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 …
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 …
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.
Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one. On June 20th 1893 Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the murder of her parents, but her reputation hasn’t really recovered in the years since. Stuff You Missed In History Class have …
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 …
The World’s Columbian Exposition and The Devil in the White City Read More »
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 …
When looking back into the past, it’s important (but difficult) to remember that for everyone concerned it was just the present, especially at times like these when technology was making the world strikingly different. For Americans born into the civil war era, the gilded age of the 1880s and 1890s must have been a dizzying …
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – At The Moulin Rouge Anders Zorn – A Portrait of the Daughters of Ramón Subercaseaux Thomas Eakins – The Concert Singer Émile Bernard – Breton Women at a Wall Félix Vallotton – Bathers on a Summer Evening G. Caillebotte – Nasturces Almeida Júnior – Reading Frederic Leighton – The Garden of …
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole of its day, The Diary Of A Nobody is perhaps less hilarious than it was back in 1892, but it’s no less readable and seems to evoke its age better than any of the supposedly naturalist contemporary fiction. By reading it I have learned that: Dull, respectable men in …
George and Weedon Grossmith – The Diary of a Nobody Read More »
Cinema was even more a sideshow attraction than recorded sound in 1892. In pre-Lumiere France, cinematic pioneer Émile Reynaud was projecting slides with moving images in front of painted backgrounds at his Théâtre Optique in Paris. In a sense this had been done for hundreds of years with magic lantern shows, but Reynaud’s innovation was …
