Julkaisuseuranta
26.2.2021
Phaidon Verlag was founded as a history and art-book publisher in Vienna in 1923 by Ludwig Goldscheider (1896–1973), Dr Béla Horovitz (1898–1955) and Frederick Ungar (1898-1988), all Jewish scholars. The founders named the company Phaidon after a pupil of Socrates, to reflect their love of classical culture. The company's distinctive logo derived from the Greek…
23.2.2021
Spouse and I lived in Britain in 1972 and 1973, and worked in a Herts hospital. American Bill Bryson (b1951) first visited Britain in 1973 and worked in a Surrey hospital. Bill married a local nurse in 1975, moved back to Des Moines in 1975 to complete his studies at Drake Uni, then re-settled in…
It started in the early 1980s when Gateshead decided to take art to the public because it did not have its own contemporary art gallery. The early works were so successful that in 1986 a formal public art programme was launched. This was given a tremendous boost during the 1990 Garden Festival in Gateshead with…
The 282-ton brigantine Amazon was built in 1861 in Nova Scotia Canada. In Nov 1872, and now called Mary Celeste, the ship sailed from New York Harbour en route to Genoa. It was a merchant ship with a tricky past so presumably the name change was to disassociate itself from a series of mishaps eg the sudden…
Few artists have captured Australian history as convincingly as Sidney Nolan (1917–92); his most iconic old works were synonymous with Australian modernism. Nolan was known as an artist who celebrated the human spirit, so this story was previously unknown. Many thanks to Andrew Turley.By 1939, in Melbourne, Nolan first painted the darkness of concentration camps with…
2.2.2021
Found across S.E Asia, betel nuts were harvested from the Areca palm and were chewed for their stimulating properties. The local Dutch realised how important betel nuts were to the indigenous people and how it was an essential part of hospitality. So the Dutch quickly incorporated betel use with their dealings with local elites, and…
29.1.2021
Bikur Cholim SynagogueThe Jerusalem Post reported that Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city with c4 million people. Izmir aka Smyrna is the principal seaport of Western Anatolia on the coast of the Aegean Sea. The Jewish community in Izmir goes back to the C4th BC. The city’s oldest district, Kemeralti, was home to the densest…
The Up series of documentary films followed the lives of 14 Britons since 1964, when they were 7. The first film was titled 7 UP and the series has had 9 episodes, one every 7 years, spanning 56 years. The series has been produced by Granada Television for ITV, when Australian journalist Tim Hewat organised the…
20.1.2021
The first confirmed outbreak of sweating disease arrived in England in 1485, towards the end of the Wars of the Roses (1455–87). This led to speculation that it may have been brought over from France by the French mercenaries used by Henry Tudor to win the English throne. Major epidemic waves followed in 1508, then 1517,…
17.1.2021
Thank you to History and Will. When the United States Industrial Alcohol Company/USIA decided to build a huge molasses tank, they put it smack in the middle of Boston’s North End, a community made up largely of Italian immigrants in a densely populated neighbourhood.Pulling victims outSmithsonian21 people were killed on Commercial St in the North…
New York’s prosperity before the Civil War was closely tied to slavery and the Cotton South. But it was only in the southern states, where the economy was based on the plantation agriculture, that slavery was legal. Slavery had been ended in the northern states where industrialisation did not require cheap labour. Thus the northern…
29.12.2020
Portrait of Singer by Edward Harrison May, 1869Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-75) was the youngest child born in NY to German migrants. The parents divorced & abandoned the 8 children when Isaac was only 12, so he left home with minimal education, took odd jobs at carnivals and formed a travelling troupe of repertory actors. After 9…
25.12.2020
By the early C19th, London had become the world’s largest city. To deal with concerns re preventing crime, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel introduced the Metropolitan Police Act to Parliament 1829. But people were afraid that the new police force would be used by the government to spy on them. So under the Act, the…