The History Blog

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

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.

All of that and more can be found in the newly uploaded online archives of the National Portrait Gallery. The archives, previously available by appointment only, track the fascinating history of the NPG since its founding in 1856.

The digitization project is two years old and they’ve got a third of the archive online, which is over 15,000 descriptions of a variety of records, including letters, posters, articles, reports, pictures, even x-rays. More records are being added to the online catalogue every day.

Among the correspondence and reports from the Gallery from 1940 to 1946 when the entire collection had been moved out of town to Mentmore, a mansion in Buckinghamshire, for safekeeping during the war. Apparently while the cats were away, the mice did literally play. There are carefully annotated lists of every rat killed, where and how. My favorite is the one killed in the library “speared by Pittock with poker after it had escaped, with great excitement”.

Then there’s the story of the portrait of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle that so enraged a suffragette she slashed his face with a meat cleaver in 1914. She claimed to be protesting the repeated arrests of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, but I’m not clear on why poor Mr. Carlyle got it in the face.

On a tragic note, the gallery archive describes a shocking, bloody murder-suicide that took place in Room 27 in the east wing of the NPG in 1909. A well-dressed 70-year-old gentleman was viewing portraits with his 58-year-old wife when he took out a revolver, shot his wife in the head then shot himself. The man died instantly. His wife survived a little longer, bleeding profusely all over the parquet floor. The subsequent cleanup is a focal point of the report.

Who knew a portrait gallery could see so much dramatic action?

Wilson A. Bentley, a self-taught farmer from Jericho, Vermont, was the first person to capture the beauty of snowflakes on film. When he was 17, his father bought him a bellows camera and a microscope and he spent two years trying to take the first photomicrograph of a snowflake. He finally succeeded in 1885, when he was 19.

That became his life’s passion. He filled 9 journals over 47 years with detailed notes about his photographic tecniques and the weather. He became known in town as “Snowflake Bentley”.

The scientific community was slow to accept his work. They were unconvinced that his methods were accurate. They thought it was 19th century photoshop, basically, although eventually he was inducted a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1920.

In 1931, he published a book of his snowflake photography called Snow Crystals. He lived to see it in print, but died soon thereafter of pneumonia after walking home through a blizzard.

Bentley’s photos don’t meet modern standards because he was “working with crude equipment,” said Kenneth G. Libbrecht, who has written seven books on snowflakes and grows snow crystals in a laboratory.

“But he did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years,” said Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology.

When Libbrecht became interested in snowflakes, he said, Bentley was still the standard. The method of singling out a crystal to photograph hasn’t changed in all that time.

“You basically let the crystal fall on something, black or dark-colored, and then you have to pick it up with a toothpick or brush and put it on a glass slide,” Libbrecht said.

Ten of his snowflake pictures and 16 winterscapes are being sold by the Carl Hammer Gallery at this year’s American Antiques Show. These images are very rarely available for sale. The estimated price is $4800 per picture.

His hometown of Jericho has built a museum in his honor. You can virtually tour it on the website: Snowflake Bentley Museum. The Buffalo Museum of Science also has a vast collection of his original glass plates which you can browse online.

The Royal Society has published a new set of documents marking important moments in the history of science, including an 18th century manuscript telling the original Isaac Newton apple story.

It’s a 1752 biography of Newton by William Stukeley who knew the great man personally and worked with him Boswell-style. The biography has been squirreled away in archives of the Royal Society for centuries, only to be published now as part of the Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations.

“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went out into the garden and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself,” reads Stukeley’s account of an evening with Newton in the scientist’s garden.

“Amidst other discourse, he told me he was just in the same situation as when formerly the notion of gravitation came into his mind.

“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself, occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.

“Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is that the earth draws it.”

Unlike the Royal Society’s already awesome Trailblazers site, the Turning the Pages site features actual facsimiles of the manuscripts, so you can read them online as if you were turning their fragrant yellow pages.

Other documents in the Turning the Pages collection include Thomas Paine’s 1789 letter “On Iron Bridges” , Henry James’s 1843 Fossil notebook with beautifully detailed sketches of fossils, the 1681 “Constitutions of Carolina” by John Locke and other luminaries of political philosophy.

See if your computer has the specifications to load the amazing 3D version. If you don’t have Microsoft Net 3.5, it’s really worth it to download for the full experience. Otherwise you can use the Accessible version which isn’t as flashy but still has great scans of each page.

Mark your calendars, folks. The first episode of BBC’s Radio Four and the British Museum A History of the World in 100 Objects debuts tomorrow. That’s already today for those of you across the Atlantic.

The theme of the first 5 episodes is “Making Us Human” and they covers objects that define us as human, made between 2,000,000 and 8,000 B.C. Tomorrow’s inagural object is the Mummy of Hornedjitef.

This is the mummy of Hornedjitef an Egyptian priest who was buried in a coffin, within a second, outer coffin. Examining his body using CAT scans and X-rays revealed that he suffered from arthritis and osteoporosis suggesting he was a mature man when he died. The embalmers have placed four packages inside his torso, probably his lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. He lived over a thousand years after Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great at a time when Egypt was ruled by Greek kings.

There’s tons of information on the brand spanking new website on each of the 99 objects that have already been selected for broadcast. For those of us out of Radio Four’s range, the programs will be posted as podcasts.

The website also has a neat feature where individuals upload objects of their own and explain their significance. Just get a good quality digital picture and click the yellow Add Your Own Object icon in the upper right of the page. A moderator will check to be sure it’s not pr0n then approve it.

You can view all the images in the series plus the ones uploaded by individuals and find out more about them using this Flash map. Click on Contributor in the menu on the left and choose Individuals to see only the pictures uploaded by people.

The radio program is just 15 minutes a day, but I’ve already spent hours browsing the site. It’s addictive.

The Art Fund in collaboration with multiple local governments and museums have launched a campaign to raise the £3.3 million (ca. $5.4 million) to keep the Staffordshire Hoard intact in local museums. The problem is they have only 13 weeks to raise this princely sum, so they’re basically at DEFCON 1.

Unless they raise £3.3 million by April 17th, the hoard be sold to the highest bidder. There will certainly be an export ban so it’s not likely to leave the country, but it could easily be split up and scattered amongst private collections and museums all over the UK.

Celebrities like former Python Michael Palin have joined with historians like Dr. David Starkey to support The Art Fund’s campaign.

Dr Starkey said [the Staffordshire Hoard] transformed the history of the Midlands from being an Anglo-Saxon “obscure Brummie slum” into the “centre of England”.

He added: “It’s only six months since these things were found. They’ve barely been conserved. All the study, all the work has got to start right here.”

Dr Starkey, who is also a television and radio presenter, said breaking up the collection or moving it would “lose its meaning”.

He added: “It must stay here, together and intact, to be studied and displayed here in the West Midlands, the foundation of whose history it will now become.”

If the campaign is successful, the hoard will be jointly owned by both the Birmingham Museum and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. The city councils of Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent and The Art Fund have started the ball rolling by donating £500,000.

To pitch in yourself, click here to donate. Share the link on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever you’ve got. These are lean times, so the more people hear about the fund-raising drive, the better the chances of its succeeding.

They have handy dandy icons and banners ready for people to use, as well as easy email links and links to their Facebook/Twitter pages. Spread the word!

P.S. – I customized the icon on my page (see left) by slowing it down a little, taking out a frame and adding a border so it matches my blog style. I’ll be glad to offer my rudimentary services to anyone who would like to tweak the button before displaying it on their site.

Britain’s Channel 4 is searching for a terminally ill person to volunteer to have his or her body mummified on television then displayed in a museum for 2 years.

A documentary production company is working with an unnamed scientists who thinks he has figured out the exact Egyptian mummification procedure. They’ve tested it on pigs and it shows promise, apparently, so now they want to go all the way and try it on a human being.

The Independent sent an undercover reporter posing as a potential volunteer to interview with the production company, Fulcrum TV which has otherwise not commented on the record. It’s a pretty creepy interview, not surprisingly. They want to follow the volunteer around with cameras for a couple of months to “understand who you are and what sort of person you are so the viewers get to know you and have a proper emotional response to you,” ie, watch you die.

[Executive producer Richard] Belfield said that no payment would be made, not even to help relatives after the volunteer’s death: “No not as such. Of course we would cover all costs. But the advice from our compliance lawyers is that it would be wrong to offer payment.”

He added: “The Egyptians were extremely clever organic chemists. Some of the materials they used came from as far afield as Burma and the Far East. One resin they used we know only existed in Burma. One thing we want to explore is how they developed their knowledge of chemistry.

“If you would like to think about it over the weekend you can call me at any time. Let me give you my numbers…”

The museum display after mummification isn’t obligatory, you’ll be glad to know. They run a classy operation, after all.

The thing is, it’s a perfectly legitimate pursuit to investigate the mummification procedure, which has never been fully explained. I’m sure many people who are interested in leaving their bodies to science would be glad to get mummified. It’s the reality TV part that’s gross.

There’s a documentary premiering on PBS tonight at 9:00 about Louisa May Alcott. In conjunction with a new biography about the author, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women reveals just how varied and rich a life she led.

Her father was involved in the utopian and transcendalist movements and was an experimental educator, so little Louisa got quite the diverse education. Henry David Thoreau taught her botany. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne taught her literature.

It was no paradise, though. Her father found her strong-willed nature and dark hair (seriously) a vexing sign of demonic tendencies, and he was no bread-winner, so Louisa had to work hard virtually her whole life to support her family.

Louisa Alcott’s life was no children’s book: she worked as a servant, a seamstress, and a Civil War nurse before becoming a millionaire celebrity writing “moral pap for the young,” as she called it. Under pen names and anonymously, she also wrote stories with enough drugs, sex and crime to prove the author was no “little” woman. When she died, Alcott took her secret identity as a pulp fiction writer with her, and kept it for nearly a half-century.

That secret identity was A. M. Barnard. Two of her Barnard works are available for free from the Gutenberg Project: Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power, and The Abbot’s Ghost or, Maurice Treherne’s Temptation, A Christmas Story.

The third, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was rejected by her publisher for being too scandalous (the central plot element is a woman who finds herself in a bigamist marriage with an abuser). In dire need of money to support her family, Alcott ruthlessly edited it in hopes of getting it in publishable condition, but the key bigamy plot point was too large to be overcome.

It remained unpublished until 1995, when a fervent Alcott collector bought the manuscript and edited it back to its original juicy condition. Stephen King reviewed it for the New York Times and he loved it.

Here’s a nifty preview of the documentary airing tonight on PBS. It takes a novel, playful approach to its subject and looks like a lot of fun.

In 1915, archaeologists with the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts Expedition digging in Deir el-Bersha found a 4000-year-old tomb of a governor and his wife. It had been torn apart thousands of years before by tomb robbers looking for jewels and precious metals. Even the mummies were decapitated, and to add insult to injury, the robbers set the tomb on fire on their way out.

Amazingly, the elaborate wooden coffin, decorative items and mummies which the looters hadn’t deemed worth stealing back then, survived. They were in jumbled pieces, but they were still there, and thus began a hundred years of work by archaeologists to reassemble Mr. and Mrs. Djehutynakht’s tomb.

The dramatic results are now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Projected on a wall, the images pull visitors into the harsh desert and the startling moments when MFA registrar Hanford Lyman Story and expedition team members blasted away enormous boulders and encountered a shaft that showed signs of fire and plunder. They dug down another 30 feet to reach the bottom, and there, among the debris, was an entrance to a burial chamber.

“Inside, they discovered a chaotic scene with objects strewn throughout the small room by robbers in search of booty,” according to museum documents. “Proving an eerie greeting for the 20th-century visitors was a linen-wrapped painted head perched on top of a coffin, appearing to observe the excavators. Propped up in the far corner was a limb-less, head-less torso.”

The central part of the exhibit shows artifacts recovered from the tomb, including the mummified head. Computerized tomography scans showed that the bones that would indicate whether the head belonged to Djehutynakht or his wife were removed during mummification. DNA tests currently being undergone might tell us more.

Another room displays the largest known collection of wooden models from the Middle Kingdom which portray people going about their business on Djehutynakht’s estate. Egyptians believed the figures at work, religion and play on 60 ships would come to life and serve their masters in the afterlife. Conservators spent 10,000 hours pieces these objects back together from thousands of shards destroyed by looters.

The highlight of the exhibit is the Bersha coffin, the brightly painted cedar outer coffin in which 3 other coffins were nested to hold Djehutynakht’s mummy. It’s presented disassembled so visitors can see the intricate hieroglyphics on the inside of the coffin, meant for Djehutynakht to read.

The MFA has a great website set up for the exhibit. There’s a slideshow of the tomb as it was found in 1915, and a neat zoomable viewer of the reconstructed artifacts. Then there’s the totally cool 3D computer scans of the mummy head (see below).