The History Blog

One of my favorite authors of all time, Roald Dahl, was a spy attached to the British embassy in D.C. for a while during World War II.

I can’t quite gather what his official assignment was, but he apparently cut a swath through the grand dames of Washington society, and his superiors liked it like that.

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and other documents, American journalist Jennet Conant has written about Dahl’s numerous sexual conquests.

They include Millicent Rogers, the heiress to a Standard Oil fortune, and Clare Boothe Luce, a right-wing congresswoman and the wife of the publisher of Time magazine.

Boothe Luce proved so frisky, Dahl later claimed to have begged his superiors to take him off the assignment, only to be told to get back into the bedroom. [...]

Antoinette Marsh Haskell, the daughter of Marsh, explained that with Dahl’s status came a string of women.

She said: “Girls just fell at Roald’s feet.

“I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that [was worth] more than $50,000 a year.”

Another biographer actually described his as “one of the biggest cocksmen in America”. Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James and the Giant Peach.

Oh shit. Now every title of his oeuvre sounds kinky to me.

Descendants of people killed by Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War are coming together from all over to contribute to a DNA bank that will help identify remains found in mass graves.

Historians estimate about 500,000 people from both sides were killed in the civil war, which was sparked by Franco’s insurgency against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government.

After Franco’s victory, historians say 50,000 Republicans were executed by Nationalist forces and tens of thousands were incarcerated, the majority in the early years of his rule.

While the regime honoured its own dead, it left tens of thousands of its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country.

So far, Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has exhumed 1200 bodies from 110 graves, but they have information on 300 more potential grave locations. Who knows how many more mass graves are out there that nobody knows about.

It would help a lot if the military finally released secret records that have been sealed shut since the Official Secrets Law of 1968. At least the Defense Minister Carme Chacon, is trying to pry open the horror files.

Millions of documents which record the fate of generations of Spaniards during the 1936-39 conflict and General Franco’s subsequent dictatorship, remain hermetically sealed unless opened individually by judicial order.

Ms Chacon’s initiative forms part of the Socialist government’s plan to restore justice to Franco’s victims, in accordance with a historic memory law passed last year. What is the point, Ms Chacon asks, of digging up the bones of those thrown anonymously into mass graves after being shot at dawn, when all the documentation is locked up in army files?

Good damn point.

In 1998 Christie’s auctioned off a pretty portrait of a young woman. Classified as a 19th-century German School work, it sold for a modest $21,850. The art dealer who purchased it sold it to a Swiss collector last year and the new owner did a little digging with the help of a collector friend.

The two collectors took the portrait to Lumiere Technology, a Paris-based company specializing in multispectral digital technology that had already digitized two works by Leonardo: the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and “Lady With an Ermine” at the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland.

“The first time that the owner gave me this drawing he didn’t say a thing; the author was secret,” said Pascal Cotte, Lumiere Technology’s chief technical officer.

Though Mr. Cotte carried out a series of tests on the work for nearly four weeks, he said, it did not take him long to come up with a name. “I went to the owner and said, ‘I have a feeling it’s a drawing by Leonardo,’ and he said, ‘We’re here for just that.’”

In June, Lumiere announced that its examination had led to the authentication of the work as a Leonardo.

Carbon 14-dating tests carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and released this month place the work’s date between 1440 and 1650.

So what crack was Christie’s smoking, you ask? They won’t comment until the painting “has been the subject of comprehensive and conclusive academic and scientific analysis.” Which naturally leads one to wonder what exactly their small army of appraisers did with their time before the portrait went on the block.

Not that the Leonardo authentication is a done deal, mind you. There are some weirdnesses. The painting is on vellum, for instance, and no currently known Leonardo uses that medium. Some experts think the style doesn’t match the master’s.

Even so, the Swiss collector has already gotten an insane number of offers for the piece, including one for $50 million from a Russian buyer, all of which he has turned down.

The medieval glaziers who made the cathedral in Chartres and the Duomo of Milan so breathtaking inadvertently made the taking of said breath healthier.

It’s the gold paint they used that acts as an air purifier when light shines through the glass.

[Associate professor at Queensland University of Technology] Zhu [Huai Yong] said that tiny gold particles found in medieval gold paint react with sunlight to destroy air-borne pollutants like volatile organic chemicals/compounds (VOCs), which are emitted from paints, lacquers, and glues, among other things.

“These VOCs create that ‘new’ smell as they are slowly released from walls and furniture, but they, along with methanol and carbon monoxide, are not good for your health, even in small amounts,” Zhu said.

When interacting with gold particles, sunlight creates an electromagnetic field that reacts with the oscillating electrons in the gold. This field resonates and breaks apart pollutants in the air, according to Zhu.

No wonder churches smell so great. I sense a new/old trend in Green building coming on. No more overpriced Sharper Image ionizer things; just glorious stained glass in every window.

The Cranky Professor

Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware is releasing a chocolate beer which uses the same ingredients the Aztecs used for their human sacrifice after-parties.

University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologists examined the remains in an Aztec drinking vessel found in Honduras, and the Dogfish brewmasters recreated the quaff of the gods.

“Before we were eating chocolate, we were drinking it.” [Dogfish Head owner Sam] Calagione said. “In ancient central America, cocoa was considered to be a very divine and sought-after ingredient.”

Combining cocoa nibs, powder and honey with chilies and seeds of the annatto tree, Theobroma aims to dispel the notion that chocolate-flavored alcohol is only for ladies. At a hearty nine percent alcohol-by-volume, it nearly doubles the alcohol content of the average mass-produced beer.

I’ll be raising a glass of that goodness to Xtapolapocetl as soon as I can get mah grubby hands on it.

I just ordered a sixer of their Midas Touch brew, which is also a historical recreation, this time of the dregs left in cups in the Golden One’s tomb. It’s a meady sort of thing, apparently, involving muscat grapes, honey, barley and saffron. Weird, right? If it sucks they’ll be stocking stuffers.

For more about the Aztec chocolate beer, see Dogfish’s page: Theobroma.

Commissioned in 1927, the Delta Queen is the last all-wood overnight paddlewheel steamboat still in operation on the Mississippi river. She looks just like her earlier brethren who carried Mark Twain and has a remarkable history including service as a troop carrier in World War II.

Because of her wood superstructure, the Delta Queen needs an operating exemption from the Safety of Life and Sea Act, an exemption every Congress since 1968 has gladly provided. Until now.

I’m not sure what’s behind the hesitation. Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota made a floor speech claiming the Delta Queen is unsafe because of the wood structure, but the examples of dangerous incidents he cites are either from the 19th century or from contemporary steel ships. The one boiler problem he mentions on the Queen herself was a model of efficient safety procedures, so hardly supports the contention that the Queen is inherently dangerous.

She has passed every yearly Coast Guard inspection. She’s been retrofitted and secured in every possible way. There is nothing at all wrong with her. She is a registered historic treasure of the Department of the Interior and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a National Historic Landmark and a member of the National Maritime Hall of Fame.

Save the Delta Queen!

The New York Times has a great story about the life and art of Giacomo Puccini.

It’s coming up on the 150th anniversary of his birth, and there’s a new movie about his raucous love life being released to coincide with the anniversary.

Puccini proudly called himself a “mighty hunter of wild fowl, opera librettos and attractive woman.” Mr. Benvenuti’s film, “Puccini e la Fanciulla” (”Puccini and the Girl”), presents a newly uncovered strand in Puccini’s messy biography. It asserts that he has another living granddaughter, Nadia Manfredi, the child of another son, also named Antonio, born of an affair with Giulia Manfredi, a feisty woman of humble background who ran a hostelry in Torre del Lago popular with local farmers and transient hunters. Personal letters and other documents that Mr. Benvenuti was shown by Nadia Manfredi in early 2007 present what seems a persuasive case.

And that’s after he had a 17 year affair with a married piano student of his who bore him a son and lived with him in raunchy sin until her husband finally died and Puccini’s family browbeat him into marrying her despite the fact that he was porking half the town as he had been pretty much non-stop from day one.

Juicy gossip aside, the article covers some interesting musical ground as well. Puccini was apparently fascinated by modern musical approaches and included them in his operas.

Puccini was intrigued by the experiments of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. He took the 60-mile trip from Torre del Lago to Florence just to hear an early performance of Schoenberg’s landmark “Pierrot Lunaire” (1912), an experience that made a deep impression. And Anton Webern, no less, Schoenberg’s student, who would become the master of the radically compact and elusive gesture in 12-tone composition, once wrote to Schoenberg of his enthusiasm for Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” (1910). “A score with an original sound throughout, splendid, every bar a surprise,” Webern wrote, with “not a trace of kitsch.”

The aggressive opening chords of “Turandot” present Puccini in his tough-guy modernist mode. Yet think of the Act II scene for Ping, Pang and Pong, three ministers at the court of the ancient emperor in Beijing. It’s easy to treat it as a comic/nostalgic interlude in an otherwise intense opera. But to listen closely to this elaborate trio is to marvel at the intricate, pungent orchestral harmonies, spiked with piercing dissonance.

I never thought of it that way on account of I was too busy cringing at the racist coolie aspect. Time to listen to “Turandot” again. The non-Nessum Dorma bits, that is.

City of Rome plans ancient theme park outside of town.

“The model is Euro-Disney in Paris,” said Deputy Mayor Mauro Cutrufo, announcing plans to build a vast ancient Rome theme park just outside the city which he says could be up and running within three to four years.

The park would provide family-friendly attractions to show visitors what life was like in the Rome of 2,000 years ago.

To be built on an as yet unspecified 1,000-1,200 acre site, it would put a Roman twist on rides like Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in which visitors float on boats through a fantasy pirate world.

“You would relive scenes from the Colosseum, from ancient Rome, gladiators or maybe Julius Caesar or other things,” a Rome city official said.

There aren’t enough puking emoticons in the world to describe what I’m feeling.

Hopefully the regional government of Lazio will end this tortured madness before it begins in earnest.

The good folks over at the Orwell Prize are doing a cool thing reminscent of that WWI letters blog I posted about a while ago. They’re reposting all of George Orwell’s diary entries in real time, exactly 70 years after Orwell first wrote them.

The August entries are from his domestic diaries. The political ones kick off on September 7th. I don’t know if that’s a convention Orwell himself used, or if it’s just how they classify them at the Orwell Prize.

So far the entries are relatively mundane stuff about the weather and George catching snakes, although I don’t mean that dismissively. It’s refreshingly genuine, and I’m glad George Orwell bucked the trend and didn’t kill snakes.

The footnotes are money, complete with Shakespeare quotes to explain a passing reference.

Pardon my impromptu hiatus there. I’m back with 2 new fans and replaced DC jack. I had actually forgotten my computer could be this neat. As is usual with technology these days, I could have bought a new laptop with what I paid for the hardware fixes, but it wouldn’t be as pimped out as this one. Besides, this is my laptop. There are many like it but this one is mine. /Full Metal Jacket

As I catch up on my news alerts, I might just write up an ante-dated story or two, so if you see stories appear from a week ago, you’re not crazy. Not because of that anyway.

But enough about me. This week the internets bring us Executed Today, an engrossing blog which discusses the circumstances behind one execution which took place on that day. Some of them were cause célèbres in their time, including Nazi executioners, spies, witches and sodomites.

Here’s the witchy one, courtesy of 17th c. Sweden.

Accused by her own daughters of carrying their children — Malin’s grandchildren — to Satanic masses, “Rumpare-Malin” obstinately refused to cop to the charge. (Naturally, not confessing was a further indicator to the court that Satan was fortifying her defiance.) Without a confession, the authorities couldn’t assuage themselves by giving her the easy-ish death of decapitation; the law required burning at the stake.* A sack of gunpowder around the neck to speed things up was the best they could offer her.

Matsdotter maintained her innocence to the stake, frustrating the confessors, and when one of her daughters called on her to admit the crime, “she gave her daughter into the hands of the devil and cursed her for eternity.”

Some years later the daughter apparently was executed for perjuring herself in this case, thereby fulfilling mom’s dying curse. Oh, and Malin’s husband was also an executee. Sodomy.

Srsly if I were part of that family, I’d be courting any dark power I could think of to make me invisible to the authorities.