History

Rob and Laura redux: Another glimpse of Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke on the "Dick Van Dyke Show" set in 1963. Photo by Earl Theisen for the article "America's Favorite TV Wife" in Look magazine. View full size.

Circa 1908. "The Boulevard, Potomac Park, Washington, D.C." Various national landmarks in a strikingly uncrowded capital. 8x10 glass negative. View full size.

An article by Harvey Butler from the Twin Anniversary Edition of the Sandusky Register and Star News, from November 24, 1947 reported that in 1884, there were more than four hundred telephones in operation in Sandusky, Ohio. Four operators worked to handle all the connections from those phones. From the early part of the twentieth century until about 1922, there were two telephone companies in Sandusky. The Central Union Telephone was located on Washington Row, and the Sandusky Telephone Company was on the fourth floor of the Kingsbury Block (Columbus Avenue and Washington Row). There were two exchanges at that time. Central Union Telephone customers used the Bell exchange, and the Sandusky Telephone Company used the Harrison Exchange. Dr. Henry Graefe’s listing in the 1919 Sandusky City Directory had two phone numbers, so that customers from either company could contact his office. His phone numbers were: Bell Main 75 and Harrison 57. About 1921, the Central Union Telephone Company changed its name to the Ohio Bell Telephone Company. By 1923, there was only one telephone company in Sandusky, the Ohio Bell Telephone Company. These switchboard operators were working at Ohio Bell in 1930. Information posted on this picture states that in 1930 there were 75 switchboard operators who handled 45,000 calls from 9,700 Sandusky subscribers. In 1984, Ohio Bell became a part of Ameritech, which later became SBC/AT&T. Of course, millions of individuals all over the world now use cell phones. On several occasions the Ohio Telephone Pioneers, a non-profit organization made up telephone employees and retirees, held their annual meeting at Cedar Point.

Cover of Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes published by The Museum of Modern Art As the leader of the International Style, the Swiss-born, Paris-based architect Le Corbusier had the rare opportunity to build on three continents at a time when airplanes were still a new method of transportation. Because the architect behind the Villa Savoye employed signature elements in widespread locations throughout the world, some say he blanketed the world with one style of architecture. His various projects do share some universal elements, but this one-style-fits-all opinion of Le Corbusier’s work oversimplifies his approach—place indeed affected practice. MoMA’s new exhibition catalogue, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, by guest curator Jean-Louis Cohen and MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll, looks beyond the superficial qualities of Le Corbusier’s buildings and into the place and culture in which they were created. Structured as an atlas, the book offers a unique way to explore the life and work of one of the most important visionaries of our time. As Cohen explains, “the idea of a Corbusian atlas can be understood in its most literal sense, as a mapping of places lived, observed, drawn, designed, and built by Le Corbusier.” In addition to providing a visual perspective for exploring Le Corbusier’s extensive contributions to architecture, the maps geographically organize essays from over 30 of the foremost scholars of his work. Included with the essays are over 400 vivid illustrations including vintage and contemporary photographs, drawings, plans, watercolors, sketches, and much more. Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" /> Map from Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" /> Map from Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" /> Map from Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" /> Map from Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes Through this lens of a “Corbusian atlas,” readers gain a new perspective on Le Corbusier as an architect, interior designer, artist, writer, photographer, city planner, and a man who had dynamic and complex relationships with the physical environments he encountered. According to Bergdoll, Le Corbusier viewed “building as a type of viewing device for the landscape beyond it, a means, therefore, of making the landscape into an object of contemplation.” Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). Unité d’habitation, Marseille. 1945–52. Roof terrace. Photograph. 2012. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC. Photo © Richard Pare The architect himself once said, “a site or a landscape does not exist—except as our eyes see it. The idea therefore is to make it visibly present, choosing the best of the whole or parts of it.” Download a free sample of Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, available exclusively from the MoMA Stores now through July, and be sure to visit the exhibition, on view through September 23, in the sixth-floor galleries.

Drosera capensis"> I’ve remembered to label my Drosera capensis with italics.

In my mind, I have a picture of the Acropolis Museum celebrating its birthday – perhaps in a big party to which all the other museums are invited. Each year, it excitedly waits in hope of a giant cake in the shape of the Elgin Marbles – but it never arrives & it is left to celebrate on its own, hoping that the next year will be better. Don’t get me wrong – it is still an amazing museum & should be on the itinerary of any visitor to Athens. But, to jump back to the previous analogy, if it was a cake, it would only have half the icing on – there are patches everywhere with no icing, and everyone wonders when these bits will be finished. From: Greek Reporter Acropolis Museum’s 4th Anniversary By Christina Flora on June 18, 2013 The Acropolis Museum opened its gates when the great economic crisis started affecting Greece. But it had the luck to be embraced by the Greek and international public, giving it the chance to operate for four years without public subsidy. The Acropolis Museum celebrates its fourth birthday with optimism for the future. On Thursday, June 20, the exhibition venue and the restaurant will remain open from 8am to midnight, while admission will be reduced to three euros for everyone. Visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to discover along with the museum’s archaeology – carers, the hidden stories of the surviving blocks of the frieze with three-dimensional presentations on specific screens that will be placed in the Parthenon Gallery. On the same evening, at 9 p.m., the Philharmonic Wind Orchestra of Athens will take visitors in the courtyard on a musical tour with beloved melodies from the world repertoire. Furthermore, the Museum will launch in its shops two commemorative copies of sculptures, the head of Poseidon and the head of Artemis from the east frieze of the Parthenon.

Berlin’s Pergamnon Museum has been the subject of various restitution requests from countries such as Turkey. Not for the first time though, Germany is trying to turn the whole situation on its head, by clamouring for the return of some of the artefacts from its museums that were taken by Russia. This approach would be fine – but for as long as it ignores the requests for restitution of items such as the Pergamon Altar, they shouldn’t expect other countries to have too much sympathy with their predicament. It has to be added though – that Russia’s behaviour has hardly been exemplary either. Particularly in its attempts to deliberately highlight just how many artefacts they managed to illegally acquire from Germany. From: Independent Mary Dejevsky Tuesday 18 June 2013 The Pergamon Museum offers a pointed message from Berlin to Russia – give our treasures back Briefly in Berlin, I took time out to visit the Pergamon Museum, which houses –among many, many antiquities, the remains of the great temple and its altar. If you’re at all queasy about how the Elgin Marbles reached the British Museum and why they are still there, you should probably give the Pergamon temple a miss. Otherwise, it is one of the great relics of the ancient world, rescued – or looted, depending on your view – for the delectation and education of more northerly Europeans. There are, though, good reasons why – despite any misgivings – it’s worth going. One is that the Pergamon Museum is part of a grand, and still growing, ensemble that occupies Museum Island just a short distance from the Reichstag. Clustering so many grand collections together, rather than scattering them around the city in the name of regeneration, provides a magnificent monument to high culture that is unique to Berlin. Another is for what it says about the practicalities of German reunification. Much of the island, which is in the former East Berlin, is in the throes of extensive restoration. And all the wraps, noise and excavations, along with the empty spaces before you cross to the island, are a reminder of how much remains to be done to knit the city together more than 20 years after reunification. Each time I go to Berlin, the disparities between west and east – in shops, building quality and overall feel – are less conspicuous. But the scale of the task to fill in the empty middle was, and is, enormous. And, third, for all the Checkpoint Charlie memorabilia, it’s hard now to remember that the East was not just walled in, but under Russian occupation – unless you go to Treptow Park, where the vast Russian war memorial still stands. Elsewhere, Russian traces are mostly gone, including from the Pergamon Museum, where the information boards are now in German and English, and sometimes in Turkish, but not Russian. Except for one. On the first wall, there is a summary of how the remains of the temple came to be in Berlin. They were, it says, displayed in Berlin until 1943, when they were taken to Russia. They were returned in 1958, unlike – the notice goes on pointedly – many other stolen artefacts. This board is in German, English and Russian – the only Russian, so far as I could see, in the whole museum. The hope presumably is that Russian tourists – of whom there are many – will take the message home.

Buell, Jonathan S.The Cider Makers’ Manual:a Practical Hand-Book, Which Embodies Treatises on the Apple; Construction of Cider Mills, Cider-Presses, Seed-Washers, and Cider Mill Machinery in General; Cider Making; Fermentation; Improved Processes in Refining Cider, and its Conversion into Wine & Champagne. Revised edition with additions.Buffalo:Published by Haas, Nauert& Co., 1874. Perhaps the best of 19th-century [...]

On this date in 1699, Madame Angelique-Nicole Tiquet lost her beautiful head … eventually. The talk of every Parisian in the spring of 1699 for attempting the life of her husband, Angelique-Nicole Carlier had been well-known in Paris circles since the 1670s; coincidentally or not, that was a period when a perceived boom in “husband-killing” burgeoned the phenomenon into an outright moral panic. In those bygone days, Mademoiselle Carlier did her manslaying metaphorically, wielding only her limitless charms (not excluding a wealthy inheritance left by her industrious albeit untitled late father). This reputed “masterpiece of nature,” alas, exchanged her magnum opus for deniers on the livre when she succumbed to the suit of Claude Tiquet, a respected councilor of the Parlement of Paris so bedazzled by the young woman that he did not pause to consider her liberalities. Although quite past her in age, Tiquet won her hand with the promise of wealth so capacious that he wooed his intended with a bouquet of flowers studded with 15,000 l. worth of diamonds — and plied her aunt with still more largesse to advance his case. But actually, Monsieur Tiquet was not wealthy. He stretched his fortune to acquire these amorous bribes as, let us say, investments in a happy future. “Thus they united their fortunes for life, equally blinded as to each other,” George Henry Borrow wrote. “Such are the steps that lead to the most unhappy destinies.” The wife’s prodigality — and her belated discovery as she blew through the putative family fortune that it was he who had married the money, and not she — soon brought domestic relations to a frosty pass. Madame kindled a more edifying romance with a young captain of the guards; Monsieur strove in vain to check her moves with locked doors and snooping skulks. They separated to distinct wings of the family house, seeing one another only rarely — and in deathly silence — while each schemed his or her embittered schemes. Years they wasted at this intolerable impasse. Despairing at last of being rid of either her horrible husband or his horrible debts, Madame Tiquet took her plotting far enough to compass her spouse’s death. “It is impossible,” she cried in one unguarded moment to a friend, “for me to have any enjoyment of myself while my husband lives, who is in too good health for me to look for such a quick revolution of fortune.” So she engaged the services of her porter and of a freelance villain, and on the evening of April 8, 1699, these two assassins ambushed Claude Tiquet as he returned from a friend’s house and shot him three times. One ball only barely missed the heart. Tiquet survived, and he demanded those who came to his aid take him not to his own house but back to his friend’s. Of enemies, he said, “I have none but my own wife.” This scenario speedily became the talk of Paris, and it did not take long for sentiment to coalesce against the wife. The hired assassins implicated Madame Tiquet in a years-long conspiracy to murder her husband whose previous installments — a missed ambush; a failed poisoning — had come to naught. Both Madame Tiquet and the porter, Jacques Moura, received a sentence of death, each appropriate to their respective stations: she to lose her neck, and he to swing from his. There nevertheless remained some ambiguity about her real guilt, for the evidence was mostly circumstance and inference and colored by the purely titillating qualities of the public scandal. And then there was the fact that she was an attractive woman. Angelique’s brother, a guardsman like the condemned woman’s lover, organized a petition for pardon. Surprisingly, even Monsieur Tiquet threw himself at Louis XIV‘s feet to plead for the life of his would-be murderess and the mother of his children. But it is said that when

The archaeological site of Werowocomoco, Chief Powhatan’s capital city when the Jamestown colony was founded in 1607, is no longer in danger of development and destruction thanks to a new agreement between the property owners and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. The conservation easement will protect the site from development and keep it open to future archaeological exploration. Examining records and maps left by explorer Captain John Smith, among other primary sources, in 2003 historians identified the 57 acre site overlooking the York River in Tidewater, Virginia, as the likely center of Powhatan’s vast chiefdom. Subsequent archaeological excavations confirmed the identification, but they’ve barely scraped the surface. Only 2% of the site has been explored thus far. Landowners Robert and Lynn Ripley have generously allowed archaeologists to excavate the site for the past decade, and now that the easement agreement has been made, their generosity will extend in perpetuity giving researchers all the time they need to dig wider and deeper. Werowocomoco means “place of chiefs” or “place of power” in the Powhatan language and it was no overstatement. Chief Powhatan — real name Wahunsunacawh — created a confederation of tribes whose territory, called Tsenacommacah meaning “densely-populated land,” stretched from the Eastern Shore of Virginia west to a fall line near I-95. All the tribes had their own chiefs who all paid tribute to Wahunsunacawh. Werowocomoco was the seat of religious and temporal power of the Powhatan paramountcy. Powhatan’s chiefdom covered 30 political divisions and a population of 15,000 to 20,000 people while Jamestown settlers struggled to survive. Excavations have yielded the outline of the largest longhouse ever found in Virginia and a system of ditches that may have separated sacred and secular areas. Randolph Turner, a retired state archaeologist whose hunt for Werewocomoco dates to the 1970s, said Powhatan’s empire was “one of the most complex political entities in all of eastern North America.” The leader “had the power of life and death” and expanded his empire through warfare or the threat of warfare. “He’s one of the most interesting political and military figures that I’ve ever read about,” Turner said. “And we’re just getting hints in the historical records of all he accomplished in his lifetime.” Werowocomoco is an invaluable resource on the life of Powhatan, his chiefdom and culture, all the more so because much of what is commonly known about the great man has been filtered through the perspective of the Jamestown colonists. Notice the title of the article about the easement: “Virginia site of Pocahontas rescue will be preserved.” That’s a reference to the almost certainly apocryphal story that Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas threw herself bodily over John Smith to save him from being executed by her father in 1607. Members of the area’s Pamunkey tribe have been involved in the excavations from the beginning, getting their hands dirty in the dig, working with archaeologists to ensure the site is treated with respect and burial grounds are not disturbed. The preservation and continuing exploration of Werowocomoco will reveal their history without the constant and irritating forced connection to Jamestown and the various associated legends. Ashley Atkins, a Pamunkey member and College of William & Mary doctoral candidate put its neatly: “I want people to understand there was a real civilization, a complex cultural community that existed prior to European colonization. Europeans didn’t bring civilization. They brought a lot of other things, some good, some bad.”