Steve Goddard's History Wire

Is It Time For Tom Edison To Step Aside -- Or Not?

The Boston Globe:

"New York - For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words 'Mary had a little lamb' on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

"The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune' was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back.

"But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable - converted from squiggles on paper to sound - by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif."

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New Penalty Hearing Sought For Former Black Panther

Time.com:

"Philadelphia, PA — A federal appeals court on Thursday said former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot be executed for murdering a Philadelphia police officer without a new penalty hearing.

"The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction, but said he should get a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions. If prosecutors don't want to give him a new death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced automatically to life in prison. Prosecutors are weighing their options, Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns Jr. said Thursday.

"Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, said he was glad the court did not uphold the death sentence, and said he wants a new trial. 'I've never seen a case as permeated and riddled with racism as this one,' Bryan said Thursday. 'I want a new trial and I want him free. His conviction was a travesty of justice.'

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Your Ancestors May Have Lived More Than 1.1 Million Years Ago

The New York Times:

"Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday. The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, were found in sediments along with stone tools and animal bones that appeared to have been butchered. The remains have been attributed to the previously known species Homo antecessor, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

"The discovery is described in the current issue of the journal Nature by a team of Spanish and American scientists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution at Tarragona, Spain. The scientists, noting that the earliest presence of human ancestors in Europe is 'one of the most debated topics in paleoanthropology,' said the site of Sima del Elefante in the Atapuerca Mountains held the 'oldest, most accurately dated record' of both fossils and artifacts of human occupation in Western Europe.

"Other sites on the continent have yielded artifacts of a roughly comparable age, but no fossil bones. Until now, the earliest remains of Homo antecessor, found in the same mountains, were 800,000 years old. Far to the east, in the republic of Georgia, recent fossil discoveries show that early Homo had moved into parts of Eurasia from Africa about 1.9 million years ago. 'It’s great to have confirmation that there was early human penetration in Western Europe this early,' said Ian Tattersall, a paleonanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, who was not involved in the research."

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Karl Malden On The Late Richard Widmark: "You Don't Have Friends Like Him"

The Los Angeles Times:

Richard Widmark, who made an indelible screen debut in 1947 as a giggling sadistic killer and later brought a sense of urban cynicism and unpredictability to his roles as a leading man, has died. He was 93.

Widmark died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn., after a long illness, his wife, Susan Blanchard, told The Times today. She said a fractured vertebrae that Widmark suffered in a fall last year was the beginning of his illness.

"I lost a dear friend, and you don't have friends like him," Karl Malden, who first met Widmark in New York when they were both "hustling for radio work" in the early 1940s and later appeared in five movies with him, told The Times today.

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Book Alert / The Day Freedom Died

The Day Freedom Died -- The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane, Holt '08, $27, 326 pages, ISBN: 0805083421. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Don't you find it fascinating that some historical phenomena lie unexamined for a century or more, only to win the interest of two scholars independently around the same time? Inevitably, they bump into one another in musty library stacks, frantically e-mail their publishers, and the race to publication is on.

Such is the case with the 1873 Colfax Massacre, dubbed by some the last battle of the Civil War, in which Confederate troops located and slaughtered five dozen former slaves in the Colfax, LA courthouse. Earlier this year, LeeAnna Keith weighed in with The Colfax Massacre -- The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction, examined a while back in these pages.

Now, author Charles Lane of The Washington Post supplies his own take on the bloody battle that cut the underpinnings from the hopefulness of Reconstruction. As a former Supreme Court staff writer, his work hones in more than Keith's on the "very retrograde (court) decisions" that set the stage for the Massacre by countermanding the civil rights won by newly-freed slaves. Together with the Massacre, they helped make possible the "separate but equal" Plessy v. Ferguson court ruling in 1896 and the state by state adoption of Jim Crow laws thereafter.

Book Alert / The Purpose of the Past

The Purpose of the Past -- Reflections on The Uses of History by Gordon S. Wood, Penguin Press '08, $25.95, 323 pages, ISBN #1594201544. Index, credits, unillustrated.

Time was when historians deigned to debase themselves by writing history for the masses, so a historically curious layperson either had to rely on high school or college textbooks or slog through turgid university press tomes written by professors for professors. No wonder a generation has grown up abhorring history.

But in recent decades, two exciting things have happened: Such respected members of the acacemy as Joe Ellis, Gordon Wood and Doug Brinkley have deliberately sought out a wider audience by writing accessibly, and such independent scholars as David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, and Barbara Tuchman have won respect not only from their readers but from the academic community as well. The result is a better-informed public and better-paid authors.

In his fascinating new book, Wood observes that he used to pen short reviews for an academic audience until he began writing longer reviews for such publications as The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. "Writing reviews for a lay readership is a marvelously stimulating experience, and all historians ought to try to do it. If they did, they might make our history books much more readable."

Wood's purpose in delineating how the writing of history has changed in the past half-century is to demonstrate how "New currents of thought have brought refreshing and vitally necessary changes to the discipline, expanding its compass to include previously ignored groups and subjects. He is critical of relativism, which he says prevents the past being understood on its own terms rather than by serving "the causes of the present."

Exploring Our Towering Trees: How Did They Live So Long?

Smithsonian Magazine:

"Brian Atwater paddled a battered aluminum canoe up the CopalisRiver, pushed along by a rising Pacific tide. At this point, a 130-mile drive from Seattle, the 100-foot-wide river wound through wide salt marshes fringed with conifers growing on high ground. The scene, softened by gray winter light and drizzle, was so quiet one could hear the whisper of surf a mile away. But then Atwater rounded a bend, and a vision of sudden, violent destruction appeared before him: stranded in the middle of a marsh were dozens of towering western red cedars, weathered like old bones, their gnarly, hollow trunks wide enough to crawl into. 'The ghost forest,' Atwater said, pulling his paddle from the water. 'Earthquake victims.'

"Atwater beached the canoe and got out to walk among the spectral giants, relics of the last great Pacific Northwest earthquake. The quake generated a vast tsunami that inundated parts of the West Coast and surged across the Pacific, flooding villages some 4,500 miles away in Japan. It was as powerful as the one that killed more than 220,000 people in the Indian Ocean in December. The cedars died after saltwater rushed in, poisoning their roots but leaving their trunks standing. This quake is not noted in any written North American record, but it is clearly written in the earth. The ghost forest stands as perhaps the most conspicuous and haunting warning that it has happened here before—and it will surely happen here again. 'When I started out, a lot of these dangers were not all that clear,' says Atwater, a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) who specializes in the science of paleoseismology, or the study of earthquakes past. 'If you look at what we know now, it beats you over the head.'

'In one of the more remarkable feats of modern geoscience, researchers have pinpointed the date, hour and size of the cataclysm that killed these cedars. In Japan, officials had recorded an 'orphan' tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.'"

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Berlin's City Center, Had Hitler Lived: Like Ancient Rome?

Time.com:

'It's one of those spine-chilling what-ifs. What if Hitler and his helpers had been successful in their aggressive striving for world power? A new exhibition in Berlin attempts to answer this question in part by looking at the devastating architectural consequences Hitler's success would have had for the German capital.

"In close collaboration with his confidant and architect of choice, Albert Speer, Hitler sought to cast his megalomania in concrete by radically reshaping the city's center. His dystopian World Capital Germania, in the Fuehrer's own words, would 'only be comparable with ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome. What is London, what is Paris by comparison!'

"The plans included the construction of two main boulevards, 120 meters (131 yards) wide and running cross-shaped through the city, lined with a number of gigantic buildings, halls, squares and triumphal arcs. 'If the plans had been realized,' says spokesman Sascha Keil, 'Berlin's historical center would have forever been destroyed.'

"The building that best illustrates Hitler's megalomania is the so-called Volkshalle (People's Hall). Around 320 meters (350 yards) in height and covered with a giant dome, it would have been the largest domed building in the world — able to accommodate 180,000 people at once. A 3-D model of Germania, originally made for the film The Downfall, a German movie about Hitler's last days, makes its dimensions visible. The Brandenburg Gate and even the Parliamentary Building look insignificantly tiny next to the enormous proportions of the People's Hall. According to Keil, however, the building's size would have led to certain problems: 'With all 180,000 seats occupied, the condensed breath of the people would have accumulated in the dome and caused a rainfall.'"

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Out in Paperback / Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great -- Love, Sex and Power by Virginia Rounding, St. Martin's Press '08, $17.95, 566 pages, ISBN #0312378637. Index, bibliography, source notes, two groupings of glossy color images.

If one sought to understand Catherine the Great but could know only two things about her, consider that having no real claim to the Russian throne, she seized it and proceeded to rule intelligently and benevolently for the next 34 years; and that included among her many lovers was one four decades her junior.

The hardcover published earlier by Virginia Rounding, a London-based translator and writer, won wide critical acclaim and claims to be the first modern biography to analyze Catherine in both the political and domestic spheres. Among the accomplishments she chronicles are Russia's gaining access to the Black Sea after her first Russo-Turkish War against the Ottoman Empire and her writing of a manual on childhood education, drawn from ideas of the philosopher John Locke.

Feeling The Pulse Of The Daily Newspaper: "Not Dead Yet"

The New Yorker:

"The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.

"It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.

"Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

"Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, 'At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.' Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline 'NOT DEAD YET.'"