History

More Civil War cutups. "Unidentified men in Union uniforms, one pointing a revolver at another's head." Half-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress. View full size.

Today's research snippet.Purbeck Marble - in briefPurbeck columns at the Temple ChurchPurbeck marble was a highly prized building material in the 11th through to 16th centuries, with its heyday in the 12th and 13th.It can only be obtained from one place and that's land in the area of Corfe on the Isle of Purbeck in south-eastern Dorset. It's not a marble technically speaking, but actually a polishable limestone and his characterised by tightly packed fossil shells of the water snail viviparus carinfer. It comes in a variety of shades including blue-grey, red-brown and green. The vein of this limestone is between 18 and 24 inches thick and was worked from the surface.Thousands of architectural objects have been fashioned by Purbeck stone, including columns at the Temple Church, William Marshal's effigy, and a magnificent fountain that used to stand outside the private apartments at the palace of Westminster. Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother to King Stephen, used Purbeck for wall shafts, capitals and bases at Wolvesey Palace in the mid 12thc and also for elaborate colonnettes at Hyde Abbey.Working the marble is tricky because of its denseness and required expert workers in the craft. Such craftsmen worked in the Purbeck area itself, and in London. One of the reasons for the success of Purbeck was the coastal location which made transportation easy. Columns were shipped up to Durham Cathedral in 1175. Capitals and bases went to Norwich, to Westminster, to Vale Royal. In 1375, a ship called The Margarite out of Wareham was listed as transporting cargoes of Purbeck to London, including two high tombs for the Earl of Arundel and a large slab for the Bishop of Winchester. In 1386 the same ship took Purbeck from Dorset to London intended for the tomb of Edward III.Tomb of King John: Worcester cathedralThe London crafstmen originally came from Corfe but settled in their own community in the capital. The biggest influx seems to have come with the requirement for building and beautifying at Westminster Abbey instigated by Henry III in 1245. By 1253 there were 49 marblers on the site all cutting and polishing the marble blocks and shafts. There were probably also centres of marbling at other great ecclesiastical sites - Salisbury cathedral for example, which was sending worked marble to Southampton in 1231-2.The most successful Purbeck items for the mass market in its 12th and 13thc must-have period were tomb slabs and effigies. William Marshal as aforementioned, Henry Bishop of Winchester, King John, Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury. Later on, Purbeck continued to be in high demand when funeral brass effigies became the rage, and the marble was used as the background slab. It was still also being used for panelled tomb chests and large, canopied wall tombs. Today it's no longer quarried on the former sites except for specialist projects such as restoration.

An earlier GeoCurrents post mentioned Finns among the nationalities deported by the Soviets before and during World War II. As it turns out, the situation in the Finnish borderlands is rather more complicated than that. The territory between St. Petersburg and Helsinki is home to a number of ethnic groups whose histories range from cultural and linguistic assimilation to population transfer to outright ethnic cleansing.This post is from GeoCurrents

It might have been May 19, 399 BCE* — and if not, we’re in the neighborhood — that the original gadfly** philosopher Socrates obeyed a death sentence from his native Athens and quaffed a cup of deadly hemlock. It’s one of the most famous executions in history, and arguably one of the most consequential. Socrates left no original writings that survive for us. Posterity sees him via the works of his students Xenophon and especially Plato, but he was a well-known figure to contemporaries in the polis. For decades, the man with the method and the familiar daemon had been philosophizing around town. Socrates comes in for mockery in an Aristophanes play lampooning newfangled intellectual trends in the 420s BCE “Like Ozzy Osbourne, [Socrates] was repeatedly accused of corruption of the young.” The weird and unsatisfying corrupting-the-young and impiety charges which putatively caused the man’s trial and death sentence have been much-debated in the centuries since. It seems clear that at some level the “real” crime in the eyes of the hundreds of fellow-citizens who judged Socrates had to do with the students who weren’t reverential successor-eggheads, but toxic contemporary politicians. Socrates tutored the treacherous demagogue Alcibiades, who convinced Athenians to mount a catastrophic invasion of Sicily that cost Athens the Peloponnesian War; he rolled with Critias, one of the notorious tyrants of Athens during the 404-403 Spartan puppet dictatorship that resulted from losing that war. All the while, Socrates had openly preached a dim view of the Athenian democratic system. Again, we don’t have the master’s direct words here, but something like the dialogue presented by the Socrates character in Plato’s allegory of the cave — in which non-philosophers are a lot of purblind morlocks — is difficult to square with anything but an elitist take of civilization. There’s a reason this could be a bit of a sore subject in a city that had just seen the glories of its late imperial apex possessed by Spartan hoplites, especially when espoused by a guy who rubbed chitons with the tyrants themselves. Even so, Socrates was only narrowly convicted. Once convicted, the legal game had both the prosecution and the defendant propose a punishment, and the jury select one. Were this system still practiced somewhere, game theorists would have a field day with it. But Socrates just opted out of the match by proposing that he be “punished” with a public pension for his services to the polis. There’s being a gadfly, and then there’s telling your jury to go take a long walk off a high rock: he was death-sentenced by a larger margin than had voted to convict. Plato makes this a much more martyr-like scene than Xenophon; the latter emphasizes that the septuagenarian chin-waggler didn’t much mind being excused from the frailties of advancing age. Plato used Socrates repeatedly in various dialogues, and it goes without saying that these are cornerstones of the literary canon. The dialogues of most relevance† for his execution specifically are: the Apology, Plato’s account of the defense Socrates mounted at trial: it’s in this text that Socrates is reported to utter the words, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Crito, a conversation between a wealthy guy of that name and the condemned Socrates in which the philosopher expounds his theory of citizenship and social contract in refusing Crito’s blandishments to escape before execution. the Phaedo, in which Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul, and then gets down to the business of swallowing his fatal draught. Soon the jailer, who was the servant of the Eleven, entered and stood by him, saying:—To you, Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the

The carved outline of foot found on the removable deck planking of the late 9th century Viking Gokstad Ship bears mute witness to how at least one crew member passed the time during a long sea voyage. There are two foot outlines: a right foot carved across two planks and a weaker outline of a left foot on a single plank. The deck was made out of moveable pine planks that could easily be lifted if the crew needed to access the small hold for cargo storage or to bail out water. When the ship was first excavated in 1880, the planks were found scattered so we don’t know if the feet were originally next to each other or if they were carved independently. Even though the ship was excavated 133 years ago and has been in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum since 1932, researchers only noticed the footprints in 2009 when moving the loose floorboards. Museum storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad thinks the carving was the work of a bored youth, much like kids these days might carve their initials into their desks. “My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It’s a kind of an ‘I was here’ message,” says Aannestad. [...] Aannestad has measured one of her own feet against a tracing of the carved outline – because no one can actually step on the fragile floorboard, of course. The foot was smaller than hers, and even though people were generally shorter in the Viking days, this was probably a little person. “It could have been a young man. People were treated as adults much earlier in those days. They took off sooner than we would allow young boys to do today,” says Aannestad. They should add the shoe outline to the exhibit so visitors, especially kids, can compare their feet to that of a real Viking who lived and traveled in that ship 1100 years ago. The foot carving is not the first time a young man established a lasting connection to this ship. It was first discovered on Gokstad farm near the town of Sandefjord on the west side of the Oslo Fjord in 1880 by the two teenage sons of the farm’s owner. The hill was called Kongshaugen (meaning “The King’s Mound”), and one day the boys decided to see if the legends that a king was buried there with all his treasure might be true. Just after New Year’s when the ground was still frozen, the highly motivated youths climbed the hill and started digging. Although the name suggests the hill was a burial mound for royalty, there are many mounds named Kongshaugen that turn out to be just hills. This one turned out to have an elaborate Viking ship burial within. The news reached the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments and its then-president Nicolay Nicolayse managed to stop the amateur dig. He returned in the Spring and began a proper excavation from the side instead of the top down. You can read his 1892 account of the dig here. What he found was an oak clinker-built ship 76 feet long and 17 feet wide with 16 oar holes on each side of the hull. There was room for more than the 34 rowers, however. The ship’s maximum capacity was around 70. A scrap of white wool with red stripes sewn on was found in the front of the ship, possibly a fragment of the square sail. There was a birch bark-covered wooden burial chamber built at the stern of the ship behind the mast. Inside the burial chamber was a raised bed with the incomplete skeleton of an adult male, a man in his 40s around 5’9″ whose leg bones showed the marks of the cutting blows that probably killed him in battle. Blows to the leg were a common fighting technique in Viking times. Fragments of silk and gold thread stuck in the joists of the roof indicate the chamber was once draped with expensive textiles. There were grave goods, although none of the gold, silver, jewelry, precious accessories and armaments that usually accompanied a Viking ship burial. Those had been looted, probab

This is a neat article on Grant and his wife, Julia. The quotes from their courtships letters are a lot of fun! As soon as he was away, Grant began writing love letters to Julia Dent. They portray a tender, sensitive and insecure young man, overly concerned that his fiancée did not share the intensity of his longing for her. She did not write as frequently as he did, causing him great despair, but when she did compose and send letters, Grant would read them over and over. “My Dear Julia,” he wrote. “You can have but little idea of the influence you have over me Julia, even while so far away…and thus it is absent or present I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.” One letter arrived in return with two dried flowers inside, but when Grant opened it the petals scattered in the wind. He searched the barren Mexican sands for even a single petal, but in vain. “Before I seal this I will pick a wild flower off of the Bank of the Rio Grande and send you,” he wrote. Later, from Matamoras, he wrote, “You say in your letter I must not grow tired of hearing you say how much you love me! Indeed dear Julia nothing you can say sounds sweeter…. When I lay down I think of Julia until I fall asleep hoping that before I wake I may see her in my dreams.”

April 17, 1940. When enameled steel was sexy. "Electric Institute of Washington. Display of ranges in lobby at Potomac Electric Power Co. building." 8x10 acetate negative by Theodor Horydczak. View full size.

Guys gone wild, 1860s style. "Unidentified soldiers in Union uniforms holding cigars in each other's mouths." Ninth-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress. View full size.

Check out a blog from Ford’s Theater, one of the many historical sights here in Washington, DC: http://www.fords.org/blogs/fords-theatre/exploring-history-fords-theatre-part-1 The question is raised, what does one do with a site that is noteworthy for the tragedy that happened there? A very good question indeed. I think commemoration is the best answer–not demolition.The current Ford’s Theater has been rebuilt, but it looks very much as it did in 1865 when President Lincoln was assassinated there. I find there’s nothing more important than experiencing that sort of place for oneself, so I fully support fully preserving these places–as respectfully as possible. Filed under: affair of the diamond necklace Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, civil war, Ford's Theater, lincoln assassination, Washington D.C., Washington DC

From 1952 comes this conflation of two popular genres in the children's TV show "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet." Photo by Charlotte Brooks for the Look magazine assignment "Cowboys and Meteors." View full size.