The Year in History Blog History

The end of 2015 is upon us and so is what has become an annual tradition here, the Year in History Blog History. We had another milestone which, while the number was a tad on the random side, turned out to be my favorite milestone celebration ever. Why? Because we rang in six million pageviews with Steve Austin, astronaut, a man barely alive but somehow still able to rock the double-knit polyester leisure suit. I was surprised and delighted to find so many comments from people who love the Six Million Dollar Man as much as I do. Engine block Steve Austin action figure 4EVA!

The most read story of the year going by pageviews was the one about the Dutch soccer hooligans vandalizing the newly restored Barcaccia fountain at the base of Rome’s Spanish Steps. Short on its heels was one of my favorite, if not the favorite, post of the year: the cuneiform tablet that added 20 more lines to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The awesomeness of the Viking blacksmith’s grave drew the third largest numbers of views, and the momentous discovery of an archaic home from the 6th century B.C. underneath the Quirinale Hill in Rome came in fourth.

Number five on the list is also my favorite photograph of the year. It’s the CT scan of the cross-legged meditating Buddha statue that has a mummified person inside of it. I learned about the brutal process of self-mummification thanks to that post, which was horrifying and fascinating at the same time if not in equal measure, even though the CT scan showed the internal organs had been removed so the person inside the statue hadn’t actually gotten that way by starving, dehydrating and poisoning himself over the course of six years.

That post also corrected an error that was widespread in the general media coverage of the Buddha mummy, namely that its presence inside the statue was revealed by the CT scan. The statue was part of a traveling museum exhibition about mummies, so obviously the fact that there was a mummy inside the state was already known. That’s why they scanned it in the first place. Still, once a mistake like that gets into a headline or a lede, it’s almost impossible to carve it out. The days of a front page correction fixing the problem are over.

That goes double for a big mistake in History.com’s Today in History feature. I informed History.com that they had confused 18th century surveyor Andrew Ellicott with his great-grandson and dendrochronology pioneer Andrew Ellicott Douglass in their entry on the first recorded observation of a meteor shower in North America. I got an email back saying they were looking into it, but their erroneous article still stands. Perhaps they’ll have fixed it by the time November 12th comes around next year.

Another widespread story that needed some correcting is runner-up for favorite picture: the sale of the “world’s greatest cat painting.” Carl Kahler’s monumental 1893 painting of wealthy San Francisco socialite and philanthropist Kate Birdsall Johnson’s 43 cats sold for $826,000 made news all over the cat-loving Internet. Mrs. Johnson came off of her posthumous virality a little the worse for wear since apocryphal stories of her being a crazy cat lady with hundreds of cats roaming the house got repeated over and over again. In fact she was a thoughtful, devout, generous person who left valuable property and monies in her will to found a hospital for indigent women and children. That hospital still exists, albeit in a new location (the old one was felled in the 1906 earthquake) and under a new name.

It was a particular good year for film discoveries, I think. I don’t just mean lost films that were found hiding out in vaults, but personal discoveries, films that were known but that I discovered in 2015. The most important actual discovery of the year was the film of the 1915 Eastland disaster found in Dutch newsreels. The ship which killed 844 people when it capsized while still moored just feet from the bank of the Chicago River was captured in important photographs by groundbreaking photojournalist Jun Fujita, but this is the first film of the disaster known to have survived.

As far as personal finds go, I still laugh like an idiot at Douglas Fairbanks as the brave, clueless, high as a kite detective Coke Ennyday. That was a random surprise find. Finding The Daughter of Dawn on Netflix, on the other hand, was the happy outcome of years of checking in on the story. I’ve been anxious to see the rediscovered treasure since I first wrote about it in 2012, and much to my amazement, it did not disappoint even after years of buildup. It’s a great picture in many ways, capturing an era that was bygone even as it was being filmed.

My favorite videos of the year were all about the technology and procedure of historical preservation and exploration. First there was the all-too-brief view of how Historic Royal Palaces conservators go about washing the fragile 17th century tapestries under their care. With all the custom technology — the giant horizontal car wash made specifically for tapestries — the best part was how tenderly the conservators sponge away the dirt and blot away the moisture. The composite video made from synchroton X-ray imaging of a corroded 17th century metal box blew my mind purely from a tech standpoint. The detail and resolution of the images opens up a world of new possibilities for non-invasive exploration of artifacts that are otherwise too fragile to be touched.

Speaking of history and technology, the discovery that an eye salve from Bald’s Leechbook, a 10th century Anglo-Saxon book of remedies for illness, kills MRSA superbug bacteria with ruthless efficiency could have enormous implications in our soon-to-be post-antibiotic world. There were some heartbreaking responses to that story from people who have lived for years with persistent infections and are desperate to find a solution. Here’s hoping the research gets all the support it needs going forward so they don’t have to crowdfund for a measly £1,000 to hire a summer intern.

Is it weird if I transition from bacterial infection to poop? Oh well, at least there’s some sort of segue in there, even if it is a pathogenic one. Let’s face, it’s not a good History Blog year without some good poop stories, like the 25 tons of pigeon poop cleaned out of the 14th c. tower in Rye, a medieval city on the English Channel coast. Also we saw the greatest of all updates to the story of the barrels of poop found in Odense, Denmark. Researchers sifting through compacted 14th century excrement one teaspoon at a time, a designated expert poop-sniffer, museum Smell-O-Vision: that post and its comment thread made me inordinately happy. As did the hidden pooper found in the 17th century Dutch painting by Royal Collection curators.

The hidden pooper may be my favorite restoration find, but my favorite artifact find of the year is probably the Roman owl fibula found on Danish island of Bornholm. Its bright enameled colors, rarity and sheer cuteness completely won me over. If Lorenzo ever graduates from making Mjölnir amulets out of his mom’s tea spoons into a full-fledged artifact reproduction business, I vote he make us a whole bunch of Bornholm owls.

Close seconds are the blackboards from 1917 discovered with beautiful chalk artwork and class exercises preserved in pristine condition in an Oklahoma City school and the 132-year-old Winchester ’73 found leaning against tree in Great Basin National Park in the Snake mountains of eastern Nevada. Several comments on the latter story appreciated that I’d said conservators were keeping the rifle in its highly weathered condition “because it’s cool.” What’s funny is that I actually thought about it a lot when I was writing. I was going to break down all the reasons they’d decided not to restore it, but then I realized that it all boiled down to the same thing: because it’s cool. There are a million Winchester ’73s. This one stands out because some poor devil left it leaning against a tree for 130 years and now it looks kickass.

As far as precious metal finds go, the treasure of the year has to be the Bronze Age gold spirals found on Zealand, Denmark. They were found under a pile of gold coins and the spirals are so awesome they completely eclipsed the gold coin hoard. The comment thread on the spirals is particularly great too. Lots of interesting contributions from people who use or produce similar objects in embroidery and machining metal. The inscribed sword from the 13th or 14th century inspired a wealth of fascinating comments as well. Everyone likes a mystery, or at least we few, we nerdy few, we band of history-obsessed brothers do.

I also loved the comments on the story about the 7th century Christian skeletons found in front of the Temple of Concordia at Paestum because you were so enthusiastic about the fabulous hidden prostitute conspiracy story. One of the joys of writing this blog is when something that tickles me tickles y’all too. I love it even more when it’s a tangent that you pick up on rather than the main thread of the story. I’m not sure why. Validation that my meanderings were worthwhile, I suppose.

Sometimes the meandering becomes an entire post of its own, as in the case of Childeric’s treasure, a story I came across while researching something else I can’t remember anymore and that became something of an obsession for days. The story about Emily Post’s madcap road trip from coast to coast came about in much the same way.

It’s been a heartbreaking year for history lovers. The destruction of so much of our shared cultural heritage in the Middle East by terrorism and war is almost unbearable. The brutal murder of Khaled el-Asaad, a great man who dedicated his life to the historic patrimony of Syria and the gave his life for it too, was an agonizing loss to his family, colleagues and all the rest of us who where so beholden to him without even realizing it until he was gone.

In the end, it’s history itself that soothes me even in such dark times. It wasn’t so long ago that Europe was facing the rubble of its own history, torn apart by total war. The sculptures and reliefs of Tell Halaf in Berlin were bombed to smithereens when the museum took a direct hit from an incendiary bomb in 1943. Seventy years later, they were put back together.

Three years ago, author Hilary Mantel, author of the exceptional Tudor historical fiction Wolf Hall, gave a speech about the public’s relationship to royal families at a London Review of Books event. It made the news because some media outlets plucked quotes about the Duchess of Cambridge and made them out to be cruel criticisms of the former Kate Middleton rather than the astute and apposite observation about how people, spurred on by an obsessive press, fetishize her and box her in. It’s a great speech, but the part that struck me most profoundly was about the discovery of the remains of Richard III.

Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.

I’ve thought of that last line so many times this year, as horrific destruction followed horrific destruction. What was lost can be found again, even if its original form is gone forever. That is what history does. That is what we do every time we read history. We find what was lost.

Thank you all so very much for reading and commenting and sending me the kindest compliments and hottest story tips. May your 2016 be glorious.

Civil War-era cedar log “corduroy road” found in Virgina

A county construction crew in Fairfax County, Virginia, has unearthed a section of a rare Civil War-era cedar log highway. A crew from the Fairfax County Utilities Design and Construction Division (UDCD) was digging for a new road shoulder and sidewalk on Ox Road when workers found a layer of old macadam (a small stone aggregate road surface invented by John MacAdam in the 1820s). Beneath it was a line of cedar logs laid next to each other, a design known as a corduroy road because of its resemblance to the striated fabric. Ken Atkins, senior inspector for the UDCD and avid history buff, made sure the macadam stones were removed very carefully so as not to disturb the wood underneath.

Atkins stopped excavation and alerted UDCD engineer Mohamed Kadasi who called the Fairfax County Park Authority’s Cultural Resource Management and Protection Branch (CRMPB). They sent archaeologists to assess the site who confirmed that Mr. Atkins’ instincts were spot-on. His cautious, thoughtful approach saved a very rare surviving historic Civil War road surface. Logs were a common road surface at the time, especially during the war when the constant tramping of Union and Confederate soldiers turned dirt roads into sucking mud pits.

The CRMPB documented the site, taking photographs and planning a more thorough future recording of the historic road. When they were done for the day, Atkins covered the excavated trench with a steel plate to protect the cedar logs and keep members of the public from falling into the pit.

Then came the bureaucracy. While the county is using the land for public works, it actually belongs to the state of Virginia and is being worked under the aegis of an easement held by the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). Therefore before a formal excavation of the cedar road could be done, the CRMPB needed a permit from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Usually that sort of thing can drag on for weeks, but everyone pulled together. Within 48 hours, the CRMPB had drawn up a work plan and submitted the permit application, the VDOT had agreed to the plan and signed the permit.

Armed with the permit, the CRMPB team used a total station, one of those surveyor’s tools that looks like a big yellow plastic camera on a tripod, to record the cedar log road in 3D. They also got a favor from the Fairfax County Geographic Information System (GIS) department which has been using high definition LiDAR data to create a detailed topographic map of the county. The CRMPB asked them to process the data from the area around the road find and it returned evidence of a Civil War circular fort that once protected the roadway.

CRMPB archaeologists recorded every log and its exact location, numbered them and then attached two tags with the assigned number to each end of the log. Then they cut through them. I know it sounds horrible and it is, but the UDCD had a drainage pipe to install, and the decision was made that it was better for historical accuracy and preservation to cut the logs but leave them in situ rather than pull them out. Once the pipe was in place, the trench was backfilled up to the cedar log road. The cut ends of the logs were put back in their original places and then the trench was backfilled again, this time up to the modern ground level.

While the road is now reburied and will likely remain so in perpetuity, thanks to the documentation and GIS data, the CRMPB hopes to digitally reconstruct the area as it was during the Civil War.

Jim Lewis, a member of the executive committee of the Bull Run Civil War Round Table, said a corduroy road from the Occoquan River to the Fairfax courthouse was a major pathway in the war.

The logs that the county workers found are almost certainly part of the first section of that road, from the courthouse to Fairfax Station, which was built in 1862, Lewis said. “Almost certainly” because Lewis pointed out that a specific dating process hasn’t been used to verify that the wood is from the Civil War and not from a later incarnation of Ox Road.

If the corduroy road does date to the Civil War, the historian said, it would have been traveled by Union Gen. Joseph Hooker, Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and other famous generals.

The road would have been a link to get supplies from the railroad at Fairfax Station to the Fairfax courthouse, a significant Union supply depot, he said.

Most other corduroy roads have long rotted away, Lewis said, which makes the Fairfax discovery substantial.

“To find a corduroy road intact is spectacular,” he said.

Iron Age settlement unearthed in Norway

A unique opportunity to excavate an undeveloped field on Norway’s Ørland peninsula has revealed the remains of a large and wealthy Iron Age settlement. The site is adjacent to Norway’s Main Air Station which is expanding to make room for 52 new F-35 fighter jets the government recently purchased. By Norwegian law, the property must be surveyed by archaeologists before construction begins, and because this site is so extensive (91,000 meters squared or more than 22 acres), the survey is a major project with more than 20 staff working for 40 weeks at a cost of 41 million Norwegian Krone ($4,700,000), not counting the additional costs for room and board and large excavators.

The excavators are necessary to strip a very thin layer of topsoil which has been churned up by farming. The land has been farmed for centuries, going at least as far back 1,500 years ago when it was right on the bay. Now it’s a mile inland. Its former position on the coast made it an important location for Iron Age Norwegians.

“This was a very strategic place,” says Ingrid Ystgaard, project manager at the Department of Archaeology and Cultural History at NTNU University Museum. “It was a sheltered area along the Norwegian coastal route from southern Norway to the northern coasts. And it was at the mouth of Trondheim Fjord, which was a vital link to Sweden and the inner regions of mid-Norway.”

Excavations have already confirmed that the people who lived there were prosperous, as testified to by the quality of their garbage. Archaeologists were delighted to find middens — ancient garbage pits — on the site, because they rarely survive so long in the acidic soil of Norway. Thanks to its coastal history, the site’s soil is composed of alkaline ground-up seashells which has allowed delicate organic remains like animal and fish bones to survive to this day.

“Nothing like this has been examined anywhere in Norway before,” Ystgaard said.

There are enough bones to figure out what kinds of animals they came from, and how the actual animal varieties relate to today’s wild and domesticated animals, she said. The archaeologists have also found fish remains, from both salmon and cod, and the bones from seabirds, too.

These finds will give archaeologists a unique glimpse into the daily lives and diets of the Iron Age residents. Other artifacts found in the middens include a blue glass bead, several amber beads and a shard from a green drinking beaker that was imported from the Rhine Valley. These are expensive pieces, a testament to the wealth of a settlement that could afford to trade for such high-end goods.

The precision work of the excavators has peeled back the top layers of soil a centimeter at a time revealing discolorations and holes in the soil that are basically a blueprint of the structures in the settlement.

So far, these marks in the soil show that there were three buildings arranged in the shape of a U. The two longhouses that were parallel to each other measured 40 metres and 30 metres and were connected by a smaller building.

The 40-metre longhouse contained several fire pits, at least one of which was clearly used for cooking. Other fire pits may have provided light for handwork, or for keeping the longhouse warm.

Ystgaard believes there are probably more archaeological remains outside the 22 acres available to them to survey, perhaps a burial ground and harbour with the remains of boat houses, but they have more than enough meaty material to sink their teeth into on the airbase site. The opportunity to explore how the Iron Age site was laid out — where the houses were, where the fireplaces were, where the garbage pits were — is precious and rare and they intend to take full advantage of it.

Austin Reed’s prison memoir published

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American author will be available for sale next month. The original manuscript was discovered by a rare books dealer at an estate sale in Rochester, New York, a few years ago and acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2009. Yale English professor Caleb Smith, Beinecke curators and genealogical researcher Christine McKay were able to identify the author as Austin Reed, a free African American from Rochester who had spent much of life in penal institutions.

Reed was six years old when his father died. In the wake of the loss, he began to get into trouble, ditching school and going out at all hours. His exasperated mother decided that it was better for him to live in the country, far from the temptations and evils of the city, where, she hoped, he might be turned from his self-destructive path. She indentured him to the Ladd family to work on their farm in Avon, New York. Alas, like a latter-day Oedipus, Reed’s mother only doomed him to the fate she had so fervently wished to avert. When the farmer tied the boy up “like a slave” and beat him badly, Reed and two other child servants set fire to his home in revenge.

Reed was convicted of arson in September of 1833 and was sentenced to serve 10 years at the New York House of Refuge, the first juvenile reformatory in the United States. He was 10 years old. The facility opened in 1825 in a former US arsenal in the Bowery. The freshman class consisted of six boys and three girls. A decade later when Reed was there it would house 1,600 children. It was dedicated to teaching its charges skills and professions with the laudable aim of rehabilitation, but the disciple was brutal and the workload extreme.

From the beginning Austin Reed was rebellious and fought against prison authorities. His juvie records are replete with comments from the wardens describing him as “a deep knowing impudent brazen faced boy” and “a most notorious liar.” He made multiple attempts to escape, at least one of which was successful if only for a short time. Still, the troubled boy found some support there, especially from superintendents Samuel Wood, an abolitionist who saw to it that Reed learned how to read and write. His successor Mr. Terry took a different approach, inflicting harsh punishments and whipping Reed within an inch of life.

He left the House of Refuge in 1839, only to quickly fall foul of the law again. Now an adult, he served the next 20 years in the notorious Auburn Prison, the oldest prison in the country still in use today. Auburn also had a stated aim of rehabilitation, but its methods were draconian: perpetual solitary confinement, violent whippings with cat-o-nine-tails, a form of waterboarding called the “shower bath,” being made to carry the “yoke,” a 40-pound bar of iron chained to the back of the prisoner’s neck and both hands.

Reed was in his mid-30s when he completed the book in 1858. He always intended his memoir to be published and read by a wide audience. He wrote it with an audience mind, often addressing the reader. His titles make it clear that he saw sharing his story as a means to expose the many cruelties he’d encountered in his lifetime of dealings with the criminal justice system. His original title, in the prolix run-on format so popular in the 19th century, was: The life and adventures of Rob Reed, his fifteen years imprisonment with the mysteries and miseries of Auburn Prison with the rules and regulations of the prison unmasked. The troubles and sorrows of the prisoner from the time he enters the prison untill he is discharged. In the notebook, that title is pasted over with a revised version: The Life and the adventures of a Haunted convict or the inmate of a gloomy prison with the mysteries and miseries of the New York House of Reffuge and Auburn Prison unmasked with the rules and regulations of Auburn Prison from 1840 up to the present time and the different modes of punishment.

Caleb Smith has whittled that revised title down to a more manageable The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict and now, 150 years after Austin Reed first set out to tell the world about the hardships he endured, his plans have finally come to fruition. The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is published by Random House and can be pre-ordered at Amazon now for delivery on January 26th.

Alexander Hamilton powder horn for sale

A powder horn engraved with Alexander Hamilton’s name that most likely belonged to the Founding Father himself is going up for auction next month. The seller is dentist Dr. Warren Richman who bought it from a patient in 1990. He has spent decades documenting the artifact, trying to find conclusive evidence that it belonged to the man whose name is on it not once but twice. An arms appraiser, a forensic documents expert and Alexander Hamilton’s great great great great great grandson Douglas Hamilton all agree that it’s the real deal. They believe he carried gun powder in it when serving under General George Washington during the Revolutionary War and that the carving was done by Hamilton’s own hand.

Born in Charlestown, the capital of the island of Nevis in the British West Indies, the illegitimate son of Rachel Faucette Lavien, an unhappily married woman who had fled her husband, and James Hamilton, one of many lesser sons of British nobility who had left home to seek his fortune in the Americas, Alexander was abandoned by his father and two years later lost his mother to fever when he was 11 or 13 years old. (His year of birth is uncertain, either 1755 or 1757). Young Alexander was left with nothing but a couple of dozen books, so he went to work as a clerk for an American shipping company. The future Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the Bank of New York and engineer of a new country’s monetary system, was so good at the business that he was left in charge of the firm for five months in 1771 while still a teenager.

Alexander Hamilton had other unmistakable gifts as well. He wrote an account of a hurricane published in the Royal Danish American Gazette that so impressed community leaders they raised money to send him to the North American colonies to advance his education. Hamilton arrived in New Jersey in 1772 and, after a year of college preparatory studies, enrolled at King’s College (modern-day Columbia University) in New York City in the fall of 1773.

He quickly became involved in the hot political topic of the era and earned a reputation as a lucid and effective advocate for the patriot cause. When armed conflict broke out between the British Army and colonials at the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, Hamilton volunteered for the New York militia. This is the fulfillment of a long-hold wish expressed in a letter to his friend Edward Stevens when Hamilton was just 14 years old and clerking for food:

To confess my weakness, Ned, my ambition is so prevalent that I disdain the groveling conditions of a clerk to which my fortune condemns me. I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. My folly makes me ashamed, yet Neddy, we know that such schemes can triumph when the schemer is resolute. Oh, how I wish there was a war!

That deep drive to rise up in the world, to make something of himself, to fight in a war which affords men of talent and bravery the chance at field promotions, medals and fame explains the alacrity with which he joined the Revolutionary cause. It also explains some of the engraving on the powder horn.

Alexander’s father James was the fourth son of Scottish nobleman Alexander Hamilton of Grange, and the younger Alexander proved keen to affirm that connection throughout his life. He wanted to have his never-legitimized heritage publicly recognized. He put the coat of arms and crest of the Grange branch of the Hamiltons on his personalized bookplates. He named his house in New York The Grange after the family seat.

The powder horn has multiple elements of the arms of the Hamiltons of Grange. There’s a unicorn — the symbol of Scotland also seen in several Hamilton crests — with a five-petaled flower on its hip. The more stylized, geometric version of a five-petaled flower, the cinquefoil, is on the Grange coat of arms. A roundel engraved on the horn has that formal version of the cinquefoil. It’s too faded to be sure, but it looks like it’s not just a plain cinquefoil, but a cinquefoil ermine (dotted with black shapes that represent the black-tipped tail of the winter stoat). The Hamilton of Grange arms use cinquefoil ermine.

Other engravings aren’t necessarily specific to the Hamilton family but are very much in keeping with Alexander’s yearning to make it big. There’s an engraving of a large house with a large enclosed property and several forking streams, symbolizing landed wealth. Another roundel holds a group of fasces, the tied bundle of wooden rods that in Ancient Rome represented magisterial authority.

The year engraved on it is 1773, the year Hamilton went to King’s College. Carving your name and symbols on a power horn in anticipation of a war that hasn’t started yet sounds like a studenty thing to do, especially a student who had openly yearned for war when he was barely into his teens.

One engraved phrase is odd, though. It reads: “First When When [sic] Came To Ohio.” The auction catalogue says it’s a “reference to American settlement,” which okay, but really? Why? Why wouldn’t it be “First When Came To New Jersey” or “First When Came To New York”? The extra word doesn’t bother me — he made other mistakes in the carving, like not leaving enough room for the final r on the large engraved “Alexander.” Ohio, not one of the 13 colonies, was a British territory until after the war. The first US settlers of Ohio were Revolutionary War veterans who founded the city of Marietta.

Authentic powder horn of Alexander Hamilton or no, it is estimated to sell for $25,000 – $35,000 and the starting bid is $10,000. The auction is on January 11th.