The History Blog

The Cave Canem project launched last November to microchip, treat and neuter the stray dogs that populate the ancient city of Pompeii. When last we saw our brave canine heroes, they were still in the process of being rounded up by the Italian animal welfare groups and the adoption website didn’t exist yet.

Now all the rounding up has been done and the website is up and running. On the site you will find a lovely photo gallery of the pups up for adoption (with the ones already adopted marked as such). They all have adorable Pompeiian names.

The best part of the site, though, is the backstory written by one Stella Pende for each dog. They tie each dog in to the city of Pompeii and its mythology. The anthropomorphic characterization is gloriously lurid at times.

Meet Polibia:

In the quarter of the ancient baths at Pompeii, where I roam freely, they call me Polibia. I am two years old and like each respectable member of my family, I am a freed-slave and when possible I choose this humid warmth area that gives body to my fur and soothe my poor tired paws. My doggy friends at Pompeii say that I am magic because, suddenly one morning, my tail awoke with a white wisp, but they don’t know the truth. One night at the bath I was immersed in the warmth of the pool, when, Apollo the Beautiful, revealed himself showing his muscles and vigour on the purple glitter coach, wrapped in a cloud of smoke. But he was also very annoyed to find a hairy freed-slave in his favourite waters. So, furious, he caught me by the tail and threw me out of the bath and this divine touch lightened my tail tip.

Mythological backstory animal abuse! Damn you, muscular and vigorous Apollo. Damn you and the purple glitter coach wrapped in a cloud of smoke you rode in on.

Sadly only the first page of the dog stories is translated into English. The rest of them are just as fabulous, so fire up Google Translate and go to town.

If you’re in Europe and/or able to get to Italy in person, you can apply to adopt one of these historic honies. The requirements and forms you need are on this page. If I could, I would snap them all up myself.

The outstanding website Heritage Key is running a series of London-themed challenges for bloggers. There are neat prizes to be won, but most of all, much love for London’s marvelous wealth of history to be expressed.

I missed the first challenge because I got all freaked out under pressure and went completely blank, so I’m hoping I can squeak in just under the deadline for The Most Important Ancient Site in London challenge.

For my most important ancient site in London I choose (drumroll please) Drapers Gardens. This soggy patch of land on Throgmorton Avenue had the great fortune of being deemed basically undevelopable until 1967, when the Drapers Company decided to build an office tower on their garden space.

When the eponymous skyscraper was demolished in 2007 in preparation for a new building to be erected on the spot, an archaeological survey stumbled on a massive treasure trove of daily life in Roman London from the 1st to the 4th century A.D.

Drapers Gardens’ sogginess had not only kept this mother lode from being obliterated by two millennia of development and redevelopment, but it also helped keep these objects in an exceptional state of preservation.

Among the treasures are 19 metal vessels from the mid to late 4th c., possibly hidden in a well by a wealthy family fleeing one of many Saxon raids on the city, or they may have been left behind intentionally as part of the ritual closing of the well. The vessels are made from copper and lead ore and include wine jugs, dishes, ladles, even a set of three nesting bowls. They’re in such spectacular condition that the articulating handles on some of them still swing.

A total of over 1100 artifacts were found at the site. Other remarkable finds include hundreds of brooches, a wood door with its original hinges, a roman road with wood footbridges over the ditches on both sides, a wooden ruler with the lines marking the Roman inches still visible, an infant burial site and the skull of a brown bear that probably died in the amphitheater nearby.

The dig uncovered not just rare and beautiful artifacts, but really the entire structure of the neighborhood for 300+ years of Roman life in London: streets, alleys, floors, clay and timber foundations of dwellings, waste disposal and plumbing systems. In Rome itself you don’t find this kind of staging because the city has been built and rebuilt so many times, and because timber or clay housing just doesn’t tend to last 2000 years.

The Drapers Garden find is a microcosm of Roman city life, not only a worthy candidate for the most important ancient site in London, but surely in the running for one of the most important discoveries of Roman social history, period.

Pictures courtesy Pre-Construct Archaeology

Researchers examining Giotto’s wall paintings in the Peruzzi Chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce church with ultra-violet rays have uncovered an incredible wealth of detail invisible to the naked eye.

Giotto’s Santa Croce paintings were made on dry plaster, as opposed to frescoes which are painted on wet plaster. That made the color more brilliant when he first applied it in 1320, but dry paintings don’t last as well as frescoes so these beautiful works didn’t have the best start from a preservation perspective.

Then it got worse. The Peruzzi family, who had commissioned Giotto’s paintings for the chapel, decided to redecorate in the early 18th century and whitewashed the walls. Crazy sumbitches.

Restorers in 1840 removed the white paint, but used harsh solvents and wire brushes and all the rest of the horrid arsenal of 19th century “conservation” and so ended up stripping the delicate Giotto paintings. Then to add insult to injury they repainted over some of the damage they did to highlight areas so they could be seen from the ground.

The 19th c. paint was removed by a restoration in 1958, so all that’s left now are the battered remains of Giotto’s own work.

That’s where our team of intrepid researchers steps in. Financed by a grant from the Getty Foundation, the four-month project aimed to utilize non-invasive diagnostic tools to assess the condition of the paintings.

“It was something really astonishing,” said Cecilia Frosinini, co-coordinator of the project that studied the scenes in the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.

“We knew we could get some very interesting results from our scientific diagnostics but when we looked under ultra-violet light, all of a sudden all these very faint paintings that were ruined by old restorations took on a new life,” she said, pointing to one scene while donning protective eye wear. [...]

“The scenes are again three dimensional … we were able to see all the chiaroscuro effects,” she said. “There were bodies under the garments … they became three dimensional, you could see the folds of the garments, the expressions of the faces.”

Look at the halos. It’s amazing how much of the original gold paint is still there. On the non-UV one you can only see that small sliver of gold on the right of the saint’s nose. Under UV light all of the sudden the entire round stands out.

Unfortunately, the ultra-violent rays which are so illuminating in short bursts would damage the paint if they were focused on it permanently, so this can only be a short-term application. The team plan to use the information from the UV examination as a map for future restorations.

They’re also hoping to snaggle enough grant money to take detailed UV pictures of the entire chapel so they can create an online virtual chapel for the general public to get as close to Giotto’s originals as we can 700 years later.

Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving Nation by historian Ellen Fitzpatrick is a collection of condolence letters Mrs. Kennedy received in the wake of her husband’s assassination.

The outpouring of grief was so enormous — the White House got 800,000 condolences in the first seven weeks alone — that most of the letters were destroyed. Two hundred thousand pages made it to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston where Fitzpatrick found them.

Fitzpatrick was at the Kennedy library researching a different book when she asked to see some of the condolence letters in hopes of getting a sense of how Kennedy was perceived by Americans in his own time. As soon as she started reading, she was hooked.

“It was like the roof came off the building, the walls dropped away, the floor came out from under me. I was absolutely floored by what I’d begun to read,” she said Friday. “I have been teaching American history for 30 years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a collection as powerful and that represented so many ordinary people speaking from the heart about their views about American society, and politics, and the president.”

And she had to get permission from every one of the letter writers to include them in the book. This is probably why nobody’s ever done it before and the letters have remain unpublished all these years. After narrowing her list of thousands of favorites down to 240, she was able to track down 220 of the writers. Out them, only 5 declined to be included.

The excerpts in the article are so moving I wept like babby, but the part that struck me the most was Fitzgerald pointing out that we’ve seen so many piles of books about JFK, the assassination, the administration, from movers and shakers, from conspiracy theorists, from historians and from journalists, but this is the first work to collate perspectives from everyday Americans, and they’re just wrenching.

Writing two days [after the assassination], eighth-grader Mary South described learning that the president had been shot just as she sat down to play the church organ at her Catholic school in Santa Clara, Calif.

“I tried to tell myself he would be all right but somehow I knew he wouldn’t. … the tears wouldn’t stop. The slightly damp keys were hard to play but I offered it up that the President might live,” she wrote.

In return for her letter, she received a small card printed with the words “Mrs. Kennedy is deeply appreciative of your sympathy and grateful for your thoughtfulness.”

“Getting that back felt like: She saw this. Jackie saw this,” South, whose married name is Mary Certa, said in an interview Thursday. “I felt good that I had done something. I just wanted her to know how upset we were and how helpless we felt.”

When one of Fitzpatrick’s researchers called and read her letter, “I started to cry all over again,” said Certa, 60, of Campbell, Calif. “It was like I was right back there in 1963.”

I think this approach brings the sheer emotion of the tragedy to the fore like nothing has after all these decades of Camelot and grassy knolls.

The complete original manuscript of General Theory of Relativity penned by Einstein’s very hand has gone on display today for the first time at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem. Einstein donated the manuscript to Hebrew University in Jerusalem when it was founded in 1925. He left them the rest of his documents in his will.

The manuscript has been kept in a safe at Hebrew University since the founding. A few pages have gone out on display to museums on occasion, but very rarely.

The University lent the manuscript to the Academy to put on a display worthy of its 50th anniversary celebration. The display will be open until March 25th, therefore overlapping the Academy’s anniversary festivities with the 131st anniversary of Einstein’s birth on March 14.

It took Einstein eight years after publishing his theory of special relativity — in which he came up with the famed equation EMC2 (squared) — to expand that into his theory of general relativity, in which he showed that gravity can affect space and time, a key to understanding basic forces of physics and natural phenomena, including the origin of the universe.

But exhibit organizers say the significance of Einstein’s pages of careful script, diagrams, and perfectionist’s scratches will not be lost on casual viewers. They say the display will present the manuscript in the context of the theory’s legacy — which includes everything from modern space exploration to commercial satellite and GPS technology and present-day attempts to create a universal explanation of the forces of nature, a quest that started decades ago and stymied even Einstein himself.

This is the first time the whole 46 pages are laid out in a darkened room, each page gently lit in its own protective casing. You can read every page, every chart, note, and doodle as Einstein wrote them.

An 1,800-year-old marble bust of Jupiter was found in English Heritage’s main northern archaeological storage unit in Helmsley, North Yorkshire.

Conservators examined it and quickly realized it wasn’t a reproduction, but rather a genuine 2nd c. Roman sculpture that had been given to the Earl of Arundel, one of the first dedicated collectors of antiquities, by Dudley Carter in the early 17th century.

It was first documented in 1616, but the collection itself became dispersed later in the 17th Century.

However, about 100 years later, the bust fell into the hands of John Aislabie, an MP and wealthy owner of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, near Ripon.

It is believed it may then have taken pride of place in the Temple of Jupiter on the Studley Royal estate, adding a touch of authenticity to the 18th Century folly.

The Studley Royal neo-classical folly is actually called the Temple of Piety and was dedicated to Hercules, but it became known as the Temple of Jupiter because of the bust.

Aislabie found the bust in the cellar, where it had been relegated after the Earl of Arundel’s collection was broken up later in the 17th century. A lot of the Earl’s pieces were discarded rather unkindly, so it may have been at this point that the bust was damaged as we see it today.

Aislabie loved it anyway, so he moved the sculpture to Studley Royal and built the temple with Jupiter as its centerpiece. Aislabie’s son remodeled the temple and removed the sculpture, eventually putting it in storage.

Nobody’s quite sure how it got from Studley Royal to the English Heritage storeroom, but Professor Michael Vickers of Oxford’s Ashmolean confirmed that it was indeed the Jupiter bust from Arundel’s collection. Experts have looked for it in collections before but obviously never found it.

The bust is in fairly good condition despite its missing half. It needs cleaning and further research to try to pin down its movements over the centuries. Conservators will analyze the marble to determine exactly which part of the Roman world it may have come from originally.

Other than that, it’s good to go. In fact it will become the centerpiece of a series of free tours of the Helmsley facility which is normally closed to the public. It looks really cool in there. Huge floor to ceiling racks of dusty marbles just waiting to be explored.

Last year an Action Comics #1, the first Superman comic, published June 1938, sold at an online auction for a cool $317,200. That was the most expensive copy ever sold up until that point.

Today another sale of Action Comics #1 has blown away all previous records not just for Superman, but for any comic ever sold. A private collector who wishes to remain anonymous bought it from another anonymous private collector for one million dollars.

The reason it went for so much is that it’s in Very Fine condition, an 8.0 on a ten point scale. The Action Comics #1 that sold last year was graded a 6.0. Out of the hundred #1s known, there are only 2 graded 8.0 and this is one of them, so it’s the rarest of the rare.

He said that the seller was a “well-known individual” in New York with a pedigree collection, and that the buyer was a known customer who had previously bought an Action Comics No 1.

“The opportunity to buy an un-restored, high-grade Action One comes along once every two decades. It’s certainly a milestone,” said [comic expert and inventor of the grading scale] Mr [Stephen] Fishler.

He added: “It is still a little stunning to see a comic book and $1m in the same sentence.”

So the buyer has at least a million and a half bucks in 2 editions of a single comic book. The mind boggles.

Mr. Fishler had actually sold this same copy to the current seller 15 years ago for $150,000. The astonishing appreciation is due to the sheer rarity of the issue, its condition and how infrequently the piece comes on the market.

As ComicConnect.com co-owner and COO, Vincent Zurzolo points out, “High-grade copies are rarely, rarely offered for sale. When they do come on the market, you can expect to see a big leap in value.”

That’s the title of an exhibit opening today at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Created in partnership with Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage & Activities and Contemporanea Progetti of Florence, this exhibit traces the connections between the myths, ideals, culture, government, military of the nascent US republic and the Roman Republic.

Three hundred Ancient Roman and post-Revolutionary artifacts illustrate how much the founding of America owes to Rome, culturally and politically. There are items in the exhibit that I’ve never seen — like a bronze eagle from a standard of the Roman legions — and I grew up in Rome.

The new republic (from res publica, literally “public thing” or “public affair”) was a dangerous undertaking, Winterer says, and all parties knew it. “They examined Rome and its history as if it were a cadaver at an autopsy,” she says. “And they examined it closely. They asked: ‘What worked? What should we do? What mistakes should we avoid?’ “

Grey says that “the founders deliberately appropriated images, themes and language from Rome to build up their self-image.” People had their portraits painted in Roman dress. They aspired to the dignity and grandeur of the world’s most famous republic.

This is why you find so many delicious anachronisms in D.C. like a statue of George Washington half nekkid in a toga.

That cultural bond with ancient Rome continued for the first century of the United States’ life. Roman style informed US architecture, school curriculums, statuary, even the government itself with its elected representatives and a strong but revolving executive.

These links to Rome are so ubiquitous they’ve almost become white noise. The aim of this exhibit is to renew consciousness of the Roman roots of our Republic.

The exhibit is divided into three parts (like all of Gaul!). The first section is “Building a Republic” and looks at the beginnings of both the Roman and the American republics. Roman artifacts are displayed along with early (and even some contemporary) US artifacts, like Roman gladiator helmet juxtoposed with a helmet worn by Philadelphia Eagles receiver Harold Carmichael.

The second section, “A Classical Revival,” presents Roman arts and culture through Pompeiian artifacts and how they influenced American arts and culture. The third section is called “Expansion and Empire” and displays artifacts from the post-Republican empire that Rome became, comparing its growth to that of the United States from the original 13 colonies to the Manifest Destiny expansion across the continent.

The Constitution Center’s website has a nice overview of the exhibit. They call it a walkthrough but it’s not as comprehensive as the name suggests. Still, it gives a tantalizing glimpse into the artifacts on display.

Here’s a quick YouTube about the 18th and 19th century American affinity for ancient Rome by Stanford associate professor of history Caroline Winterer who helped craft the exhibit.

Researchers published in the journal Science have dusted off fossils uncovered 40 years ago by the Marion Bonner family in western Kansas and found a new genus of giant plankton-eating bony fish among them.

Filter-feeding fish known as pachycormids were previously thought to have been a brief phase in evolutionary history, appearing 170 million years ago and then leaving the scene until whales, sharks and rays stepped into the niche 56 million years ago.

The new finds suggest that instead the pachycormids were a hugely successful species who set up shop in oceans all over the world from 170 million years ago until 65 million years ago, when the K-T extinction event that killed the dinosaurs killed them (and most everything else on earth) too.

Co-author Kenshu Shimada, a research associate in paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that one of the fish he and his colleagues identified, Bonnerichthys, grew to around 20 feet in length and swam through a seaway covering what is today the state of Kansas. [...]

For the study, led by University of Oxford scientist Matt Friedman, the researchers analyzed both old and new fish fossils found in England, the U.S. and Japan. The Kansas fish was previously thought to have been like a gigantic swordfish, bearing fang-like teeth on its jawbones.

“However, our close examination of the specimen showed that such a long snout and fang-like teeth were not present in the fish,” Shimada said. “Rather, with a blunt massive head, the fish had long toothless jawbones and long gill-supporting bones that are characteristic of plankton-feeding fishes.”

The European Jurassic species Leedsichthys was even larger at 30 feet. Their huge mouths were an asset in keeping their even huger bodies fed off tiny plankton. Like baleen whales today, pachycormids opened their mouths wide and gulped as much water as they could, filtering the plankton-packed water through its gills.

There’s some great background on the fossil-hunting Bonner family in this article.

Over the seven decades that Marion climbed and combed the chalk buttes; and over the four decades his children accompanied him, the Bonners helped science immeasurably. They were resourceful and careful; when they found unusual-looking bones, they gave them to scientists and let them take published credit for the scientifically described “discoveries.”

Their discoveries lay now in museums in Kansas, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Grateful scientists named discoveries after the family: A few invertebrates. Pecten bonneri, a small-fin fish, pterandon bonneri, a flying reptile, niobrarateuthis bonneri, an ancient squid, found by Melanie.

This is their first genus, though.

• 

Drunk History, which I think we can all agree is the greatest YouTube channel of all time, is coming to HBO this Friday at midnight.

It looks like it’s going to be a particularly sweet one too, with Will Ferrel as Abraham Lincoln and Don Cheadle as Frederick Douglass.

For those of you have HBO, mark your calendars. For those of you who don’t, I’m sure it’ll be online at some point since it’s part of the Funny or Die HBO comedy lineup.