene has King Charles VII of France encounter Joan in a dream, circa her successful appeal. He tells her:…
Continue Reading →Unconventional
'Where are the cigars?' (George Healy's 'The Peacemakers')
July 6, 1854: The US Republican Party held its first Convention, in Jackson, Michigan, ‘under the oaks’. Six years later, the Grand Old Party had its first President: 162 years after that first Convention, the Republicans have taken a wild gamble with their nominee for President in 2017: Mr Trump, like Howard Beale in Network, is articulating the rage of the American people. It’s Big Casino – he could end up like Barry Goldwater, but if he moderates his approach, given the times, he might get there, like Nixon in 1968. Mind you, the Democrats aren’t exactly running FDR, or JFK. …
Continue Reading →Their Best Shot
Hamilton by John Trumbull, painted 2 years after the Duel
Alexander Hamilton Elie Wiesel Michael Cimino This 4th of July, we recall Alexander Hamilton, the multi-talented and widely reviled (vide Burr) political figure of the early days of the American Republic, who did as much as anyone to build the various struts of the enormous edifice now creaking and groaning under the weight of history, with Mrs Clinton or Mr Trump poised to kick away the last brace. What this founding father and first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury would have made of the modern opera now being staged in his name, one can only wonder. Al died in a…
Continue Reading →The Raft of “The Medusa”
3 July 1816: the French frigate “The Medusa” founders off Cap Blanc. Two and a bit years later, Theodore Géricault exhibited his classic romanticist work; a grim and sombre depiction of hope turning to despair, as possible rescue, seen in the distance, fades away. The loss of 150 people in this wreck, and abandonment of some, and evidence of cannibalism by survivors, became a national scandal, and Gericault’s melodramatic treatment did nothing to calm the citizens down. “This was a great subject, gory and gasp-making.”* [Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, 2006, p. 9.]
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