Category Archives: History

Throwing it back!

Fans first met Desiree on Season 17 of The Bachelor. While things didnt work out between Desiree and Sean Lowe, Des went on to be the Season 9 Bachelorette.

Throughout the ups and downs of her journey as the Bachelorette, Chris Siegfried continued to show up for Des regardless of what happened with the other men.

She eventually gave Chris her final rose and the two got engaged during the Season 9 finale.

The couple is still together to this day and they share two children, Asher Wrigley and Zander Cruz.

Now, this week in Bachelor Nation history, were looking back on one of their first dates together in none other than Munich, Germany!

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During Season 9 of The Bachelorette, Des got to travel to Europe for the very first time with the men vying for her heart.

Upon arriving in Munich, she said, Its beautiful here and Im going to have the best time of my life. Munich is so romantic. The buildings are beautiful and full of history. The architecture in this city is just amazing. I am so excited to date in this city.

And for her first date in the city, Desiree took Chris to tour the old city and sightsee.

The two had a blast sampling sausages and beer and even tried on lederhosen!

During their date, Des and Chris swapped relationship stories and Chris ended it by reading a romantic poem he wrote just for her.

Touched by his sincerity, Desiree kissed Chris, and love was clearly in the air!

Later that night, the two continued their date with dinner in a royal hall where they were serenaded by singer Matt White who sang his hit Love and Affection.

Chris ended up receiving the rose and, well, the rest is history!

Check out more of Chris and Desirees time in Munich in the throwback clip below.

Go here to see the original:

This Week in Bachelor Nation History: Desiree & Chris Siegfried Enjoy a Special 1-on-1 Date in Munich - Bachelor Nation

Before there was a vaccination, the only Covid-19 medicine I had for the isolation of the lockdown periods was making music with my oldest friend, Daniel Rapport. We have been friends since we were born, formed a band in high school, and now have an acoustic blues duo, The Blue Tide. We have long drawn our inspiration from the Mississippi Delta blues, with Daniel playing acoustic and slide guitar and me on harmonica. As Covid-19took off, with the death toll rising and all of us sheltering in place, I was able to connect (remotely at first, then later in person) and overcome the loneliness by writing lyrics about the pandemic and pairing them with the guitar licks Daniel was writing. During this time we experienced the uprising for Black lives of 2020 and raging climate change-induced wildfires that filled the air with thick plumes of smokeand so we began writing songs about the overlapping pandemics of Covid-19, racism, and the climate crisis.

As I continued to work on our Plague Blues album over the summer, my dad Gerald Lenoir made a stunning discovery: our family was enslaved on the same plantation in Morgantown, Mississippi as the family of the legendary blues artist, J.B. Lenoir. After years of investigating our genealogy, he finally found out the specific plantationthe Lenoir Plantationour family had been enslaved on in Morgantown, Mississippi.

Then, a few weeks later, I had an unnerving experience that made it too real. My dad sent an email to me and told me to open the attachment to see a photo he had found of the enslavers mansion on the Lenoir Plantation (which you will see featured in our music video). I clicked open the attachment and a sepia tone image with an over-exposed edge popped up that revealed the two-story big house with French windows that opened onto an impressive oval balcony, supported by columns, all sounded by a picket fence. As my eyes swept the snapshot, my process of seeing and meaning-making decelerated dramatically; the light gathered by my cornea, the refracted rays traveling through my pupil, and the visual signals that went to my brain via the optic nerve must have been detoured, taking a circuitous route, because even though I was looking directly at the photo I lost the ability to really see and process the information I was taking in for an indeterminate period.

When the information finally arrived at my visual cortex, I could understand that standing there, on the second-floor balcony, peering back at me were five people with white skin; the family that had bought, owned, used, and abused, my family. When my bewilderment subsided enough for me to regain awareness of where I was and what I was looking at, I zoomed in to try to see the faces of these people who had demanded to be called master. But as I got closer to their faces the image blurred (much like my understanding of what was happening at that moment) and I couldnt clearly see the faces of those who had inflicted generations of pain and anguish on my ancestorsa trauma passed down through the generations that still resides in my body, and a trauma that was being triggered in that very moment as my pulse quickened, my breathing turned shallow, my chest tightened, and my hands clenched. I became aware in that moment of the historical trauma that was disrupting my bodys equilibrium, causing my cerebrum to register sorrow, fear, and fury, which then triggered the release of hormones to the ocular area and produced tears.

Seeing the enslavers who stole my familysand J.B.s familysfreedom reified enslavement for me in a way, I realized only then, had been abstract. At that point, I struggled to process my emotions, but I knew I had to create something to tell the story of my family and our connection to J.B.

J.B. Lenoir, a blues hall of famer, is one of the most prolific social commentary blues artists of all time, with songs about police violence, lynching, the Vietnam War, and even had a song about President Eisenhower the record company refused to release. His Alabama Blues was featured in the soundtrack to the movie Selma. Yet J.B. never got stuck in one genre of blues, and as one of his songs attests, I Sing Um The Way I feel; and he did just that, singing about joy, pain, drinking, politics, and playing everything from electric guitar big band blues, to solo acoustic guitar, and even creating a unique blues sound he called, African hunch rhythm with his incorporation of African drums. J.B. also had a flare for showmanship and often performed in a zebra-striped tuxedo jacket, complete with tails. When J.B. diedafter not receiving proper care and being released from the hospital prematurely after being in car accidentblues great John Mayall memorialized him with the classics The Death Of J.B. Lenoir and Im Gonna Fight For You J.B.

At the time of his death, J.B. was employed as a dishwasher because, like many Black artists before him, he was fleeced by the record companies who profited off of his work but didnt fairly compensate him. Because of this, even though he played with some of the biggest names in the bluessuch as Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Elmore James, and Sunnyland Slimand even toured Europe with legends such as Big Mama Thornton, he wasnt able to support himself financially with music. J.B.s most famous song is one that he is credited as co-writing with Willie Dixon, You Shook Me which has been covered by Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck, among many others.

It was simply unbelievable to me that as I was writing songs about the breakdown of our society, challenging those in power, and the power of love, I discovered a shared family origin with one of the best to ever do what I was attempting. This revelation of my connection to J.B. inspired me to take the stage name J.D. Lenoir and write the lyrics to our new song, Where I Got My Name (Down in Mississippi).

Where I Got My Name also features introductory commentary from my Uncle Ivan I.T. Lenoir. I recorded the interview the first time I saw I.T. after a long quarantine and he offers his raw reaction to learning about where the family was enslaved. My brother, Jamana Lenoir, of Magnum Opus Publications, produced the music video that includes archival photos provided by our dad.

The video begins with a photo of Laura Lenoir that Gerald has safeguarded for many years, the only image that remains of one of our enslaved family members. Laura was my great-great grandmother and she was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1844 and died the year my father was born in 1948. She was married to my great-great grandfather Thomas Lenoir who was born into slavery in 1844 and died in 1922. Laura birthed 19 children, including my great grandfather York Alonzo Lenoir. I had known about Laura and York before, but it was only when I wrote this song that I understood more deeply who they were through our family conversations about their lives and all that they had endured. This process animated my enslaved family members to me in a way that I had never experienced, and I finally felt like I had a connection to them.

The incredible family collaboration that made this videoand the self-discovery and ancestral connection that occurred through the processhas been deeply healing and has proven to be for me the best therapy for the historical trauma of slavery. For the next phase of the healing process, I have now made it my lifes quest to find a way to get in touch with J.B.s children and share our tribute song to their father (if anyone who reads this has any connection to them, please reach out to me).

I hope on this Juneteenth and beyond, you are moved by our song; both feeling the intensity of the trauma of the past and also the incredible healing power of music and storytelling.

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Opinion | A Juneteenth Story of Family History, Music, and 'Where I Got My Name' - Common Dreams

So that was, uh, interesting.

Coming off a thrilling Game 1 battle that felt like a borderline classic, the Lightning and Avalanche served up a plot twist in Game 2, with Colorado caving in the defending champs to the tune of 7-0. It was a stunning spectacle, as a Tampa team thats seemed almost invincible over the years got lit up like they were an undermanned beer league squad.

So now what?

It goes without saying that nobody is counting the Lightning out. They just came back from a 2-0 series deficit against New York in the last round, and theyve earned the benefit of the doubt. After the way the last three seasons have played out, plenty of us wont be ready to close the door on Tampa until the final buzzer sounds on their fourth loss. Maybe not even then.

But still Game 2 wasnt just another loss. It was an all-time butt-kicking, one of the most lopsided results in Stanley Cup Final history. And that had me wondering: Can we learn anything from similar games, and how the rest of the series played out after a major blowout?

Lets find out. Before Saturday night, there had been 14 games in Stanley Cup Final history in which one team scored at least seven goals while winning by at least five. Four of those were from the olden days, and we probably cant learn much from them. That leaves us with a nice even 10 games from the post-expansion era to look at.

Maybe well find a pattern heading into tonights Game 3. Or maybe well just remember some blowouts.

The series: The 1973 final was a rematch of the deeply weird 1971 edition, which had seen the Habs win the Cup in seven games and then immediately fire their coach for it. This time, Montreal came in as overwhelming favorites, having posted 120 points in just 70 games during the season. The Hawks were good, having won the West Division, but they had their work cut out for them.

The game: This one actually looked like it was going to be a blowout in the other direction, as the Hawks scored twice in the games first minute to take a 2-0 lead. It was all Montreal after that, though, with two goals from Jacques Lemaire and multi-point games from names like Guy Lafleur, Frank Mahovlich and Yvan Cournoyer chasing Tony Esposito from the Chicago net.

The rest of the way: Things settled down in Game 2, with Montreal winning 4-1. The Hawks got some revenge with a 7-4 win in Game 3, lost Game 4, and then won a truly wacky 8-7 classic at the Forum to stay alive in Game 5 before Montreal finished the series in six.

The lesson: Im not sure there is one, as this series had plenty of twists and turns still waiting in the wings. If youre a Tampa fan, thats probably what you want to hear.

The series: The 1980 final was a good one, and the Flyers were the favorites. This was the year theyd had that ridiculous 35-game undefeated streak, helping them to first-place overall in the standings. The Islanders had finished well back, and were laboring under the reputation of a regular-season powerhouse that could never win the big one.

The game: Game 1 was a 4-3 overtime classic wait, that sounds familiar that the Islanders won on a Denis Potvin goal. Needing a strong performance to even the series, the Flyers got four points from Bobby Clarke and a hat trick from Paul Holmgren, and probably also some stuff from guys who didnt go on to become their GM.

The rest of the way: The Islanders essentially shrugged off the loss, heading home to win both Games 3 and 4 by comfortable margins. The Flyers extended the series in Game 5, but the Islanders captured their first Cup on Bob Nystroms overtime game winner in Game 6.

(And since Flyers fans will set my house on fire if I dont mention it yes, Game 6 is also the Leon Stickle game.)

At the time, it felt like an upset. In hindsight, not so much, as this was the start of the Islanders dynasty that featured four straight Cup wins.

The lesson: More good news for todays Lightning fans, as we hit our first example of a team on the wrong end of a blowout still winning the series. Even better, its another Game 2 where the losing team gets to head back home. And since were already comparing the current Lightning to the dynasty-era Islanders, its almost too perfect.

Feels inspiring, right Tampa fans? You may want to stop reading right about now

The series: Yes, its the very same Oilers/Islanders matchup weve been using as the comparison to this years Avs/Lightning, with the veteran dynasty meeting the young champs-in-waiting. The two teams had met in the 1983 final, with the Islanders sweeping. This was the rematch, and the two teams had split the first two games.

The game: The Islanders opened the scoring, but it was all Oilers from that moment on. Even given all Edmontons talent, it was a stunning result we hadnt seen the Islanders lose a playoff game like this since that 1980 loss to the Flyers.

The rest of the way: We all nodded grimly about the Islanders having the heart of a champion, and how theyd surely respond with their best game of the series. And then

The series: No, thats not a typo. This is the same blowout happening all over again in the very next game of the same series.

The game: Wayne Gretzky opened the scoring two minutes in, and we were right back to the all-Edmonton show. The Oilers were up 6-1 by the midway mark, and the Islanders looked utterly defeated.

The rest of the way: With Game 5 in Edmonton (these were the days of the 2-3-2 format), this one almost felt like a foregone conclusion before the puck even dropped. It mostly was, with Gretzky scoring twice in the first and the Oilers leading 4-0 at the second intermission. The Islanders did show some of that heart, with two Pat LaFontaine goals early in the third, but it was over. The two blowouts were the moment the young Oilers served noticed that it was their time, and the Islanders dynasty was over. Almost four decades later, theyve never been back to a final.

The lesson: Look, Lightning fans, I told you to stop reading.

The series: A year after beating the Islanders, now it was the Oilers looking to defend their title. But they had to get past an excellent Flyers team to do it. (Look, I promise this post will feature teams other than the Oilers, Islanders and Flyers, just stick with it.)

The game: The Flyers had taken Game 1 before dropping three straight, although all of them were close. This one wasnt, as the Oilers led 4-1 after one period and 7-2 after two.

The rest of the way: There wasnt one, as this blowout ended the series.

The lesson: If youre rooting for Tampa, or just a long series, I guess the takeaway here is that at least Saturday night didnt actually end the series. Yet.

The series: This was the post-Gretzky Oilers, returning to the final after a one-year absence and looking for their fifth Cup in seven years. Standing in their way was Ray Bourque and the Presidents Trophy-winning Bruins, who were the slight favorites. The first game had been a triple-overtime classic, ending on a goal by unlikely hero Petr Klima.

The game: The Bruins fell behind 2-0 early but rallied to tie it. Edmonton didnt pull away until late in the second, scoring three goals in four minutes to go up 6-2.

The rest of the way: Boston did win Game 3, squeaking out a 2-1 win, but theyd follow that with lackluster performances in Game 4 and 5 to lose the series.

The lesson: This one stings a little if youre a Lightning fan, since it feels so familiar. Youve got the Game 1 comeback followed by the heartbreaking loss in overtime, then the Game 2 blowout. If anything, the depressing lesson here is that even a win in Game 3 may not do much more than prolong the inevitable.

(Also, losing this series eventually leads to Bourque requesting a trade and ending up in Colorado, so this was probably every Avalanche fans favorite section in this post.)

The series: The 1990-91 North Stars were quite possibly the greatest Cinderella story in NHL playoff history, a genuinely awful team that hit its stride just in time to pull off three major upsets in a row. That led to a Stanley Cup Final date with Mario Lemieux and the Penguins, a mediocre regular-season team with jaw-dropping star power including eight Hall of Famers.

The North Stars gave them a series but couldnt stop Mario because nobody could back then, and were trailing 3-2 heading into Game 6 in Minnesota.

The game: The Penguins scored two minutes in and never stopped, posting the most lopsided blowout in Stanley Cup Final history.

The rest of the way: The North Stars got beat so bad that a week later, they were taken apart in a dispersal draft. (No, really, that happened. The 1990s NHL was weird.)

The lesson: The Avalanche might not be the Penguins and the Lightning sure arent the North Stars, so Im not sure theres anything we can really learn here. But we should still point out the obvious: Were seven games into this list, and this is the first blowout that was actually as bad as what we saw on Saturday. All the other games, as bad as they were, ended in five-goal deficits. Theres still lots of hockey left to play, but Game 2 really was historically one-sided.

The series: This was the Avs first year in Colorado, with the newly-acquired Patrick Roy in net and a talented roster in front of him. They faced an underdog Panthers team that had clutched and grabbed its way to the final because they had been inspired by a dead rat. Look, I told you the 1990s NHL was weird.

The Avs took the opener 3-1, setting up Game 2 in Colorado.

The game: Peter Forsbergs first-period hat trick, which to this day remains the last one in Cup Final history, jump-started the Avalanche and led to this one being a laugher. When Jon Klemm is scoring multiple goals against you, its bad.

The rest of the way: The Panthers settled down heading back home, but it didnt matter. Games 3 and 4 were close (with Game 4 going into overtime), but the Avalanche won both to capture the franchises first championship in a four-game sweep.

The lesson: If youre a team from Florida and you lose a Game 2 blowout in Colorado, dont even bother trying the rest of the way because youre doomed.

Also, thanks to the 1996 Panthers ushering in the Dead Puck era, we now get to skip ahead 15 years to find our next game

The series: The Presidents Trophy-winning Canucks entered the series as strong favorites over the Bruins, then earned a 2-0 series lead with a pair of squeakers in Vancouver. Heading to Boston for Game 3, the Bruins needed a win.

The game: This one was actually scoreless through one, but all Bruins after that. They scored four unanswered goals in the second, then kept pouring it on in the third.

The rest of the way: More than any other series weve seen so far, this is the one where the blowout game really did feel like the inflection point. The Bruins won Game 4 by a 4-0 final, and while the Canucks did earn a 1-0 win in Game 5, it was the only one theyd get the rest of the way as the Bruins went on to capture the Cup in seven games. Boston outscored Vancouver 13-3 in the four games after this blowout.

The lesson: This is a fun one, because it can go either way. Avalanche fans can see it as proof that a true blowout really can be series-defining, the sort of thing that even a team as good as that 2011 Canucks squad just cant be expected to bounce back from. Lightning fans could point out that all we learned was that a 2-0 series lead doesnt mean a thing, and a strong Game 3 back on home ice can change the course of a series.

But yeah, the real lesson here is that if the Bruins win a Game 3 by a blowout, theyre definitely winning the Cup. Gosh, I wonder what the last game on our list will be

The series: After splitting the first two in Boston, the Gloria-inspired Blues returned home to host a final game for the first time in 49 years.

The game: A last-second goal in the first period gave the Bruins a 3-0 lead and seemed to deflate the Blues and their crowd. Theyd roll from there on, delivering a statement win.

The rest of the way: Do you even remember this game? Im assuming that Blues and Bruins fans do, but it barely resonates with me even though its so recent. Thats because it really didnt have much impact, with the Blues winning the next two games, followed by the Bruins forcing a Game 7 in Boston that the Blues won.

The lesson: Sometimes, a blowout is just a blowout, and two good teams move past it.

A few interesting things, I hope. For one, that Saturday night blowout really was one for the history books it was only the fourth time in Stanley Cup Final history that a team had lost by seven or more. And in each of the other three cases 1991, 1996 and 2011 the team that won the big blowout went on to win the series. In fact, the team on the losing end only went on to win one more game combined, with five losses.

The outlook gets a little bit better for Tampa if we look at the overall list, although just a little bit. Of the nine series we just looked at, the team that won the blowout game went on to win seven. That opens the door to some hope for the Lightning, who can look at the 1980 Islanders or the 2019 Blues for inspiration. That 2019 final is probably the best example for the one game is no big deal crowd; its the most recent, and the blowout barely ended up mattering.

But generally speaking, blowouts in the Stanley Cup Final do seem to tell us something, and its that one of the teams is really good. We already knew that with the Avalanche. Now we see whether the Lightning can do the unlikely but not the impossible by digging their way back.

(Top photo: Isaiah J. Downing / USA Today)

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Down Goes Brown: A brief history of teams getting blown out in the Stanley Cup Final - The Athletic

Crew members prepare a newly-restored cannon for a blast at Fort Sewall in Marblehead. (Magella Cantara)

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MARBLEHEAD Hundreds took a trip back in time to 1644 in celebration of Fort Sewall Saturday.

Saturdays event held a dual purpose for the iconic fort to celebrate its completed restoration and the 100th anniversary of the fort being returned to the towns custody by the federal government. Consisting of approximately two-and-a-half acres located off of Front St. at the mouth of Marblehead Harbor, this public park was formerly a military reserve.

Established in 1644, the fort is one of the oldest coastal fortifications in the nation, the town said in a statement. For years, Fort Sewall was known as the Marblehead Fort or the Fort on Gales Head, and it earned its current moniker in 1800 to honor Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court.

The Fort Sewal Oversight Committee had a few key goals for the $1.5 million restoration that allowed this historic piece of land to come back to life.

The first thing was safety, second was accessibility, the last was education, said Larry Sands, the chairman of the oversight committee.

The forts bomb proof quarters, which were built in the late 1700s received an upgrade without interfering with its naturally historic character, Sands said.

We did some renovations to make the inside accessible. We changed the floors and things but, one of the parts of this project in the educational piece is funding of a Fort Ranger program that will start next summer and well have tour guides up here, he said. One of the final things that we are doing is building furniture for the inside and that is from the Glovers Regiment which is what Im a part of. We received a $2000 grant from Essex Heritage to fund purchasing materials.

At the event Saturday morning, the newly added canon fired, leaving a cloud of smoking gunpowder hanging in the air.

After the first fire, the crowd clapped and cheered while chanting in unison, Hip Hip Hurrah!

Read more here:

History comes back to life in Marblehead - Itemlive - Daily Item

In December 2000, the Sci-Fi Channel (since renamed Syfy) released Frank Herberts Dune, an ambitious three-part miniseries. Science fiction author Rajan Khanna was a recent college grad when he first watched the show.

I remember it coming out, and I remember honestly the Sci-Fi Channel being a big deal back in the day, Khanna says in Episode 515 of the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast. This was before there was all this geek stuff everywhere. It was sort of like, This is for us, in a way.

With a budget of $20 million, Frank Herberts Dune was an ambitious project for the fledgling network. The series won an Emmy for special effects and was one of the channels highest-rated programs. But TV writer Andrea Kail warns that modern audiences wont exactly be blown away by the shows production values. I have a very distinct memory of one specific shot where Jessica and Paul are running away from the ornithopters, and theyre running in place in front of a bad green screen, she says. It was like watching a play being filmed. It wasnt a movie, it was a play that somebody pointed a camera at.

Geeks Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that the show has its problems, but he enjoyed a subplot involving Princess Irulan, a minor character in the novel who was completely omitted from the recent film. Dune is a combination of space opera court intrigue and hippie Lawrence of Arabia,' he says. Those are the two elements. I like the space opera court intrigue stuff significantly more. [Irulans] storyline continued the space opera court intrigue stuff through the whole story, so I actually really liked that a lot.

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel says the quality of the underlying material shines through regardless of any rough edges. In particular he enjoyed how the series captures the texture of the novel. I love the Villeneuve movie, of course, but its a very frenetic film, he says. I feel like there was something about this series that took its time telling the story, and I respected that.

Listen to the complete interview with Rajan Khanna, Andrea Kail, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 515 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrea Kail on Frank Herberts Dune vs. Dune (1984):

This [miniseries] makes the Lynch version look like the Denis Villeneuve version, and the Lynch version makes the Villeneuve version look like a movie delivered by the hand of God. Thats how much this propped everything else up The [Lynch version] is a terrible movie, but I will never not watch it if its on. Its a bad movie, but its compellingly bad. I always sit and watch it because its a spectacle. This? I love Dune, but I will not sit and watch this again. Do you see the difference? The [Lynch version] is visually interesting and theres a lot going on. This is not something I would ever watch again willingly, and Im a Dune fanatic.

Matthew Kressel on special effects:

There were some places where they didnt even do a matte painting, they just had a backdrop that they unrolled behind the actors. Thats an odd choice, because maybe they didnt have the money for a matte painting, but they certainly had green screens by this point. So I was very curious about that Were spoiled by the special effects today. Theyre so good, everything looks real. Its flawless. But we kind of forget that that was really, really hard to achieve. Even Star Wars, which had this huge budget, you watch the original onenot the remasterand its like, Yeah, the Death Star is a model. You can just tell on the close-up shots.

David Barr Kirtley on Frank Herberts Dune vs. Dune (2021):

The Villeneuve movie basically doesnt explain anything. Mentats? Dont worry about it. Guild Navigators? Dont worry about it, its not important. It just focuses on telling a compelling, emotional character story. The [miniseries] tries to explain a lot more of the world-building, and thats really bad in a lot of waysdramaticallybut I feel like if you watch this you actually know more about the world and what happens in the book than you would from watching the Villeneuve moviewhich is a million times better, but its made a trade-off of dramatic effectiveness versus world-building explication.

Rajan Khanna on adaptation:

I think this [miniseries] is one of the examples of how being faithful to a book can be a trap, because what you end up with is a box-checking exercise and not a lot of life. All of the great adaptations condense things, smush things together, cut things out. Lord of the Rings is widely regarded as an amazing adaptation, and they cut all kinds of things. Theres always somebody whos like, Tom Bombadil! But Tom Bombadil needed to go You have to make those choices. I think this is an example of being faithful but also being flat and not having a lot of heart or energy. So I would not recommend this for anyone except hardcore Dune historians.

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The Dune Miniseries Is a Fascinating Piece of History - WIRED

This week in Bozeman, librarians, historians, scientists and the public gathered to share ideas for how to preserve the history of Yellowstone National Park. This year is the park's 150th anniversary. Dayton Duncan, an award winning author and a collaborator on Ken Burns documentaries for over 30 years, gave the keynote address at the Conversations on Collecting Yellowstone Conference. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Duncan and asked him about the title of his talk, "Happenstance and History."

Dayton Duncan: If you look back at history, you think that it was supposed to be this way. It was always going to be this way, it was preordained, or it was inevitable. Nothing in history is inevitable, I believe. And at 150 years old, I think it's important to remember that Yellowstone is one of the great best ideas America ever had to quote Wallace Stegner on the National Park idea. When it was created as a national park in 1872, no one there said, 'Oh, we're changing the arc of history here. We're doing something no one had ever thought of doing,' even though that was true. That was not the motivation and the foresight that they had.

Melodie Edwards: The first superintendent ended up misleading people about the idea that Indigenous people hadn't used the park before, as a way to make sure that tourists felt safe to go there. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the truth about the role of Indigenous people in Yellowstone?

DD: Well, I mean, the Mountain Shoshone lived there for time immemorial, and dozens of other Native tribes who would travel through to gather obsidian for their arrowheads, to hunt, to fish, to take advantage of the hot springs for variety reasons, the health or for religious rights. They all knew about the place. So in the film that Ken and I made about the National Parks, we tried to make that point, that the "discovery" of the National Parks was new to some people, but it wasn't new to the people who called the place home. There were all these myths for sometimes self serving reasons. People propagated that Indians, of course, were superstitious, and so these geysers and the other things would probably scare them, or they thought that they were evil spirits or whatever, all of its balderdash.

So it's a troubled history, both in terms of overlooking the deeper history that Native people have had with this very special place, and it was sometimes used against them. On the better side of that is that starting, I think, around the mid-1990s, the Park Service began making steady and now accelerated efforts to involve Native people with both the management of the park but also just to make sure that their story and their relationship to it are not forgotten.

ME: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, just how that rocky beginning set the park on a certain trajectory in terms of its mission and how maybe that mission has kind of zig zagged along the course of history?

DD: The future of wildlife was really hardly discussed at all. And it was with a changing mission evolving with the National Park Service, partly due to a young biologist named George Melendez Wright and other people who said, "Well, this is not the Park Service's mission, just to cater to tourists. Giving them a show of bears eating at garbage dumps is really not what we're supposed to be doing." And over time, they realize that predators shouldn't be shot. And over time, Yellowstone became the place where the bison teetering on the brink of extinction were saved. That wasn't why it was set aside. It just was a happenstance. And luckily for us that occurred. The trumpeter swan was on the verge of extinction. And George Melendez Wright did studies of them in Yellowstone in the surrounding area. The result of that were efforts that were made to give them sanctuary and preserve that magnificent bird from also going extinct.

So history not only is it not inevitable, it doesn't travel in a straight line, it evolves. It's more biological than it is mathematical. It also means that we can't take it for granted that everything's going to be fine. It takes the efforts of people who champion the park idea and what we think are the better principles of it. And it's a constant battle. I mean, who are we as Americans? Are we the kind of people and nation that could take a magnificent species like the bison that once existed in uncountable numbers and drive them to the brink of extinction? Oh, yes, we are - for a buck. Yeah, that's us. Or could we lay waste to the magnificent continent in our hurry to get to the Pacific Ocean? Yeah, that's us. But are we also people who could, in certain instances, at least say, 'No, we're not doing that here' or 'No, we're not doing that anymore.''

ME: To just build on that, there are arguments being made to actually privatize or put into local control our public lands. And so it does seem like there might be a need for a recommitment to this idea of national parks and public lands.

DD: I guess my point is, there is always a need for a recommitment. Because you can never take it for granted, just as we cannot take democracy for granted. That it's always, this experiment - an experiment in democracy. I just wrote and made a Ken Burns film on Benjamin Franklin. He understood this perfectly. Nothing's necessarily going to work out. It relies on the people and their leaders - but principally the people demanding of their leaders - to make it all work well. And that's true of democracy. And that's true of our public lands.

ME: Can you tell me the story about your relationship to National Parks and Yellowstone in particular?

DD: Yeah, well, I'm an old man and I grew up in a little town in Iowa. I was nine years old about to turn 10 when my family took its first and almost only real extended vacation of my youth. We borrowed my grandmother's car. We borrowed camping equipment from neighbors. She thought we'd go to a lot of these National Parks out in the West, for two reasons: One is they're important. And secondly, we could afford them. So we headed West and went through the Badlands of South Dakota into Mount Rushmore, went to what was then called Custer National Battlefield, now Little Bighorn National Battlefield Historic Site, came to Yellowstone. This was right after the '59 earthquake, half of the park was closed. So I lived through aftershock tremors at the bottom of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. Saw my first bear. saw my first moose, saw, obviously, my first geyser. A lot of the geysers were going off at odd times because of the tremendous earthquake that just occurred. We went to Grand Teton National Park, went to Dinosaur National Monument, camped there and headed back through Rocky Mountain.

And it was in retrospect, I think, a formative moment. And it was made possible because [the parks] existed, and because we could afford to go see them. And then as, you know, later in my life, I started writing books and then I started working on documentary films, and one of the persistent things that I've always been interested in is the connection of the American story and the American landscape. And I think that the National Park idea is the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. In other words, the National Park idea is as radical as the Declaration of Independence. In all of recorded history, prior to this, the most majestic and sacred places of a nation were preserved for the Kings nobility, the rich, the well connected. And for the first time, we as a nation, founded on the idea of the Declaration of Independence, said 'No, some of our most spectacular majestic and sacred places are there for everyone, and for all time,' and that was new under the sun.

It's a wonderland. And it's become the last refuge for the American buffalo, which Ken and I are doing a film on right now. Which themselves could easily have gone extinct, were it not for the efforts of a diverse group of individuals in different parts of the United States at a critical moment in time, but Yellowstone figures very prominently in that story. And now it's a place where you can go see bison, and you can see wolves. At least at the moment, assuming they're not all shot the same moment they get out of the park boundaries. It's a very special place. And it needs to be protected. And it also faces all these challenges in which last year almost 5 million people decided to come. And God bless them for that. But that presents challenges that have to be addressed somehow.

ME: One of the ways in which they can maybe control the influx of people is by making the cost of getting in more expensive. And then there's going to be families like yours that maybe can't visit Yellowstone.

DD: No, I mean, it is an inherent tension in the National Park idea. And when the National Park Service was created, inherent in the law that created them is that it served two critical elements. The first is that these places are for everyone, not just exclusively set aside for, as I say, the rich and the royalty and the well connected. It's for everybody. We all are co-owners of it. And that is key to that idea.

The second and equally important thing is, they need to be there for Americans and people not yet born. They're there for all time, and therefore have to be protected and preserved, which require regulations and management practices that will make it possible for people you and I will never know and so generations we'll never see can have the same experience that we did.

That's a tremendous challenge. But I like to think that the more people that come to the National Park, the more people become potential champions of the National Park idea. And so the problem that we've got too many people coming here is a management problem. The other problem would be nobody gives a damn about them, and that would be an existential problem.

More:

On Yellowstone's 150th anniversary, documentarian looks at the happenstance of history - Wyoming Public Media

And you thought the intentional walk had gone the way of Blockbuster, the iPod and those titanium-infused Phiten necklaces that stabilized the body's energy flow.

You were wrong! Turns out, the intentional walk is still part of the game -- and, courtesy of Joe Maddon and now Tony La Russa, it gifted us with two of the most comical and controversial moments of this season. (Well, outside of the epic Tommy Pham-Joc Pederson fantasy football dispute, which of course reigns as the kookiest non-baseball baseball thing since Yankees pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson switched wives in the 1970s.)

On Thursday, White Sox manager La Russa intentionally walked Dodgers shortstop Trea Turner with a runner on second base -- and a count of one ball and two strikes -- in order to have relief pitcher Bennett Sousa instead face Max Muncy, who promptly hit a three-run home run to give the Dodgers a 10-5 lead in a game they would eventually win 11-9. The best part of the whole episode was not that the two-strike intentional walk blew up in La Russa's face; it was the microphone that caught one fan yelling "He's got two strikes, Tony!" and "Tony, what are you doing?" before Muncy homered.

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Or maybe the best part was the confused look on Freddie Freeman's face as he stood on second base and said to White Sox second baseman Danny Mendick, "I don't think I've ever seen that before," to which Mendick kind of turned away from Freeman and smiled, most likely in equal disbelief. Or maybe the best part was Muncy staring into the White Sox dugout as he rounded third base. Or maybe the best part was Muncy uttering language that can't be repeated here as he crossed home plate. Or maybe the best part was Muncy, in his postgame interview on the field, where one must refrain from using certain four-letter words, simply saying, "I wanted to make them pay, let's just leave it at that." Or maybe the best moment was La Russa, after the game, asking, incredulously, "Is there some question whether that was a good move or not?"

Yes, Tony, there was a fair amount of disbelief, and not just from the fan who seemed to foretell what was going to happen. A sampling from a certain social media site:

Now, to be fair here, the pounding on La Russa is also a little unfair. If Muncy strikes out, it looks like a good move. Plus, Freeman was on second base only after a wild pitch on a 0-2 count -- it's not like La Russa randomly decided to walk Turner in the middle of the at-bat. Even Ben calculates that the White Sox had a 21.9% chance of winning if they intentionally walked Turner and 22.9% if they pitched to him, so we're essentially talking about the flip of the coin.

I think what really set everyone off -- especially the baseball cognoscenti on Twitter -- is that the intentional walk has largely disappeared from the game, so when one goes painfully awry, it stands out. Studies have shown the intentional walk is -- mathematically -- usually a bad strategic decision, in large because part of what happened with Muncy: An attempt to prevent one run, such as with Turner singling home Freeman, often instead turns into a big, multi-run inning. Essentially, giving the team a free baserunner, even to face a weaker batter, is rarely a good idea.

Indeed, we can see the influence of sabermetric thinking in the decline of intentional walks through the years -- all the way down to just 0.09 per game in 2022:

1967: 0.40 per game (peak intentional walk)1989: 0.34 per game (hadn't dropped much)1998: 0.22 per game (starting to drop)2002: 0.30 per game (the Barry Bonds spike)2012: 0.22 per game (dropping again)2019: 0.16 per game (A.J. Hinch issued zero all season)2020: 0.11 per game (no pitchers hitting in the NL)2021: 0.14 per game (lowest other than 2020)2022: 0.09 per game (back to the universal DH)

In truth, there have been far, far, far more egregious intentional walks than this one. Honestly, La Russa's intentional walk isn't even the strangest of this season -- that belongs to Maddon, for his ridiculously stunning intentional walk of Corey Seager with the bases loaded back on April 15. In fact, with that walk in mind, let's run down the types of intentional walks from most bad to least bad:

1. The bases-loaded intentional walkObviously, just giving the team another run is silly -- and particularly so when the batter is Seager -- while a very good batter, not to be confused with Babe Ruth or Ted Williams or Bonds (we'll get to him in a second). That's why the only known bases-loaded intentional walks are to Seager, Josh Hamilton (also by Maddon!), Bonds, Bill Nicholson and Mel Ott. That's five. And the Ott one doesn't really count. It was the next-to-last game of the season and Chuck Klein of the Phillies and Ott of the Giants were battling for the home run lead (Klein led by one). With the Giants way ahead late in the game, the Phillies intentionally walked Ott.

Anyway, the Rangers were up 3-2 when Seager batted with one out and the bases loaded. Maddon walked him to make the score 4-2. Not shockingly, it backfired. A sacrifice fly and balk followed to allow two more runs to score, so the Angels left the inning trailing 6-2 (although they rallied to win the game). No matter Maddon's goofy explanation after the game -- "Just trying to stay out of a big blow, and also just to stir the group up, quite frankly" -- the move was completely indefensible.

More defensible was Buck Showalter's bases-loaded intentional walk to Bonds in 1998. This wasn't quite peak Bonds, when managers freaked out and start walking him all the time -- an incredible 120 intentional walks in 2004, which will forever remain the most astounding baseball stat of all time. But Bonds led the league in intentional walks every season from 1992 through '98 (and then several more times after that) -- he was still plenty feared by then.

In this game, the Diamondbacks led the Giants 8-6 with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. With weak-hitting catcher Brent Mayne on deck, Showalter walked Bonds to make it 8-7. Mayne battled reliever Gregg Olson for eight pitches before lining out to right field. So it worked ... barely. Good move? Debatable.

2. The intentional walk with two strikesIt's hard to hit in the majors. It's even harder to hit with two strikes! Trea Turner is a career .303 hitter. He's a .222 hitter with two strikes and a .197 hitter with a 1-2 count. The overall major league average in 2022 with two strikes is .167 and .161 on a 1-2 count.

That's why you also rarely see a two-strike intentional walk. The odds remain in the pitcher's favor, no matter the matchup. In his article, Ben mentions just two other two-strike intentional walks since 2014:

--The Rockies walked Seager on a 1-2 count on April 3, 2021, after Gavin Lux stole second. That didn't work either; Chris Taylor followed with an RBI double to give the Dodgers a 6-4 lead.

--On April 16, 2021, the Twins walked Mike Trout on a 1-2 count following a wild pitch. That one also blew up. Justin Upton hit a grand slam to extend a 5-3 lead for the Angels to 9-3.

Yeah, maybe best to avoid those two-strike intentional walks.

3. The intentional walk to load the bases with the game on the lineI hate, hate, hate when managers do this. Example: Tie game, bottom of the ninth, runners on second and third. The manager walks a batter to load the bases -- either to set up a double play or maybe to simply face a weaker hitter. Trouble is, now the pitcher has to throw strikes, since another walk loses the game. The numbers slightly support my personal beliefs, albeit not strongly: In 2022, batters have hit .256 with runners on second and third and .262 with the bases loaded (although with 62 more points of slugging percentage). In 2021, they hit .267 with runners on second and third and .278 with the bases loaded. Walking somebody to face a much weaker hitter can perhaps make sense here.

OK, quick check. There have been 13 intentional walks this season in the ninth inning or later, with two outs and runners on second and third or first and third. None of those actually came in tie games. But three came with the team issuing the intentional walk leading:

--April 16: Liam Hendriks of the White Sox walks Tampa Bay's Ji-Man Choi with a 3-2 lead to face Taylor Walls. Walls strikes out.

--April 24: Pittsburgh's David Bednar walks the Cubs' Ian Happ with a 4-3 lead to instead face Frank Schwindel. It works as Schwindel strikes out to end the game.

--May 15: Diego Castillo of the Mariners walks Francisco Lindor to face Pete Alonso. Alonso strikes out swinging on a 3-2 slider (that was off the plate).

So, fine: Managers are 3-for-3 with these ones so far in 2022. Let's see if that holds.

4. The intentional walk to a hot hitterWe mentioned A.J. Hinch. When he was managing the Astros in 2019, they became the first team not to issue an intentional walk all season. Then, in the World Series, Hinch broke his own rule and did issue an intentional walk -- and it didn't work. In a big way.

That postseason, Nationals star Juan Soto had gone 2-for-4 in the final game of the NLCS, 3-for-4 with a home run and double in Game 1 of the World Series and was so far 1-for-3 with a double when he stepped up again in the seventh inning of Game 2, with two outs and runners at second and third. The Nationals led 3-2 with All-Star Ryan Pressly pitching for the Astros. Hinch had seen enough of Soto and decided it was time to issue his first intentional walk of 2019 -- even though Pressly held left-handed batters to a .165 average that year.

Howie Kendrick followed with a single, Asdrubal Cabrera singled in two runs, and then Ryan Zimmerman singled in two more. A 3-2 game became an 8-2 blowout. Maybe the Nationals win anyway, but consider the ripple effects of that loss. The Nationals had just two reliable relievers in Sean Doolittle and Daniel Hudson, but because the game turned into a blowout, Dave Martinez didn't have to use either of them -- making them a little more rested for the rest of the series. What happens if Pressly pitches to Soto?

5. The intentional walk to the No. 8 hitter to face the pitcherThis one doesn't apply any longer, but was always the reason the National League saw more intentional walks than the American League. While popular in the 1960s and into the 2000s, it slowly fell into some disfavor. The reason: The math showed that the advantage gained by facing the pitcher (and hopefully getting him out) was erased by the advantage the other team would receive by having its leadoff hitter lead off the next inning instead of the pitcher (if you got the No. 8 hitter out).

Late in his career, the Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston of the Dodgers must have suddenly realized this. He had always been a big employer of the intentional walk, including issuing 101 of them in 1967, most in the majors. In 1974, he suddenly stopped issuing them -- just nine, fewest in the majors and 43 fewer than any other NL team. More recently, Bruce Bochy peaked at 64 intentional walks in 2013 and averaged 46 per season over his career, but dropped to 26 in his final season in 2019. Maddon began his career with the Rays averaging over 30 intentional walks per season, but had just 18 in 2021. Although maybe he didn't learn his lesson. Nine of those turned into "bombs," described as either the next batter not grounding into a double play or multiple runs scoring in the inning.

Of the 154 intentional walks in 2022, just nine of them have been issued to the No. 8 hitter (5.8%). Last year, when pitchers were still batting. 23.0% of all intentional walks were issued to the No. 8 hitter.

We could keep going, but most of the remaining intentional walk categories -- getting the platoon advantage, giving an intentional walk when already trailing (82 of them have come while behind) or extra innings of a tie game and the ghost runner already on second (very common) -- aren't as offensive. (For the record: The math usually still doesn't add up.)

One final note. The White Sox and Phillies are tied for second in the majors with nine intentional walks issued -- but Joe Girardi has been fired and La Russa is perhaps on the hot seat. There is good news for lovers of the intentional walk: New A's manager Mark Kotsay leads the majors with 13 of them. Maybe he can keep the intentional walk alive.

Continued here:

Was Tony La Russa's intentional walk of Trea Turner the worst in MLB history? A ranking - ESPN

LONDON Explorers and historians are telling the world about the discovery of the wreck of a royal warship that sank in 1682 while carrying a future king of England, Ireland and Scotland.

The HMS Gloucester, traveling from southern England to Scotland, ran aground while navigating sandbanks off the town of Great Yarmouth on the eastern English coast. It sank within an hour, killing an estimated 130 to 250 crew and passengers.

James Stuart, the son of King Charles I, survived. He went on to reign as King James II of England and Ireland, and as James VII of Scotland from 1685 to 1688, when he was deposed by the Glorious Revolution.

The wreck of the Gloucester was found in 2007 by brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell and others after a four-year search. It was firmly identified in 2012 with discovery of the ships bell.

The discovery was only made public Friday because of the time it took to confirm the identity of the ship and the need to protect the historical site.

Claire Jowitt, an expert in maritime history at the University of East Anglia, said the wreck was one of the important almost moments in English history. The Gloucesters sinking almost caused the death of the Catholic heir to the Protestant throne at a time of great political and religious tension in Britain.

If he had died, we would have had a very different British and European history as a result, Jowitt said.

I think this is a time capsule that offers the opportunity to find it out so much about life on a 17th-century ship. The royal nature of the ship is absolutely incredible and unique, she added.

She believes the wreck is the most important maritime discovery since the Mary Rose, the warship from the Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. The Mary Rose capsized with a crew of around 500 in 1545 in the Solent, a strait between the Isle of Wight and the British mainland. A huge salvage operation brought it back to the surface in 1982.

There are no current plans to raise the wreck of the Gloucester because much of it is buried under sand.

Weve only just touched the tip of an iceberg, Julian Barnwell said.

Artifacts rescued from the wreck include clothes, shoes, navigational equipment and many wine bottles. One bottle bears a seal with the crest of the Legge family the ancestors of George Washington, the first U.S president. The crest was a forerunner to the Stars and Stripes flag.

An exhibition is planned next spring at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery to display finds from the wreck and share ongoing research.

--The Associated Press

The rest is here:

'One of the important 'almost' moments in English history:' Wreck of warship found off UK coast - OregonLive

The smile is the most easily recognised facial expression at a distance in human interactions. It is also an easier expression to make than most others. Other facial expressions denoting emotion such as fear, anger or distress require up to four muscles. The smile needs only a single muscle to produce: the zygomaticus major at the corner of the mouth (though a simultaneous twitching of the eyelids orbicularis oculi muscle is required for a sincere and joyful smile). As well as being easy to make and to recognise, the smile is also highly versatile. It may denote sensory pleasure and delight, gaiety and amusement, satisfaction, contentment, affection, seduction, relief, stress, nervousness, annoyance, anger, shame, aggression, fear and contempt. You name it, the smile does it.

The smile comes easy to human beings. The facial muscles required to smile are in fact present in the womb, ready for early deployment to anxious parents. The smile may even predate the human species. Many great apes are known to produce them, suggesting that the smile first appeared on the face of a common ancestor well before the existence of Homo sapiens. It was Charles Darwin, in his classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), who gave the first scientific demonstration of a great ape smiling. He also showed that the great apes smile has something of the gestures polyvalence among humans: it can denote pleasure (notably under tickling) but also aggressive self-defence.

The smile has always been with us then, and it would appear its always been the same. It seems only one step further to claim that the smile has no history. But this would be far from the truth. In fact, the smile has a fascinating, if much-neglected past. In order to access it, we need first to take on board more general cultural factors. The ubiquity and polyvalence of the smile means that, in social circumstances, for example, it is not enough to see someone smiling. One has to know what the smile intends. The expression needs untangling, deciphering, decoding. In this, it resembles the wink. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out in 1973, the wink is physiologically identical to the involuntary eyelid twitch we call a blink. For a wink to be understood as a wink rather than a blink, winker and winked-at need to understand the cultural codes in play. And these, of course, can differ very markedly.

In the West, we tend to acknowledge the variability of codes in terms of space and diversity: there is a sense that Western smiling culture differs from that to be found, for example, in Japanese and Chinese societies. Yet the smile shows chronological as well as spatial differentiation. In the archaic smile that is seen in certain ancient Greek sculptures, for example, the lips are formed into a smile. Yet classicists are sceptical that this does in fact represent the expression as we know it. It may just be intended to evoke general health and contentment. In other words, the smile existed, but we dont know what it meant.

Ancient Romans showed another variant. If we take their vocabulary at face value, they did not distinguish between a smile and a laugh, contenting themselves with a single Latin verb ridere for both. Only towards the end of the Roman Empire did a diminutive subridere enter the language. This came with the derived noun sub-risus (later, surrisus) a sub-laugh a little or low laugh associated with mockery. It retained this lesser status and this diminutive form, distinguishing it from the laugh as it entered the Romance languages in the High Middle Ages. Around 1300, for example, French contained words for laughing (rire) and laughter (le rire or le ris) and smile (sourire, from sous-rire).

At roughly the same times and in a similar manner, Italian adopted ridere and sorridere, Spanish reir and sonreir, Portuguese rir and sorrir, and Provenal rire and sobsrire. A specific word for smile emerged in Celtic and Slavic languages around then too, but using a non-Latinate term: the Danes got smile and the Swedes, smila. English finally got its smile from a High German or Scandinavian source. Revealingly, it was at much the same moment that the smile entered the Western art tradition, in the form of the famous smiling angel, created between 1236 and 1246, that adorns the west front of the great cathedral in Reims in northeastern France. Historians have hailed this delightful and very modern-looking expression as marking the advent of new civilisational values in Western culture.

There are certainly examples of open mouths and teeth, but they are invariably negative in their associations

The smile as we know it was thus out and about in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature demonstrates that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the range of feelings that we attach to it in our own culture. Petrarch dreamed of the brightness of the angelic smile of his lover, and while this kind of gentle lyricism can also be found in William Shakespeares sonnets, the Bard knew that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Renaissance painting welcomed and adopted the smile, too. Its meaning was not always, however, crystal clear: witness the legendary if infuriatingly ambiguous smile playing on the lips of Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa (1503-17).

Yet if the smile was alive and well in Western culture, it was not yet our own. In Western art, it differed in one highly significant respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in facial representations extremely rarely. One can scan drawings, paintings and sculptures from before the 19th century in art galleries and museums the world over without finding a single example of a tooth-baring smile of the kind that is so common in our own day. There are certainly examples of open mouths and teeth, but they are invariably negative in their associations.

It is tempting to ascribe this state of affairs to the unhygienic state of mouth. But, in fact, skeletal remains from late medieval cemeteries suggest that teeth were then less affected by cavities than they would become from the 18th century onwards, with the mass advent of sugar into Western diets. The reason for the tight-lipped primness of the smile in the period inaugurated by the smiling angel of Reims seems to have owed everything to cultural values rather than biological deficiencies.

Three factors operated to minimise representation of the expression. First, there was a close association between the open mouth and the lower orders. Opening the mouth invariably to reveal inner horrors was something only plebeians did. This artistic convention reflected social norms current in polite or patrician society that were set out in the early 16th century by two highly influential writings: the Mantuan diplomat Baldassare Castigliones The Book of the Courtier (1528) and the Dutch humanist Erasmuss On Civility in Children (1530). Both strongly advised against opening the mouth for all but fulfilling the basic biological needs: to do so in any other way marked one down. Laugh if one must, was the message, but do so silently and with ones mouth buttoned up in a seemly, decorous and polite way. Frans Halss Laughing Cavalier (1624), for example, may have a broad grin, as the title suggests: but his lips are sealed. Were they not, he would be as good as denying his status as a gentleman.

The two seminal texts were frequently re-edited over the next few centuries and translated into many languages. Erasmus first appeared in English in 1532 and Castiglione in 1561 (the version seemingly known to Shakespeare). Though addressed to courtiers and schoolchildren respectively, the texts reached far wider audiences, particularly through the Renaissance genre of the conduct book, which purported to show readers how polite people behaved in every facet of their lives. These texts formed part of what the German sociologist Norbert Elias in 1939 called the civilising process, a kind of behavioural revolution, one of whose key features was control of bodily orifices, particularly in public spaces. Mouths should be kept closed when eating, for example, spitting was taboo, noses should remain unpicked, ears were not to be probed in public, and eyes should not stare. And there should be no farting.

Doubtless, in real life, these were rules there to be broken. But breaking them revealed ones low character. Or and this was the second factor in play, in art as in life it betrayed a loss of reason. The mouth lolling open was an accepted way of depicting the insane, but it went further than that, and encompassed the representation of individuals whose rational faculties had been placed in abeyance, by passions or base appetites. This was one reason why some of the tiny number of portraits showing white-tooth smiles are of children William Hogarths The Shrimp Girl (c1740-45) is a good example. By definition, she had not reached the age of reason and learnt how to be polite. (Or maybe she was from the lower orders and would never know better.)

When the soul was calm and tranquil, the face was perfectly at rest

The third factor explaining the absence of positive depictions of open mouths in Western art related to what were known as history paintings depicting scenes from ancient history or scripture. Individuals in such scenes are often shown as in the grip of a strong emotion such as terror, fear, despair, rage or ecstasy (whether spiritual or fleshly). In the 17th century, Louis XIVs premier painter, Charles Le Brun, sought to codify conventions concerning the representation of the passions in history painting. He drew on implicit norms that he had detected within Western art dating back to antiquity, but also sought confirmation of his ideas in the cutting-edge physiology of the philosopher Ren Descartes.

Descartes argued that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, located within the head, between the eyes and behind the bridge of the nose. The gland was where thought and sensation were formed, and this influenced, Descartes argued, the flow of animal spirits to the muscles including, importantly, the muscles of the face. For Le Brun, it followed that, when the soul was calm and tranquil, the face was perfectly at rest. Conversely, when the soul was agitated, this expressed itself on the face particularly around the eyebrows, the facial feature located closest to the pineal gland. The more extreme the passion, the more contorted the muscles in the upper part of the face and the more the lower part of the face came to be affected, too. It needed very extreme emotions for the mouth to open widely.

Le Bruns theories were widely diffused in Europe from the late 17th century. Even though the Cartesian view of the soul subsequently declined, the facial drawings with which Le Brun had illustrated them remained highly popular. Indeed, throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, copying his gallery of expressions became a standard way that amateur artists learned how to draw and paint faces. The expressions also found themselves appearing in other types of paintings. Dutch genre painting showed inebriated figures lolling around in inns and taverns laughing uproariously or caught up in violent dispute. Teeth also appeared in some self-portraits by artists presenting themselves in a sardonic manner a tradition that went back to Rembrandt and beyond. But the regular portrait stayed loyal to the courtly shut-lipped tradition of Castiglione, the Mona Lisa and the Laughing Cavalier.

Until, that is, 1787. For it was in that year in Paris that Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun (related by marriage to Louis XIVs court painter) exhibited a self-portrait in the annual Salon in the Louvre (where the painting remains). With her daughter at her knee, she graciously looks out at the viewer and smiles with decorous charm, revealing her white teeth.

The art world went into a state of shock. One element of which artists, people of good taste and collectors all disapprove, wrote one critic, and of which there is no precedent stretching back to Antiquity, is that as she laughs she shows her teeth In late 18th-century Paris, a new phenomenon had marked its arrival in Western culture, transgressing all the norms and conventions of Western art. The modern smile was born.

Mme Vige Le Brun may have been initiating something of an artistic revolution on the cusp of the more famous political revolution of 1789. But there is evidence that her painted smile reflected changes already taking place within French society more generally. People were, it seems, smiling more and seeing new positivity about the gesture. Paris was in the vanguard of this development. The French capital had established itself as a kind of influencer avant la lettre, which set trends that the rest of Europe followed as regards fashionable behaviour and commodities. The kind of stiff gravitas, conventionality and facial immobility prized at the royal court at Versailles lost its attraction for the livelier, more dynamic metropolitan culture emerging in the French capital. In salons, coffee-houses, theatres, shops and the like, more relaxed and unstuffy behaviour was the norm.

The white-tooth smile, moreover, was invested with new prestige by the cult of sensibility that swept through Europe at mid-century, encouraged by the bestselling novels of Samuel Richardson (Pamela, Clarissa) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose, mile). Modern readers of these novels are usually struck by the huge amount of weeping and sobbing that goes on in them, as their protagonists virtue is placed under cruel assault. But the characters prevail, significantly, with a sublime smile on their lips.

This was important as these novels and others like them generated a wish among their readers to model their own behaviour on the fictional characters. This trend resembles the impact of Hollywood stars and social media influencers in more recent times. The virtuous and transcendent smile showcasing healthy white teeth in the novels became a model for the Parisian social elite in real life. It became not only acceptable but even desirable to manifest ones natural feelings among ones peers. English travellers expressed amazement at how frequently Parisians exchanged smiles in everyday encounters. The city had become the worlds smile capital.

If the cult of sensibility gave novel readers the wish to smile in this fashionable way, Parisians were also lucky enough to have technical assistance at hand. The French capital had become a renowned centre for dental hygiene. Across Europe and indeed the wider world prior to the early 18th century, mouth care had been a clumsy combination of strategic tooth-picking, pain-relieving opiates and indiscriminate tooth-pulling. Now, a new kind of mouth-care expert emerged in Paris, replacing the fairground tooth-pullers of yore: the dentist.

Under the Reign of Terror, smiles had to stay beneath the parapet for political reasons

The term was coined in Paris in the 1720s and entered the English language at mid-century. It denoted a specialist with surgical and anatomical training who deployed artful instrumentation on dental care. The new dentists could clean, whiten, align, fill, replace and even transplant teeth so as to produce a mouth that was cleaner, healthier and in smiling attractive. European gentlemen undertaking their Grand Tour would drop in to Paris to get their teeth fixed. Parisian newspapers were crammed full of publicity vaunting mouth cosmetics and instruments of every description. Alongside toothpicks, tongue-scrapers, breath-sweeteners, tooth-whiteners and lipsticks was found the toothbrush a sure harbinger of a smiling modernity, which was invented at this very moment. The perfection of the invention of porcelain dentures in the late 1780s by the Parisian entrepreneur Nicolas Dubois de Chmant presaged a booming new industry in false teeth. It meant that one could perform the new white-tooth smile without a tooth of ones own in ones head.

In this context, we can see the Vige Le Brun as a kind of high-art advertisement for Parisian preventive and cosmetic dentistry and fashion. The public showing of the portrait in the Salon ensured a widespread impact: viewers took the new smile with them to their homes across the world. A radiant future looked assured.

In the event, the triumph of the Parisian open-mouthed smile was both localised and short-lived. It would have to wait more than a century before it established its sway worldwide. Even and perhaps especially in Paris, the impact of the Vige Le Brun smile was short-circuited by the French Revolution two years later and the diffusion of a political culture that found this kind of smile problematic. Even before the Revolution, the cult of sensibility was being challenged by neo-classical taste. The epic paintings of Jacques-Louis David, for example, were all about jutting jaws, facial rigidity, stiff upper lips and quasi-operatic bodily gestures. This style of representation prevailed after 1789. Indeed, under the Reign of Terror (1793-94), smiles had to stay beneath the parapet for political reasons. To ardent revolutionaries, smiling seemed to hark back to the dolce vita scandalously enjoyed by pampered aristocrats under the Ancien Rgime. True patriotism had no time for a gesture that seemed to mock republican seriousness.

Furthermore, the open mouth that people increasingly associated with the French revolutionaries had gothic, ghoulish and melodramatic associations. The facial mutilations of victims by angry mobs, for example, often focused on the mouth: the state official Joseph-Franois Foullon de Dou who in 1789 was held to have urged the people of Paris to eat grass if they could not afford the price of bread had his comeuppance when his severed head was paraded around the city on the end of a pike, with straw stuffed into its mouth. Goya depicted the revolutionaries as the god Saturn devouring his children, according to one interpretation of his haunting painting. English political cartoonists doubled down on this, presenting the Parisian popular classes as slavering cannibals. Even the porcelain dentures that Dubois de Chmant had bestowed on humanity became the object of the sarcastic mockery of the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Such images lingered in European imaginations, crowding out memories of more innocent times.

If in Paris the Vige Le Brun smile had lost its allure and been consigned to the dustbin of history, this owed something also to a crisis in medical services. Revolutionary legislation closed the niche within the medical system that dentists had occupied, and there was no provision for training in dental surgery. For a century, dentists had no institutional status, and soon found themselves back in a situation where they were competing for customers with the charlatan tooth-pullers of old.

The smile went into hibernation as a public gesture in the West for more than a century. It was only in the early 20th century that it re-emerged under the influence of a range of factors. Better dentistry was a significant part of the story, and the world leader was not Paris but the United States, which had been among the earliest countries to professionalise dental training from the early 19th century onwards. Yet, as in the 18th century, the triumph of the smile owed as much to cultural trends as to the supply of dental expertise and proficiency. Highly visual advertising practices, Hollywood star image-making and snapshot photography also played a role. As anyone with family photograph albums going back that far will discover, it was from the 1920s and 30s that smiles appear for the first time precisely the period when individuals began to say cheese when confronted with a camera. Portraiture had become democratised and smilified.

From the turn of the 21st century, iPhone photography and social media confirmed the preferred individual expression of social identity was through smiling. The technologies also worked to erode barriers with global smiling cultures that had formerly been less reflective of Western practices. One in every five of the more than 500 million Twitter messages sent each day, it has been calculated, contains an emoji. It is the lingua franca of the globalised mass culture of the electronic age. The most utilised of all the 3,000-plus available emojis is the smile with tears of joy, an upgraded version of the original smiley.

In 2019, the long march of the modern (Western) smile received a severe jolt, with the appearance of COVID-19. Suddenly, that expression retreated behind a surgical mask. It is true that the perceptive among us may have been aware that a genuine and sincere smile causes a detectable crinkling of muscles around the eyes. But then we are not all so perceptive. And who smiles only sincerely anyway? The emoji registered the hit. Though the smile with tears of joy maintained the top spot in global usage, another emoji surged dramatically: the surgically masked face. The popularity of the masked-face emoji became so intense that when, in November 2020, Apple released its annual additions to the range, it was thought wise to tweak the mask emoji, adding colour to the cheeks and a meaningful creasing around the eyes so as to give the appearance of smiling under the mask. The smile, it seemed, was fighting back. And indeed it looks unlikely to lose its iconic cultural value and global appeal. A receding pandemic status across the world gives everyone something to smile about.

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A history of the smile through art, culture and etiquette - Aeon

In 1951, mobster Frank Costello (seated, center) testified in front of the Kefauver Committee during a televised congressional hearing on organized crime that captivated the country. Bettmann / Getty Images

A year and a half after some 2,000 supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a series of televised congressional hearings are revealing new details of the unprecedented attack.

Broadcast on most of the major networks and cable news channels (Fox News opted out), the two-hour opening hearing featured live testimony from a Capitol Police officer who described the January 6, 2021, riot as a war scene; pre-recorded interviews with Trump aides and advisers; and visceral, never-before-seen footage from the day of the insurrection.

I saw officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up, said officer Caroline Edwards, who sustained a traumatic brain injury during the riot. I was slipping on peoples blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.

Perhaps the most expertly produced prime-time hearings broadcast to date, the January 6 proceedings are part of a lengthy American political tradition. From the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings to the 1973 Watergate hearings, televised hearings have transfixed the nation for decades, offering the public a rare glimpse behind the congressional curtain.

Television didnt invent the congressional hearing or [become] the first to take advantage of its essential theatricality, wrote broadcaster Reuven Frank in the 1997 book Covering Congress. But the medium opened up a new world where the theater was always open, the audience always receptive, the press always in attendance.

According to an online House of Representatives exhibition, the first live television broadcast of a congressional proceeding took place on January 3, 1947, during the opening of the 80th Congress. Due to costliness and an unwillingness by members of Congress to have their [discussions] recorded, wrote Jackie Mansky for Smithsonian magazine in 2017, the 1947 broadcast proved to be an anomaly, with regularly televised proceedings only becoming the norm in 1977.

Despite the legislative bodys overall resistance to television, individual congressional committees couldand didbroadcast their own hearings. The first to capture a broad swath of Americans attention took place in 1951, when the Kefauver Committee investigated organized crime. Embarking on a national tour of local courtrooms, Senator Estes T. Kefauver subpoenaed mobsters, corrupt law enforcement officers, gamblers and other witnesses. An estimated 30 million people watched the live proceedings, eagerly following the cinematic black-and-white footage of criminals under duress, per the Senate Historical Office.

Frank Costello, an Italian crime boss based in New York, initially refused to testify but agreed to speak if the camera focused on his hands rather than his face. Actually, reported the Newsday newspaper on March 14, 1951, they were more character-revealing than his expressionless face, twitching nervously as the mobster reached for a glass of water or mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Another star of the Kefauver hearings was Virginia Hill, the former girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel. According to the Mob Museum, she showed up at the courthouse in a $5,000 mink cape and silk gloves, denied all knowledge of criminal activity, and slapped a woman reporter in the face on her way out of the proceedings.

A similarly captivating set of hearings aired in the spring of 1954. Known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the proceedings pitted Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator known for his zealous hunt for communists, against the U.S. Army, which had accused the controversial politician of seeking preferential treatment for an aide. McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn, in turn charged the Army with harboring communists within its ranks.

Across 36 days of hearings, 188 hours of which were broadcast live, a boorish McCarthy and a bleary-eyed Cohn [faced off] against a coolly avuncular Joseph N. Welch, the Armys special counsel, notes Thomas Doherty for the Television Academy Foundation. In a June 9, 1954, exchange with McCarthy, Welch famously declared, Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Seen by some 27 million Americans, the hearings marked the beginning of McCarthys fall from grace. What happened was that television, whose coverage of McCarthys news conferences and addresses to the nation had earlier lent him legitimacy and power, had now precipitated his downfall, writes Doherty. Censured by the Senate and ostracized by his peers, McCarthy died of unknown causeslikely linked to alcoholismin 1957. (Cohn, meanwhile, would later mentor a young Donald Trump in the 1970s and 80s.)

Perhaps the most readily apparent counterpart to the January 6 investigation is the Watergate hearings of 1973, which unraveled the scandal surrounding a June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Though the proceedings got off to a slow start, the drama picked up as witnesses revealed the extent of President Richard M. Nixons involvement in the cover-up.

The Senate Watergate investigation is proving a television-viewing phenomenon, wrote columnist Jack Anderson in July 1973, following a former White House aides disclosure that Nixon had recorded secret tapes of his conversations with staff, government officials and family members. According to A.C. Nielsen, the company behind Nielsen TV ratings, an estimated three out of four American households tuned in to the hearings at one point or another.

The drama-filled inquiry outdrew popular daytime soap operas, writes Ronald G. Shafer for the Washington Post. One Chicago woman reportedly told a friend, Ive gotta hurry home and watch the Senate investigation on TV. Its more fun than an X-rated movie.

In 1974, the Houseanticipating an impeachment trial for Nixonauthorized broadcast coverage of floor debate for the first time. (Previously, live broadcasts had been limited to individual committee hearings.) Though Nixon resigned before an impeachment trial could take place, his actions inadvertently cemented televisions ascension as the go-to medium for political intrigue.

House Speaker Thomas Tip ONeill authorized a three-month testing period for closed-circuit television coverage in March 1977; C-SPAN, the nonprofit network that broadcasts live footage of many congressional proceedings, debuted soon thereafter, in March 1979, paving the way for such headline-making events as the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings and the January 6 ones taking place today.

What America and the world saw in 1974 was the most powerful man in the world lose his job, says historian Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in the CNN documentary series Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal. And for anyone who doubted the strength of the U.S. Constitution, what they witnessed [during the Watergate hearings] removed those doubts.

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A Brief History of Televised Congressional Hearings | Smart News - Smithsonian Magazine