February 2011 – Page 2 – The History Blog

Rare color film of JFK’s last night alive posted

February 23, 2011

Rare color footage of John and Jackie Kennedy taken at the Rice Hotel in Houston just before 9:00 PM on Nov. 21, 1963, has been restored and posted online by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The film was made by Roy Botello who was in town for a convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) held at the Rice. He was the first Scholarship Corporation Chairman of LULAC in San Antonio, so as a high level functionary he had a unique opportunity to film John and Jackie Kennedy up close on his Bolex 8mm camera as they arrived and greeted dignitaries in the ballroom.

There is no audio so we although we see the President and the First Lady at the microphone, we can’t hear him speak or hear Jacqueline Kennedy wow the crowd when she addresses them in fluent Spanish without notes, but she certainly looks the part in her black dress and triple strand of pearls. Audio recordings of the event capture the crowd shouting “ole!” after she finished speaking.

Botello returned home to San Antonio the next day. He put the film in a steel case, locked it in a drawer and kept it there for almost 50 years. Last year it finally saw the light of day again after a reporter tracked him down and asked to see it. After that first public viewing, Roy Botello decided to donate the film to the Sixth Floor Museum.

The museum has restored it, commissioning a new film-to-video transfer, correcting the color and exposure, and posted the raw footage online. With this latest addition to its collection, the Sixth Floor Museum now has home movies of every city Kennedy visited during his final trip to Texas, minus Fort Worth.

Trove of Thomas Jefferson’s books found in St. Louis

February 22, 2011

Modern(ish), Treasures

Researchers have found 28 books in 74 volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s last library in the Coolidge collection of St. Louis’ Washington University. This makes Washington University’s library the third largest repository of Thomas Jefferson’s books after the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Jefferson sold 6,700 of his books to the Library of Congress after the British burned Washington, D.C. in 1814, and he founded the University of Virginia in 1819, so that’s impressive company for Washington University to keep.

After Jefferson gave the Library of Congress most of his books, he immediately started to collect again. Those 1,600 books he purchased in the last decade of his life are known as the retirement collection, and they were unfortunately scattered in 1829, three years after his death, when his relatives sold them at auction to pay his extensive debts. Researchers at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate and a National Historic Landmark, have been trying to track down the retirement collection since 2004 so it can be digitized and made available to the public in an online database called Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries.

Endrina Tay, the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project manager, found a number of auction catalogs from the 1829 sale, but they didn’t include the names of the buyers. Then she found a letter from Joseph Coolidge, the husband of one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, asking the husband of another Jefferson granddaughter to secure some of the books for him at auction.

Coolidge wrote Nicholas Philip Trist, who married another Jefferson granddaughter, saying, “If there are any books which have T. J. notes or private marks, they would be interesting to me.” He added, “I beg you to interest yourself in my behalf in relation to the books; remember that his library will not be sold again, and that all the memorials of T. J. for myself and children, and friends, must be secured now! — this is the last chance!”

When Ms. Tay found the letter “C” next to some of the lots in one of the catalogs, she thought those volumes might have been successfully purchased by Coolidge. Then another piece of the puzzle snapped into place.

While [Tay] was tracking down the retirement library, one of her fellow Monticello scholars, Ann Lucas Birle, was researching a book about the Coolidges and, searching Google Books, found a reference in The Harvard Register to a gift in 1880 from a Coolidge son-in-law, Edmund Dwight, to a fellow Harvard alumnus and possible relative, William Greenleaf Eliot, a founder of Washington University.

“It could have been his parents have died, he’s left with 3,000 books, what should he do with these that would really do good?” Dean Baker said. “A great-uncle just founded a new university. If you send them to a university that doesn’t even have 3,000 books, it could make a world of difference.”

Tay and Birle alerted Washington University to their find, and rare books curator Erin Davis and assistant archivist Miranda Rectenwald scoured the rare book collection for all the ones donated by the Coolidge family in 1880, which had long since been dispersed throughout the library’s holdings with no particular indicators of their origin. They used a turn of the century ledger that included a listing of the Coolidge books for reference and were able to track down the Jefferson volumes.

Their work isn’t over yet, though. The curators will continue to examine the Coolidge collection for any more Jefferson books that have escaped notice. University officials are on cloud nine, needless to say. Shirley K. Baker, Washington University’s vice chancellor for scholarly resources and dean of university libraries, enthuses: “It is particularly appropriate that these books should be here in Missouri. It was Jefferson who acquired this land in the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis was the jumping-off point for the expedition Jefferson sent to explore the new territory.”

Bust of James Watt cast from old mold and 3D scan

February 21, 2011

Modern(ish), Multimedia

When James Watt, inventor of the separate condenser (an essential improvement to the Newcomen steam engine that helped usher in the Industrial Revolution) retired to his home near Birmingham in 1800, his wife exiled him to the garret room where he could tinker loudly and make stinky messes far from the main living areas. He continued to make new inventions in that garret workshop, among them two machines for copying sculptures.

He died in 1819, and his workshop was locked and left untouched until 1853 when his biographer J.P. Muirhead was allowed to view it. After that, visitors to Watt’s home — he became something of an Industrial Revolution hero and his house was a pilgrimage site — would sometimes get a glimpse of the garret, but nothing was touched or moved.

When the house was demolished in 1924, the entire workshop, including the door, window, skylight, floorboards and 6,500 objects used or created by Watt, was moved to London’s Science Museum where it was on display for years until the gallery it was in was closed.

On March 23, the workshop will finally open again to visitors. In preparation for the new exhibit, museum staff examined a collection of 26 plaster molds Watt had created, some of them still bound in the original string. There were molds for a lion, a variety of deities and one person that curators thought might just be James Watt himself.

The early 19th century mould consisted of 25 separate pieces and was thought too fragile to allow a plaster cast to be taken.

It was examined with a colour triangulation scanner to produce a perfect digital “cast”, enabling a sculpture to be created. […]

Andrew Nahum, Principal Curator of Technology and Engineering, said: “Finding a new representation of a major national figure like Watt is a real discovery, a quite exceptional event. The bust is not in the historical record and its display in the gallery will be the first time it has ever been seen in public.

“Aside from the scarcity of the image, the bust itself is of high artistic quality. In fact, Watt devoted much of his own time in later years to copying sculpture.

“Perhaps surprisingly, as a result of his interest in this area, the Science Museum holds what may be Britain’s largest collection of early 19th century sculpture moulds.”

The Science Museum has a wonderful blog with a whole section about Watt’s workshop. It’s very much worth a read.

Here’s a rough sculpture of Watt’s bust cast from the mold compared to a late portrait. They’ll be making a neater one for the exhibit.

Bust of James Watt derived from the 1807 mold using 3D digital scanner

Tour a reconstructed Roman villa

February 20, 2011

Ancient, Modern(ish)

Construction experts have built a Roman town house in Wroxeter Roman City in the British county of Shropshire using only traditional Roman tools, techniques and materials.

The house was designed by archaeologist Professor Dai Morgan Evans and took six months to build. The construction was filmed for a Channel Four series called Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day (which you can watch online if you’re in the UK or using a proxy).

It took a team of seven builders six months, 150 tonnes of sandstone bricks, 15 tonnes of lime mortar and 26 tonnes of plaster – all mixed by hand – 1,500 hand-cut timber joints and 2,600 hand-cut roof tiles to create the house, based on a real building excavated at Wroxeter, which was once the fourth largest city in Roman Britain and is now an archaeology visitor attraction in the care of English Heritage.

The workers, more used to plasterboard and plastic windows, had no experience of traditional techniques. A Channel 4 series, Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day, tracked their steep learning curve – and the running battle of the wheelbarrow.

The builders were incredulous when Evans insisted that, however advanced their plumbing and road-building, the Romans had no wheelbarrows, so everything had to be carried on to the site by hand. The builders kept smuggling in wheelbarrows; he kept throwing them out. When the roof boards were on, they wrote in giant letters “Romans had wheelbarrows” – now covered by the shingles.

“They absolutely did not have wheelbarrows,” Evans said. “I’ve done a lot of work on this now. They had wheelbarrows in China, but there is no record, drawing or evidence for a wheelbarrow anywhere in the Roman empire. The first reference I can find is Isidore of Seville, and that’s in the seventh century – centuries after our house.”

Think of all the massive construction projects all over the empire built with materials carried in baskets or one brick at a time. The mind boggles.

The town house includes servants’ quarters, small, dark, depressing bedrooms, and baths heated with the Roman hypocaust system of underfloor heating where a wood-burning furnace heated empty space left under the floors and inside the walls. This wouldn’t have been used to heat the living quarters, though. That job was left to coal braziers, but when Evans’ team tried it they had to douse the fires after just an hour because the carbon monoxide sensors were freaking out.

There were a few other concessions made to modern sensibilities, like fire exits and wheelchair-accessible pathways. The builders also left one room unfinished so visitors can see the process of construction. One wall shows in different sections bare stonework at the base, then wooden posts joined horizontally, and lastly the wattle and daub filling inside the wooden frame to create a solid wall.

The house officially opened to the public yesterday. For those of us not fortunate enough to visit in person, there’s a neat virtual tour on the Channel 4 website.

Egypt’s historical sites re-open tomorrow

February 19, 2011

Ancient, Looting, Social policy

Good news for tourism and the many Egyptians employed in the industry: Egypt’s archaeological sites and museums will re-open to the public Sunday, February 20th. In not so good news, though, looting and thefts during the anti-government protests were more prevalent than first realized.

Zahi Hawass has come under fire for claiming early on that no artifacts were stolen from the Cairo Museum during the break-in of January 28th. That turns out to have been false information since once museum curators did a complete inventory, 18 artifacts were found to have been stolen, including two gilded wood statues of King Tutankhamun and several other pieces from the Tutankhamun display.

The missing Heart Scarab of Yuya was recovered on the west side of the museum gardens, near the new bookshop. Wooden fragments belonging to the damaged New Kingdom coffin, still on the second floor of the museum, were also found in this area. The search team also found one of the eleven missing shabtis of Yuya and Thuya underneath a showcase. Fragments belonging to the statue of Tutankhamun being carried by the goddess Menkaret have been found; all the located fragments belong to the figure of Menkaret. The small figure of the king has not yet been found.

Dr. Hawass said it seems the looters dropped objects as they fled, and every inch of the museum must be searched before the Registration, Collections Management, and Documentation Department, which is overseeing the inventory, can produce a complete and final report of exactly what is missing.

Thankfully four of the 18 have now been recovered, including the most valuable piece: a limestone statue of the Tut’s father, Pharaoh Akhenaten making offerings to the gods. Akhenaten was reviled after his death and his memory erased — cartouches with his name and statues with his likeness were destroyed — so this is a very rare surviving statue.

It was found by a 16-year-old boy near a garbage can in Tahrir Square. He was there protesting against the Mubarak regime. When he found the statue, he brought it home and his mother called her brother, a professor at the American University in Cairo. The brother, Dr. Sabry Abdel Rahman, called the Ministry of State for Antiquities Affairs and returned the statue last Wednesday.

It appears to be in good shape. Akhenaten was holding an offering table in his hands and that’s been removed, but the table was found earlier still on museum premises. This statue is slated to be the first piece restored.

Now for more bad news:

At Saqqara, the tomb of Hetepka was broken into, and the false door may have been stolen along with objects stored in the tomb. I have arranged for a committee to visit the tomb this coming Saturday to compare the alleged damage with earlier expedition photos. In Abusir, a portion of the false door was stolen from the tomb of Rahotep. In addition, break-ins have been confirmed at a number of storage magazines: these include ones in Saqqara, including one near the pyramid of Teti, and the magazine of Cairo University. I have created a committee to prepare reports to determine what, if anything, is missing from these magazines. The Egyptian Military caught and released thieves attempting to loot the site of Tell el Basta; the military also caught criminals trying to loot a tomb in Lisht. There have also been many reports of attacks on archaeological sites through the building of houses and illegal digging

Hawass is under a great deal of pressure right now, not just because of the damage and thefts, but also because there have been strikes demanding better jobs and decent pay, protests against his iron rule and corruption in the antiquities ministry. Although protesters asked for his resignation, Hawass has of course refused. “They say, ‘If you cannot give us a job, leave your job’—I cannot leave my job for some kids in the street,” he said. “If I feel one day that I’m not doing something good for my country, I will resign.”