More audio time travel adventures from James and Sean. This time we cover the years 1892 and 1893, the world’s fair in Chicago, a couple of notorious murderers, some rude jokes about Frances Folsom (the wife of the President of the USA), and some popular music hall songs, which may not be as innocent as they seem.
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More audio time travel adventures from James and Sean. This time we cover the years 1892 and 1893, the world’s fair in Chicago, a couple of notorious murderers, some rude jokes about Frances Folsom (the wife of the President of the USA), and some popular music hall songs, which may not be as innocent as they seem.
First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch’s magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch’s highly original, proto-expressionist style. His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, through Madonna to The Vampire, suggest just how directly and unironically he sought to depict the anxieties of late-19th century Europe. But against all Munch’s images, it is The Scream which stands out as the work which has seared itself into the Western imagination. It remains widely celebrated for capturing the torment of existence in what appeared to many in Munch’s time to be a frightening, godless world.
Salomé is a rare instance in British theatrical history of an authentically ‘Symbolist’ drama. This means that it belongs with an innovative group of plays produced in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Conceived as an alternative to naturalism and the kind of plays that purported to represent life by reproducing everyday habits of speech and physical behaviour in recognisable environments, ‘Symbolist’ drama made use of poetic language and pictorial settings to invoke the inner lives of characters. Released from the constraints of the here-and-now it was free to express all manner of emotions both spiritual and sensual.
Grover Cleveland seems like a very suitable president for the tail-end of the Gilded Age, with the demeanor of a wealthy industrialist, a magnificent walrus moustache, a wife half his age and an obsession with the incomprehensible issue of the gold standard while the reconstruction of the South was being rolled back.
A year into his second (non-consesecutive!) term, he sought the advice of the White House doctor about a persistent ulcer. A sample was taken, cancer was diagnosed, and a decision was made to secretly operate, on a yacht somewhere off Long Island, then to replace the president’s upper left jaw and hard palate.
Produced by William Dickson at Edison’s Black Maria studio in New Jersey, Blacksmith Scene is the earliest example of a staged scene with actors playing roles.
Worlds Fairs range from the spectacular (The Great Exhibition in London in 1851, The Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889) to the middling (did you know Expo 2017 is taking place right now in Kazakhstan right now?) but surely none can have changed the world as much as the World’s Columbian Exposition which took place in Chicago in 1893. Among other things the fair saw
The first large-scale use of AC electricity, ending the war of the currents
The City Beautiful movement and the start of modern city planning
Eadweard Muybridge showing his moving pictures to a paying public in the first commercial movie theater
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show fixing the image of the “Wild West”
The Ferris Wheel, designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr
Scott Joplin, who became widely known for his piano playing at the fair and ragtime music, which had its first large-scale public exposure
The Pledge of Allegiance first performed by a mass of school children lined up in military fashion
The first moving walkway or travelator, which ran in a loop down the length of a lakefront pier to a casino
Cream of Wheat, Juicy Fruit gum, Quaker Oats and Shredded Wheat
Pabst Select being renamed Pabst Blue Ribbon following its win as “America’s Best” at the fair
The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, the first formal gathering of representatives of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions from around the world
Little Egypt introducing America to the suggestive version of the belly dance known as the “hootchy-kootchy”, to the tune said to have been improvised by Sol Bloom which now serves as the theme tune to anything exotically Middle-Eastern
Milton Hershey buying a European exhibitor’s chocolate manufacturing equipment and adding chocolate products to his caramel manufacturing business
A device that made possible the printing of books in Braille
The third rail, giving electric power to elevated trains
The first fully electrical kitchen including an automatic dishwasher
The first modern serial killer, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, who killed up to 200 people in his specially-constructed “Murder Castle” three miles from the fair
The last of these was, naturally, not an advertised attraction, but the two are skillfully intertwined in the book The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Both were immense, ambitious construction projects which required single-minded planning, and both architects exploited the industriousness and anonymity of the modern city, though to very different ends. Though at times the book feels like a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, with disconnected themes tied together with the flimsiest of thematic threads, it’s still both informative and very readable, and it’s hard to ask for much more in narrative nonfiction (I cannot speak for its accuracy, of course.)
A crash on the New York Stock Exchange starts a depression
France takes over Laos and Ivory Coast.
Interests connected to the USA overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii
The United States Supreme Court legally declares the tomato to be a vegetable
Gandhi arrives in South Africa where he will live until 1914
Lizzie Borden is acquitted of murdering her parents
New Zealand becomes the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote
Firsts
The Independent Labour Party of the United Kingdom
The first motion picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey
The Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Cultured pearls
The Ferris Wheel
Futebol Clube do Porto, FC Basel, Královské Vinohrady (later Sparta Prague)
The Bahá’í Faith is first publicly mentioned in the United States
Car number plates
St Hilda’s College, Oxford
Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”
“Good Morning to All”, which later becomes known as “Happy Birthday to You”.
Births
Big Bill Broonzy, American blues singer and composer (d. 1958)
Jimmy Durante, American actor, singer, and comedian (d. 1980)
Lillian Gish, American actress (d. 1993)
Victor Gollancz, British publisher (d. 1967)
Hermann Göring, German Nazi official (d. 1946)
José María Velasco Ibarra, five-time President of Ecuador (d. 1979)
Mississippi John Hurt, American country blues singer and guitarist (d. 1966)
Harold Lloyd, American actor (d. 1971)
Mao Zedong, Chinese leader (d. 1976)
Gummo Marx, American comedian and actor (d. 1977)
Joan Miró, Spanish painter and sculptor (d. 1983)
Ivor Novello, Welsh actor and musician (d. 1951)
Leo Ornstein, Russian-born composer and pianist (d. 2002)
Wilfred Owen, English soldier and poet (d. 1918)
Dorothy Parker, American writer (d. 1967)
Prajadhipok, Rama VII, King of Siam (d. 1941)
Dorothy L. Sayers, British crime writer, poet, playwright and essayist (d. 1957)
Andrés Segovia, Spanish guitarist (d. 1987)
Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1986)
Soong Ching-ling, one of the Soong sisters, wife of Chinese president Sun Yat-sen (d. 1981)
Harold Urey, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981)
Mae West, American actress, playwright, screenwriter, and sex symbol (d. 1980)
Deaths
Georgiana Drew Barrymore, American actress-comedian (b. 1856)
Lucy Isabella Buckstone, English actress (b. 1857)
Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist (b. 1825)
Charles Gounod, French composer (b. 1818)
Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States (b. 1822)
Guy de Maupassant, French writer (b. 1850)
Lip Pike, American baseball player (b. 1845)
Duleep Singh, ruler of Punjab (b. 1838)
John Addington Symonds, English poet and literary critic (b. 1840)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian composer (b. 1840)
