Posts filed under “History”

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

On this day in 1777, the city of Lancaster in Pennsylvania became the capital of the United States. On the next day, it ceased to be the capital of the United States. Thus catastrophe was narrowly averted. Nevertheless, a provision that no city shall be forced to remain capital of the United States for more than twenty-four hours was struck out of the draft of the United States Constitution in committee.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

On this day in 629, the Roman emperor Heraclius entered Constantinople in triumph. He had finally accomplished what no other Roman emperor in history had been able to do: he decisively and permanently defeated the Persians, ending the war that had been going on more or less continuously for more than six centuries. Curiously, seven years later, Heraclius would lose most of the Empire to the advancing Muslim Caliphate. He was versatile, this Heraclius.

THE NAZI ARCHITECT WHO FILLED YOUR WORLD WITH BEAUTIFUL CONCRETE AND DIDN’T BECOME DICTATOR OF HUNGARY.

St. Peter & St. Paul Greek Catholic (now Ukrainian Orthodox) Church, Carnegie, Pennsylvania, designed by Titus de Bobula


Our friend Father Pitt has been very slowly building a reference to Pittsburgh architects and other things called Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Encyclopedia, whose slow growth probably frustrates more readers than just Dr. Boli. But our patience was amply rewarded by a long article yesterday on Titus de Bobula that revealed a little more about our famous Art Nouveau ecclesiastical architect than most of us had ever known before. It is probable that, among the thousands of architects who have plied their trade in Pittsburgh, several held opinions extreme enough to justify us in calling them Nazis. There seems to have been only one, however, who actually went into partnership with Adolf Hitler. “You seize Bavaria; I’ll take over Hungary.”

The first half of the article deals mostly with de Bobula’s pioneering role in the introduction of reinforced-concrete construction. It is fascinating to students of architectural history, but the rest might want to skim until the demon of weirdness begins to take over the architect’s personal life about halfway through. Look for the words, “In 1904, de Bobula was tried for voluntary manslaughter…” That is where the story begins to pick up. If your jaw does not begin to dangle a little lower as you read, you may return the article for a refund of the five minutes or so you spent with it.

Titus de Bobula, from Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Encyclopedia.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

On this day in 1905, the Russo-Japanese War ended in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “We have no idea how we got this far off course,” said Komura Jutarō, the Japanese foreign minister, “but if we’re this lost, we’d better not press our advantage too hard.”

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

Staff

By Hyacinth at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons


On this day in 1952, John Cage’s 4′33″ was first performed at Woodstock, New York. Until a week before the performance, Cage had been referring to the work as 3′52″, but pianist David Tudor found it impossible to execute some of the more technical passages at the marked tempo, and Cage consented to slow it down a bit.

You can listen to “a computer-generated performance of 4′33″here.

BODY-IMAGE PROBLEMS IN 1915.

An advertisement in the Popular Magazine, July 7, 1915. A decade later, magazines were warning readers about the sometimes-deadly effects of “reduce-o-mania.” The fashion in beach bodies changes, but the advertiser’s fundamental message remains unaltered: You are defective.

HAPPY BASTILLE DAY.

Not the Bastille

Happy Bastille Day to all lovers of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. And speaking of prisons, the old Western Penitentiary is vacant and crumbling, although it will take quite a while for a fortress like this to crumble.

What can be done with a building like this? It is a work of unusual architectural merit, but it was designed for one purpose, and perfectly adapted to that purpose alone. Our friend Father Pitt, who provides these pictures, suggests that it would do well as the mansion of an eccentric supervillain, but where will we find a supervillain eccentric enough? Perhaps Vladimir Putin will be available soon.

The only other use Dr. Boli could think of was as a film studio. The various parts of the building would make fine fantasy castles, palaces, Bastilles, etc., and the more prosaic sections could be adapted as soundstages.

But it occurs to him that his readers are full of good ideas. If you were the state of Pennsylvania, what would you do with the Western Pen? Where would you look for a buyer who would be willing to preserve the architectural features of the buildings while adapting them to creative new uses? Where would you place the advertisements to attract the attention of eccentric supervillains?

Guardhouse
Stonework

SPEAKING OF COOLIDGE…

When Calvin Coolidge decided to retire, he announced it with the terse message, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.” He was on a fishing vacation at the time; Coolidge had spent much of his presidency fishing while things took care of themselves (or Andrew Mellon took care of them). So Pittsburgh cartoonist Cy Hungerford, whose seventy-year career included fifty years at the Post-Gazette, produced this cartoon, which conveys very well why a president might not want to run for reelection.

Our friend Father Pitt put some effort into restoring this image, which was found in a microfilm copy of the newspaper.

IS THIS FUNNY?

One of the minor inconveniences of age is that, after one has passed the two-century mark or so, one finds oneself laughing at things and unable to explain to the younger folks why they were funny. One even finds it difficult to predict whether anyone else will see the joke, because it is not easy to tell how much of the history one lived through is still in current memory.

Dr. Boli was browsing through the digital collections at the Library of Congress, and he found the use of this picture to illustrate this collection very funny. But he was not sure that anyone else around him would see the joke. Is this funny to anyone else?

FUN FACTS ABOUT THE SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

Signing of the Declaration of Independence

According to a document leaked from the National Archives, forensic experts determined in 1975 that the signature of John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence had been forged by Robert Morris, but the information was withheld from the public in the run-up to the bicentennial celebrations.

William Hooper, William Ellery, William Floyd, William Paca, and William Whipple formed a group they called the College of Williams, pledging mutual support in the event of an American defeat. William Williams of Connecticut refused to join, calling himself “overqualified.”

Arthur Middleton, who considered literacy beneath his dignity as a South Carolinian gentleman, had to be coached in signing his own name by Thomas Heyward.

Elbridge Gerry came late to the session and was forced to squeeze his signature into a hook-shaped space that he complained looked like “some sort of ridiculous salamander.”

Philip Livingston of New York applied his signature with a novelty ballpoint pen in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. To this day, no one knows where he got it.