History
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I've been reading about rugs. I'm ignorant, but fortunately, there are dozens of eaily-available and learned books, and I'm happy to say that our local university library is going to keep me busy until my enthusiasm flags. Everyone interested in rugs knows that the Pazyryk carpet (which I didn't know about until a month ago) is the oldest known rug…
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The grand-daughter (now age eleven), studying the Darmstadt Madonna (1528) by Hans Holbein the Younger that is reproduced in q previous post: "It doesn't look like Madonna." Grandpa: "I think it may be a different Madonna."
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What is this remarkable object? It's a seventeenth-century Turkish rug that now resides in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's of a type called a "Holbein." And just why, pray tell, should a class of rugs be named after a sixteenth-century German painter? Was Holbein a closet weaver? Or an importer of rugs? No. The answer is that rugs of this sort appear prominently in…
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Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child). Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that…
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The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston. The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago. Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood…
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Although youngsters sometimes try to piss off their parents by inserting into their nose a modest jewel or a gold circlet, we (as a nation or as a civilization) aren't terribly enthusiastic about decorating the old schnozzola. While the English language has words for many kinds of jewelry (ring, earring, brooch, bracelet, necklace, tiara, pectoral),…
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In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia. Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted. "All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of…
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Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president. It’s a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo. …
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According to Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, American men were constantly masticating tobacco. He was thoroughly shocked by the "two odious practices of chewing and expectorating" — a habit that he found to be both "offensive and sickening." "In all the public places of America," wrote the novelist, "this filthy custom…
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Reading an introductory history of Spain (I'm appallingly ignorant about the Iberian peninsula), I learned of the dark age king with the excellent name of Wifred the Hairy. Wifred stimulated me to recall other monarchs with colorful sobriquets: Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred the Unready, Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Fat, Edward the Confessor, Pippin the…