The History Blog

The new expedition to fully map and record the wreck of the Titanic has had to repair to St. John’s, Newfoundland temporarily to avoid getting whupped by Hurricane Danielle. Inclement weather notwithstanding, the team has already captured impressive new 3DHD footage of various parts of the wreck.

Here’s the famous bow so goofily captured by James “King of the World” Cameron (in real life passengers weren’t allowed anywhere near the bow):

Amazing, isn’t it? That footage was taken at 3820 meters under the sea. The 3DHD technology takes much sharper pictures even at murky depths, and although we don’t get to see the full impact like the team members did when they got to view the complete footage with 3D glasses, the colors and definition are astonishing.

The expedition website is already packed with new footage, pictures and a Flash-based map you can click and drag around to explore the wreck and debris field. Click on everything, seriously, because it’s all fascinating.

I think my favorite may be Captain Smith’s stateroom, because you can see his bathtub through the collapsed walls. When Titanic was first discovered in 1985, the Captain’s stateroom was in fairly solid condition. Over the past 25 years, corrosion has buckled the walls and is beginning to eat away at the roof.

Biodegredation is a major concern. Colonies of microorganisms have been actively gnoshing on Titanic’s iron, producing long ribbons of digested metal called rusticles (like icicles only made out of rust). It seems very likely at this point that the different floors in the stern of the ship, the part of the wreck with the greatest bacterial activity, will sooner or later fully collapse onto each other. The iron in the stern was put under the greatest amount of stress during the sinking of the Titanic which makes it more susceptible to rusticle formation now, and all food was stored there, which experts think may have acted as lure and sustenance for microbes.

That’s what makes this project so important. We’ll not only have a detail-rich big picture of Titanic’s current condition, but we’ll have a greater understanding of the wreck’s long-term prospects.

RMS Titanic’s Facebook page is another rich source of pictures and minute-to-minute information about the project.

So I got on one of my obsession kicks today, this time about the history of couture fashion. I spent a good 6 hours reading about the genius of Elsa Schiaparelli, who I knew for her invention of shocking pink (yes, she actually invented a color, at least when it comes to couture) and for her amazing collaborations with surrealist artists which resulted in masterpieces like the Lobster Dress (Salvador Dalí painted that lobster onto the fabric), the Skeleton Dress (it caused a scandal when it debuted in 1938) and the Shoe Hat.

What I didn’t know is that she invented so many other things that we now take so much for granted that we don’t even think of them as having been invented, really. Things introduced to the world of high fashion by Elsa Schiaparelli include: square shoulders combined with nipped-in waistlines, wacky prints, graphic patterned sweaters, jackets to wear with evening gowns, the long runway walked by tall, thin models, ready-to-wear boutiques for couturiers, sportswear mix-and-match separates, colored zippers, the wrap dress, the skort, man-made fabrics and the wedge heel.

Schiaparelli’s couture house closed in 1954. She wasn’t able to roll with the post-war times despite having been at her most brilliant in the interwar period. That same year saw the rebirth of the signature line of her greatest rival, Coco Chanel. Chanel, who had kept under the radar since her couture house closed after the German occupation of France (she had been a Nazi officer’s mistress and was not exactly beloved in France after the war despite her own innovations and contributions to French fashion), would come to eclipse Schiaparelli in popular reputation, although not among couturiers many of whom have borrowed liberally from Elsa’s artistic genius over the decades.

If you’re at all interested in fashion history, or even just like looking at purty dresses, take a romp through these galleries: Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2004 exhibit, “Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli,” and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s awesome interactive timeline of the Golden Age of couture, which does an excellent job showing the links between famous couturiers, so many of whom started as cutters and pattern-makers under other famous couturiers.

ETA: Rowan pointed me to this article on a new exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the history of European fashion from 1700 to 1915. It opens on October 2nd and runs until March 6th. Meanwhile, here’s a photo gallery of some of the gloriousness. I’m completely in love with this dress from England, around 1885.

The Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles has created a new web-based tracking system for archaeological sites in Jordan. Financed in part by the World Monuments Fund and with extensive support from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the million dollar project has been in the works for 3 years and will be available for authorized users starting in September.

Awesomely named MEGA — Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities — the database uses Google Earth satellite images and archaeologist field reports to catalogue over 10,000 ancient sites in Jordan. Some of the information was available in a local Jordanian database, but it wasn’t web-based and was clunky to browse and update. Now anybody in the know can easily record any news about a site’s condition, from encroaching development, looters, environmental threats, whatever is relevant.

Obviously real-time updates are not going to stop someone from looting a site, but it will help authorities track problems almost as soon as they happen, and get a better idea of how to apportion protection and conservation resources.

It was the devastation of Iraq’s archaeological sites in the wake of the US invasion that actually inspired this project. The looting of the National Museum in Baghdad got much of the attention at the time, but the Getty thought they could devise a database to help authorities cope with the archaeological sites being destroyed by looters. Unfortunately, the chaos in the country over the next few years kept the Getty from being able to work with local Iraqi experts, so the project never got off the ground.

“The idea of shipping a couple of big computers to Iraq and hoping that they would get there and that it would all work just seemed too crazy,” said Alison Dalgity, a senior project manager at the Getty who helped develop MEGA.

And so the institute accepted an invitation from Jordan to develop the system there first, a plan that coincided with a sea change in Web-based mapping tools and the rise of open-source software, meaning that the system could exist on the Web and be built and updated cheaply.

It’s not even live yet, but already Jordanian authorities are so delighted with the database that they’re considering opening it to everyone, not just authorized experts but tourist schmoes like the rest of us. Jordan isn’t exactly comfortable with open information sharing when it comes to official government data, so it says a lot that they’re seriously considering upending their customary attitude towards transparency to share the wealth of their archaeological sites.

Jordan’s experience with MEGA might be something of a template for Iraq and other antiquities-rich countries. Change the Google settings and the names, and then it’s just a matter of data entry.

‘The March of Time’ was a series of ground-breaking short films on current events, sports, politics, society, younameit, which played before movies in theaters nationwide from 1935 to 1967. Produced by Time, Inc., publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines, the 20 minute documentaries first aired as radio programs on CBS in 1931. The news was delivered with professional actors impersonating public figures. (Agnes Moorehead, aka Endora on Bewitched, played Eleanor Roosevelt. So cool.)

That dramatic approach to covering events and issues of the day carried through to the film newsreels. It became a trademark, and a source of consternation to critics and journalists who didn’t know what to make of the mixture of fact, fiction and propaganda.

The film’s most unusual feature was its re‐creation or staging of events that had taken place but which had not been photographed by newsreel cameras. De Rochemont argued that he had the same right to interpret and clarify news events with staged scenes as a re‐write man on a newspaper had with words to make sense out of a reporter’s notes. He used both professional and amateur actors to impersonate famous people on the screen, and then blended the staged scenes with real newsreel footage. In time, the series became so celebrated that real celebrities were persuaded to play themselves, re‐enacting events in which they had participated.

For its production of the “Atomic Power” episode in 1946, for example, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and other leading scientists re‐enacted the roles they had played in the Manhattan Project. In one scene, James Conant and Vannevar Bush are shown lying on the sand in New Mexico, shaking hands after the successful explosion of the first atomic bomb. In reality, they had been photographed lying on the floor of a garage in Boston. The staging of scenes was never acknowledged on the screen although, of course, professional journalists and filmmakers were well aware of the techniques employed. By 1940 the series was so well known that it was parodied by Orson Welles in his production of CITIZEN KANE, including an imitation of the voice of Westbrook Van Voorhis, “The Voice of Time.”

Or for a more recent reference, think South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut with its ‘The March of War’ (Eat Snacky Smores) newsreels covering (and exacerbating) the growing anti-Canadian war fever.

This year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of ‘The March of Time’ series, the HBO Archives, the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) are collaborating on showings of the films. MoMA is grouping the newsreels by theme and showing them the first 10 days of September (pdf schedule) followed by panel discussions with experts on the archives.

If that doesn’t happen to be convenient, Sunday, September 5, Turner Classic Movies will air some of the most famous titles between 8:00 PM and midnight. Some of the newsreels aired will be: “Dust Bowl,” “Inside Nazi Germany” (showed in 1937, it was the first anti-Nazi program shown in the isolationist U.S.), “Youth in Crisis,” “Palestine Problem,” and “Problem Drinkers”. This is the first time TCM has ever shown these movies so fire up your DVRs.

You can read more about planned events, view and discuss clips on ‘The March of Time’ Facebook page.

Filmmakers from the Platige Image studio in collaboration with historians from the Warsaw Uprising Museum have created a unique 3D documentary depicting the devastation of Warsaw in spring 1945, right after the end of the war in Europe.

Poland had been invaded by Nazi forces in 1939 and was occupied for 6 years. It was the German response to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising which inflicted much of the enormous damage on the city. The film was released on August 1 to mark the 66th anniversary of the beginning of the uprising.

It took 40 technicians 2 years to piece together just 5 minutes of aerial footage of the 1945 city. They first shot a contemporary view of the city from a helicopter, retracing the path that British Liberator bombers took over Warsaw when bringing supplies and weapons to the insurgents. Then they patched in images from 2,000 historical photographs and films to recreate 1945 Warsaw as accurately as possible.

Michal Gryn, from the Platige Image studio which made the film, said the team was not aware at first of the challenge before them in the form of the masses of documentary material they had to go through.

“It was a unique project to build a 3D model of authentic city ruins and make five minutes of film from it,” Gryn said. “I don’t think that anyone in the world has done this.” [...]

The result is a computer simulation that shows collapsed bridges along the Vistula River, whole districts of roofless, burned-out houses and the Warsaw Ghetto as a flat sea of rubble.

You need the polarized glasses to see the 3D movie (also you need be in Warsaw), but you can get a glimpse of the amazing aerial views in this trailer:

On August 18th, a collaborative team from RMS Titanic Inc., the company that has salvage rights to the wreck of the Titanic, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will be returning to the wreck site not to recover artifacts, but to probe the entire debris field with the eventual goal of creating a 3D virtual rendering of exactly what is left of the ship 2.5 miles under the North Atlantic.

It’ll be the first time the wreck is recorded like an archaeological site instead of explored for salvage booty (and to make the incredibly crappy intro of an incredibly crappy movie out of the underwater footage). The careful mapping will contribute greatly to our understanding of the historical Titanic and will also pinpoint the wreck’s current state of preservation. The plan is to share the virtual rendering with the public once it’s complete.

The “dream team” of archaeologists, oceanographers and other scientists want to get the best assessment yet on the two main sections of the ship, which have been subjected to fierce deep-ocean currents, salt water and intense pressure.

Gallo said while the rate of Titanic’s deterioration is not known, the expedition approaches the mission with a sense of urgency.

“We see places where it looks like the upper decks are getting thin, the walls are thin, the ceilings may be collapsing a bit,” he said. “We hear all these anecdotal things about the ship is rusting away, it’s collapsing on itself. No one really knows.”

The expedition will use imaging technology and sonar devices that never have been used before on the Titanic wreck and to probe nearly a century of sediment in the debris field to seek a full inventory of the ship’s artifacts.

“We’re actually treating it like a crime scene,” Gallo said. “We want to know what’s out there in that debris field, what the stern and the bow are looking like.”

The expedition will be based on the RV Jean Charcot, a 250-foot research vessel with a crew of 20. Three submersibles and the latest sonar, acoustic and filming technology will also be part of the expedition.

They will also take samples of the iron hull, which they hope will answer some questions about how the ship went down. The 3D mapping of the debris field will also provide new information about what happened the night of April 14, 1912. Scientists will be able to examine in detail parts of the ship that haven’t been seen before because they’re jammed into the mud on the seafloor.

The pictures the team retrieves from the submarines will be compared to the pictures taken on RMS Titanic’s first expedition to the wreck 25 years ago. They’ll be able to gauge the rate of decay over that period, and continue to gather data that might be key to conservation on future mapping expeditions.

RMS Titanic, Inc., is still working on a website dedicated to the expedition, but they already have a Facebook page up where you can ask questions and follow the expedition.

Another slow news Sunday here, but I did find an addictive little YouTube channel run by Historic Royal Palaces, the British independent charity which cares for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. The videos in the channel cover the history of those sites and their royal inhabitants.

First one’s free about Henry VIII’s enormous kitchens at Hampton Court Palace. At 36,000 square feet, the Hampton Court kitchens are the largest surviving Renaissance kitchens in Europe.

Once you’ve gotten your fill of that, there are a bunch more about the food history of the Tudor court: Lighting a Tudor fire without matches, What the cooks wore and why, Turning the spit, Show and tell with spices, and King’s Confectionary.

Still that’s just scratching the surface. There are a dozen more videos about Henry VIII, his politics, his culture, his lovahs. Scroll down the list on the right of the uploads page to feed your Tudor addiction or to commune with the Tower of London ravens or find out about royal toilets through the ages

One of my favorite tales about the medieval Church tells of a woman who disguised herself as a man and rose through the ecclesiastical ranks to become Pope, only to be exposed when she gave birth in the middle of a public procession on the Via Sacra in Rome. How’s that for drama? In yo face, Yentl!1

The Church of course denies this ever happened and consider it Protestant Reformation slander. Although the Protestants certainly jumped all over the story with enormous gusto, the earliest source long predates them. Dominican friar Jean de Mailly first mentioned a female Pope in his 1254 Chronica Universalis Mettensis. Set in 1099, this ladyPope story didn’t have the high drama of the Via Sacra birth, just that she dropped a baby while mounting a horse and was promptly tied to said horse and dragged to her death.

It wasn’t until Martin of Opava picked up the tale and ran with it in the third iteration of his 1278 Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum that we get the fully flushed public labor element and the name: Pope John, known as Joan once all is revealed. He also places the story earlier in the 9th century.

John Anglicus, born at Mainz, was Pope for two years, seven months and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been led to Athens dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers . There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge, until she had no equal, and afterwards in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. A high opinion of her life and learning arose in the city, and she was chosen for Pope. While Pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St Peter’s to the Lateran, in a lane once named Via Sacra (the sacred way) but now known as the “shunned street” between the Colisseum and St Clement’s church. After her death, it is said she was buried in that same place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from the street and it is believed by many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed on the list of the Holy Pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on account of the foulness of the matter. (Martin of Opava, Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum)

Such juiciness would not be denied and authors from Vatican librarians to Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about her. Once the Reformation kicked in, the story was used as a convenient symbol of Church corruption and as evidence that the papacy wasn’t really necessary at all since Christendom survived the foulness of her lady parts smeared all over the throne of Peter.

The best title in this anti-Catholic vein was from a book published in England in 1675 by an anonymous author who the preface assures us was a most impeccable insider Vatican source. It’s called A Present for a Papist: Or the Life and Death of Pope Joan, Plainly Proving Out of the Printed Copies, and Manscriptes of Popish Writers and Others, That a Woman called JOAN, Was Really POPE of ROME, and Was There Deliver’d of a Bastard Son in the Open Street as She Went in Solemn Procession.

And now, there’s a movie about her based on the biographical novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross. The Church is less than enthused about it, surprise, surprise, but it’s in the top 10 box office hits in Italy. (Italians love them a good historical Church scandal.) Pope Joan is played by Johanna Wokalek, a German actress I’m not familiar with, but John Goodman plays Pope Sergius and that just rules. Also, the cute guy who was Faramir in Lord of the Rings plays her boyfriend.

IMDB tells me it was released in October 2009, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. I swear I will hunt down the sole dingy art movie house it’s playing in, so help me Joan.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has utilized a technology called Augmented Reality to display the details of a collector’s cabinet from Augsburg, Germany, (made ca. 1630). The cabinet is an incredibly complex piece of furniture that was designed to showcase its owners’ most precious collectibles. It opens on four sides to expose a bewildering array of drawers, cubbies and richly decorated surfaces.

Visitors aren’t allowed to touch it, of course — it’s a delicate piece — so the Getty decided to provide a virtual experience of the cabinet’s wonders both for the museum visitors and for visitors to its website.

“We are always looking for ways in which we can enhance the viewer’s experience,” says Erin Coburn, head of the museum’s Collection Information & Access department. During a discussion about the pavilion’s reopening, she says, “A curator suggested we do something to help people understand the Augsberg cabinet in a way other than just staring at it.”

Coburn and her colleagues created an “interactive” — a virtual model that computer users can spin, open and reassemble. This model is accessible via two touch screens in the gallery and on the Getty’s website at http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/north_pavilion/cabinet/index.html.

The Getty also has enabled online computer users to view and interact with a floating 3-D simulation of the cabinet, thanks to Augmented Reality technology, which combines the real and the virtual in real time.

There’s a wee delay while it loads, but nothing dramatic. Not only can you move all the way around it and zoom in to every section, but there are explanatory details on the most salient features of each side. Click on the “Overview” button for an awesome animation of the whole cabinet spinning around with its drawers pulled out. When you click “Show Structure” the outer walls go transparent and you can see the guts of the piece, exploring all kinds of drawers and pull-out trays in annotated detail.

I love it when technology makes history accessible. No more roped off velvet chairs and plexiglass walls keeping our collective grubby hands off of beautiful, fascinating objects.

Protip: It plays a little better in Firefox than it does in Internet Explorer. Mainly the browsers both handle it fine, but IE gave me trouble when I tried to click on the drawers and pull-outs in the “Show Structure” mode.

Marilyn Monroe famously sang a sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John Kennedy 48 years ago today. In honor of the anniversary, LIFE magazine has uploaded a slideshow of pictures taken that night by photographer Bill Ray. Most have never been released before.

There are some great shots in the group, and Mr. Ray comments on each picture, providing great detail on the party, the old Madison Square Garden (aka Madison Square Garden III, closed in 1967 and bulldozed in 1989), and the difficulties the press had in getting close to the event.

He had wanted to get a shot of Kennedy watching Marilyn, his reputed mistress, performing but the Secret Service wouldn’t let photographers stay in front of the stage, so he had to wander all over the Garden looking for the one spot that would give him that shot. Finally he found a nosebleed seat behind the stage that had the proper sight lines.

“It had been a noisy place, everybody all ‘rah rah rah,’” Ray recalls. “Then boom, on comes this light. There was no sound — no sound. It was like space.” Marilyn was on the stage, taking off her white fur to reveal that scandalous dress underneath. “It was skin-colored and it was really tight. She didn’t wear anything underneath it, it was all sewn on, and those Swarovski crystals were sparkling. And she used this long pause… Then finally, she comes out with ‘Happy Biiiiirthday’ — she starts the whole breathy thing — and everybody just went into a swoon.” Ray took his shots, including this one and the iconic frame that opens this gallery. “I was praying because I had to guess at the exposure. It was a very long lens, which I had no tripod for, so I had to rest it on a pipe railing and try not to breathe.” Though he couldn’t get the Marilyn/JFK shot he’d initially wanted — “she was in such a bright spotlight and he was almost in total darkness” — Ray still came away with a winner of a picture: “I got very lucky with this,” he says.

Not iconic but awesome nonetheless is his backstage picture of the divine Ella Fitzgerald.

The Marilyn moment tends to eclipse everything that happened before it. But there were many stars on the bill. At some point Ray made his way backstage, where he captured a contemplative Ella Fitzgerald waiting to go on — and looking much more elegant than her surroundings, Ray says. “All of the Garden was old, and the dressing rooms back then were really tacky.”

They almost look like mirror images or bizarro opposites, don’t they? The way they’re holding their arms; one shot from behind, one from the front; one onstage, one backstage; Marilyn in white(ish), Ella in black.