Without the invasion in Normandy, which lead to the withdrawal and defeat of the Nazis, the world would be a different place. Today, the sacrifices of the American soldiers who landed on the beaches of France on D-Day are not forgotten: Every year people visit the Normandy American Cemetery bringing flowers and flags to show their respects. Standing between the endless lines of crosses the reality of the sacrifice sets in. Nobody leaves this cemetery without feeling moved.
The Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 6, 1944, which were divided into sectors where the troops would land. The American troops landed on Utah Beach and on Omaha Beach, the last sector and the one best secured by the German troops. The number of casualties at Omaha Beach was much higher than at the other five landing points put together.
An accurate casualty count might never be known, but officially the U.S. Army counted 124,394 casualties, among them 20,668 dead soldiers. On D-Day alone 2,499 Americans died on the beaches of Normandy to help free Europe from the tyranny of Adolf Hitler.
On June 8 the American troops started to bury their dead soldiers in a temporary graveyard on top of a hill in Colleville-sur-Mer, close to Omaha Beach. After the war, France granted the United States the use of that land and an additional area, all together 172 acres of land, free of charge and tax. In this place, 9,387 American soldiers found their final resting place at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
Among them are Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the son of President Roosevelt, and the former president's brother Quentin, who died in WWI and was brought to rest beside him. A father is resting beside his son, just like 33 other pairs of brothers buried together here, among them Preston and Robert Niland, two of the brothers whose story the film Saving Private Ryan is based on. Approximately 14,000 other American soldiers, who originally were buried here, were brought home upon request of their families. Also on the grounds is a chapel, a lookout point over Omaha Beach with educational signs, several statues and the American WWII Memorial. A monument in the “Garden of the Missing” features the names of another 1,557 Americans who lost their lives during the invasion of Normandy but could not be found or identified.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Federal Communications Commission had a hard job in front of it at the turn of the 21st Century. The group found itself wading through the complexities of taking analog television—something that nearly everyone had used for decades—and getting viewers to go digital.
That move was perhaps the most unusual case of planned obsolescence in the modern age, a decision, mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that forced hundreds of millions of people out of their usual routine.
Many folks weren’t ready, or maybe they didn’t care enough about their TV signal quality to upgrade. But nearly eight years ago, it happened anyway, and the United States finally threw out its old rabbit-ear antennas—no matter how much it hurt.
The effort started slowly, with a test conducted by 25 television stations on November 1, 1998, according to a FCC report on the formulation of digital TV technology. The feeds, based in the 10 largest television markets, were very limited at first. A 1998 CNN report noted that one of the first programs to show up in a digital format was a screening of 101 Dalmatians, which only people who owned $5,000 television sets (or bought adapters for their not-as-good screens) could afford to see in the high-quality format.
Mandated by law to see the change through, the commission often buckled to keep the transition on track, even as the prices of digital televisions went down from $5,000 to $150.
And the job was messy. Former FCC chair Michael Powell often found himself in the unenviable position of trying to clean up a massive, bureaucratic mess. As early as October of 2001, Powell had to set up a task force intended to fix the problems around the transition.
“The DTV transition is a massive and complex undertaking. Although I’m often asked what the FCC is going to do to ‘fix’ the DTV transition, I believe that a big part of the problem were the unrealistic expectations set by the 2006 target date for return of the analog spectrum,” Powell said in an October 2001 news release. “This Task Force will help us re-examine the assumptions on which the Commission based its DTV policies, and give us the ability to react and make necessary adjustments.”
And those adjustments kept happening. For years, the federal government passed regulations or legislation to kick the can down the road as many times as it could. In the midst of a major housing and financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009, the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly found themselves having to deal with one small piece of legislation or another related to the digital transition. At a time when things were going to hell in a handbasket, we couldn’t even rely on TV to be a source of comfort.
(It wasn’t cheap, either: The U.S. government earmarked $1.5 billion to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration as part of its program to allow Americans to buy $40 digital converters for their analog TV sets. Despite the more than $2 billion the government paid to ease the transition, millions weren’t ready, despite the fact it was widely promoted pretty much everywhere.)
In some ways, the United States probably wished it could’ve been first country to complete the transition to digital television—after all, we invented television.
But ultimately, the U.S. was too big, and the 2006 deadline too ambitious. The Scandinavians, with their smallish populations and high standards of living, had much better luck. Sweden, for example, completed the process in October 2007—two and a half months ahead of schedule. Nearby Norway, on the other hand, began its transition later than the U.S. did, but it only needed two years to move everyone over, finishing up in 2009.
In comparison, it took 11 years for the U.S. to shut off its analog TV stations for most uses. And some low-power stations—think TV stations run by high schools, or religious networks—only went to digital last September, nearly 16 years after the federal government began its switchover. (Even still, some analog stations persist, not as television stations but as FrankenFMs, radio stations that take advantage of the distance between analog channel 6 and the start of the FM radio dial.)
Still, for many stations, the move was historic. And several of them did all sorts of offbeat things to reflect.
In Mesa, Arizona, for example, KPNX-12 played up the transition to DTV, including the fact that it had hired a full-fledged call center to help local viewers, during a newscast that night. At one point during the newscast, anchor Mark Curtis told someone in the master control room to hit the switch, and … boom. Static.
In Dallas, WFAA brought a number of its old engineers to the station’s transmitter building to celebrate as the station shut off for the last time. A number of them had worked for the station for decades. On the analog signal, the station’s Pete Delkus briefly discussed the station’s history, and the clip included the station’s ‘70s-era signoff, which is friggin’ awesome.
Pittsburgh’s KDKA pulled out the poetry for the last moments of its analog broadcast—a short clip, featuring a U.S. Air Force pilot flying in mid-air while a voice was reciting High Flight, a famous sonnet by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a pilot born in China, but whose father was a missionary from Pittsburgh.
And, finally, Portland, Oregon’s KOIN re-ran a half-hour telecast of the station’s 25th anniversary special, which was originally created in 1978. Watch the first part here, then the second, and finally the sign-off.
But it wasn’t just the local networks reacting to the big change. The public often found itself trying to tackle the change, too. Sometimes, this came with a healthy dose of mistrust for government.
In the midst of the switchover, a guy named Adam Chronister trolled the Alex Jones crowd pretty hard by posting a video to YouTube that suggested there was a built-in microphone and camera inside of the digital converters.
“I was listening to the Alex Jones show … and I heard him mention the video. I just about fell out of the shower,” Chronister recalled to Wired.
Technical experts quickly figured out he was blowing smoke, but conspiracy theorists bought it—hook, line, and sinker. Chronister said the goal of the video was ultimately to fool a gullible friend.
“I originally opened up the device with the intention of proving him wrong,” Chronister told the magazine. “At which point the thought popped in my head, wouldn’t it be funny if I proved him right instead?”
But of all the weird things about the digital TV conversion, none, perhaps, was weirder than the transition period that occurred after the shutoff.
A while back, I noted there was a cottage industry of people who liked to create clips imagining what the end of TV would look like, in the case of nuclear war or similar disaster.
When analog television faced its death knell, no imagination was needed: People saw a former TV weatherman named Mike DiSerio doing what he does best—getting in front of a camera.
In most markets, an infomercial-style video starring DiSerio was aired to highlight the forthcoming switch. The videos, showing DiSerio, a couple of actors, and a wide array of onscreen messages in two languages, tried to communicate an important message to an audience living under a rock.
DiSerio’s role as calm, collected television doomsday soothsayer came about for two reasons: First, he worked for the National Association of Broadcasters, which played a key role in the transition; and second, Congress had passed a law at the tail end of the George W. Bush administration that called for a short-term continuation of analog TV signals for public service reasons.
The “analog nightlight,” as it was called, ensured that most markets would have a period where they saw Mike DiSerio enter their lives. The law passed quickly, and it took the FCC just days to codify new regulations in January of 2009.
Different TV stations aired the nightlight programming at different times, often relying on different strategies. Larger stations, given the go-ahead by Congress to extend their analog-transition period until June of 2009, stayed on the air with both analog and digital signals until then, only airing nightlight programming after that point. Smaller TV stations, however, didn’t have the budget to delay the switch any longer; they turned off their analog feeds in February. TV stations in cash-strapped markets couldn’t even afford to put DiSerio’s polished message on the air at all.
Despite the hard work that went into the process of the analog switchover—and DiSerio’s considerable charms—as of June 2009, Nielsen estimated that 2.8 million homesstill hadn’t made the switchover to digital.
Maybe it was intentional?
The switch from analog to digital is, at this point, well-established in the U.S. and many other countries.
(But not all: Ukraine, beset by diplomatic struggles, delayed its transition earlier this year. “It is obvious that Ukraine is not yet ready to go digital, but if we constantly postpone the decision with the company Zeonbud, we will never move to digital, and will always be dependent,” noted Yuriy Stets, the Ukranian Minister of Information.)
It may be one of the hardest things that the federal bureaucracy in the United States has ever had to do, but for the most part, it worked. Problem is, broadcast TV isn’t as appealing as it once was. Much of the population is already moving on to greener pastures, throwing shows on Rokus and Apple TVs, and moving past broadcast television entirely.
But still, some complain. Five years ago, someone named Jesse Hakinson posted a call to action on a website called Petition 2 Congress, asking that Congress repeal the analog TV switch. Yes, someone wants to repeal the incredibly expensive endeavor that cost individual television stations thousands of dollars, and forced the federal government to spend billions in taxpayer dollars just to get the analog-to-digital converters into homes around the country.
“Sure, it’s only been two years, but it’s been long enough,” Hakinson wrote. “It’s time to help the lower class again.”
This petition, despite the fact that it has literally no chance of going anywhere, and despite the fact that the wireless spectrum that analog television used is already in the process of being auctioned off to help feed our smartphones, still gets new signatures constantly, with people annoyed by antenna problems using the forum to vent.
The petition is the digital equivalent of TV static.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
There is a large housing settlement on the east side of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It’s comprised of three tight circles of low-rise towers from the Soviet era, both in their vintage and their design. In the middle of the center circle is a park—harboring a UFO.
The area is called Medzijarky, and was built in the mid-1970s when Slovakia was still half of Czechoslovakia, and all of Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc. The UFO sculpture at its center was erected at the time of construction, created by local artist Juraj Hovorka. It’s big—15 feet tall and 26 feet across—so big that kids originally were able to crawl inside and play Star Trek (if only Czechoslovakian TV had Star Trek).
A well-known and well-schooled sculptor, Hovorka actually lived in one of the Medzijarky towers. His work tended towards what might be called “monumental realism,” which could also describe his UFO—“realism” for an alien spacecraft that is.
The name Medzijarky translates roughly as “between the ditches” in Slovakian, and the neighborhood was built during the period of communist rule over the joint state. The years following the country’s split saw the project fall into disrepair and neglect, and that included the quirky UFO. Eventually plans were made to revitalize and update the housing, and the city wanted to take the sculpture down. But the neighbors stood in defense of their spaceship, and lobbied successfully to keep it.
The Medzijarky UFO is actually the second most famous UFO in Bratislava. There is one that tops the downtown bridge over the Danube, and it’s become a kind of symbol of for the city. It rises 27 stories over the water, and hosts a sky-scraping destination restaurant. The bridge UFO may be better known, but this one, although it no longer allows the human children inside, looks more like the real thing.
The town Kennecott in Alaska was once flourishing, full of workers who came to the town in search of wealth and work in the mines. There were businesses, shops, a train connection, and a lot of life. Then in 1938 the town was abruptly abandoned by its citizens, leaving most of their possessions behind. Since the middle of the 1950s the place has been completely deserted.
In the Kennecott mines it was not gold that people were digging for, like in so many other places, but copper. After copper was discovered in the area in 1900, a group of wealthy investors formed the Kennecott Copper Corporation (named when a clerical worker misspelled Kennicott) to mine the incredibly rich veins in the jagged mountains above Root Glacier.
In the 27 years the mine was in full operation, the company made more than $100 million, and the town grew around the mines. Partly because alcoholic beverages and prostitution were forbidden in Kennecott, a nearby village, McCarthy, grew as an area to provide illicit services not available in the company town. It grew quickly into a major town, with a school, a hospital, a saloon, and a brothel.
By 1938, the copper deposits were mostly gone, and the town was abandoned. The railroad discontinued service that same year.
Today, Kennicott is a ghost town and McCarthy has a year-round population of just a couple of dozen people. Located deep in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, what remains of the towns offers visitors a taste of Alaska’s historic mining era. A number of the buildings from that era are still in use and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Walking through these gardens is like stepping in to one of Claude Monet’s famous paintings.
The House and Gardens of Claude Monet is the beautifully restored home of the painter Claude Monet who is the founder of French Impressionist Painting. Claude Monet lived in this place from 1883 to his death in 1926. Many of his paintings are painted in Giverny, the village where his home is located, especially in his own gardens.
The French artist drew inspiration from his home in the village of Giverny in Northern France from 1883. Visiting his house and gardens today— now the Foundation Claude Monet Museum—you can see the Japanese bridge, waterlilies and weeping willows that were the subjects of some of his iconic paintings
Inside the house, rooms have been restored to their 19th century condition, just as they were in Monet’s time. The yellow dining room and blue kitchen are particularly memorable, one entirely furnished in bright shades of yellow, the other in tranquil blue. Monet’s studios are complete with reproductions of his paintings, and bedrooms are also open for public viewing.
Claude Monet discovered the house in Giverny, Normandy while looking out of a train window during a trip from Vernon to Gasny. He immediately fell in love with the place. Monet rented the house where he would spend the rest of his life in May 1883 and immediately begun to create the garden in front of the house, which is called "Clos Normand." In November 1890 he was able to buy the house and the land. In 1893 he purchased another piece of land, back than behind the train tracks that run at the edge of the property. Here he created a water garden, the "Jardin d'Eau," with the famous water lily pond.
Claude Monet supervised the renovation of the house himself. He made sure that the colors of the house and its interior were matching the colors of his palette. He chose a bright pink for the outside of the house and had the windows, doors and shutters painted in a bright green. The dining room was painted in a bright yellow and the main color in the kitchen is blue. On the walls are many of the Japanese prints that Monet was fascinated with and collected. Many of the rooms are open to the visitors, including the salon, the dining room, the bedroom and the studio.
Monet was also passionate about gardening. When he created the Clos Normand he transferred all his knowledge about color, light and perspective from his paintings to his garden. The main path of Clos Normand is covered with metallic arches on which roses grow. Straight lines and groups of colors dominate the whole garden.
Most of New England’s colonial-era graveyards hold the bones of slaves. This is true not only of the urban graveyards of Boston and Newport, but also of the sleepy little cemeteries nestled among the clapboard churches and old stone walls in rural villages from Norwich, Connecticut to Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire. Unlike the African Burial Ground in New York City, which was formed after black bodies were banned from Trinity Churchyard in 1697, most New England municipalities maintained unified burying places that segregated black and white graves within a shared boundary.
So where to find these forgotten bits of history? The vast majority of slaves’ graves are unmarked, but a few have archetypical New England gravestones. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, two diminutive markers stand less than 100 yards from Harvard Yard, commemorating the short lives of Harvard-affiliated slaves: 15-year-old Cicely (d. 1714), who was owned by the Reverend William Brattle, a longtime Fellow of Harvard’s Corporation; and 22-year-old Jane (d. 1741), who worked alongside her mother, siblings, and half a dozen other slaves at the command of Andrew Bordman, the Harvard College steward.
Many more graves may have had ephemeral markers—uncarved stones, wooden slats, glass bottles, or other tokens—but enduring gravestones for New England slaves are rare. More than 6,000 black Bostonians were buried in the city’s historic graveyards in the century before the American Revolution, accounting for one in every six burials.
Photographing these sites has been a passion of mine for years. Below, here is a selection of images that focus specifically on the ways in which public memorials in Rhode Island represented black families in the century and a half before the Civil War.
Pompe Stevens was a slave and a stone carver. Based on the style of the gravestones he signed, he was probably enslaved and trained by William Stevens, a member of the famous Stevens stonecarving family. The fraternal relationship between Pompe Stevens and Cuffe Gibbs is not mentioned in any paper document. As far as the law and the historical record were concerned, enslavement broke any familial ties between them. Pompe Stevens did not accept this erasure.
When Cuffe died in 1768, Pompe carved this gravestone as a memorial to his brother, to their family, and to his own skill.
This memorial, for siblings Lonnon and Hagar, rests in a pile of broken gravestones behind the John Stevens stonecarving shop on Thames Street in Newport. This photo was taken in 2009. Since that time, some of these stones ("Lucy wife of Cato Ayrault") have been restored to the Newport Common Burying Ground. Lonnon and Hagar's stone has not.
Even when slaves were able to marry, they were not allowed to form legal families. Gravestones like this one illustrate that tension by memorializing wives and husbands who bore the surnames of different enslavers. The right to take a husband's last name, rather than a slaveowner's, was a mark of freedom. For enslaved women, the inability to take a husband's name marked the fundamental vulnerability of their families.
The gravestone that Pompe Stevens carved for his brother, Cuffe Gibbs, is part of a larger memorial to their extended family.
Cuffe is buried beside "Princ, Son of Pompe Stevens & Silva Gould," his infant nephew. On his other side lies Primus Gibbs (d. 1775), a man of about Cuffe's own age, probably enslaved by the same family. Perhaps they were brothers as well, either by blood or bondage. Further down the row are Susey Howard, "daughter of Primus Gibbs" (d. 1770) and Jem Howard, "Twin brother of Quam and son of Phillis" (d. 1771).
This is not a plot controlled by a single slaveowner. At least four white households are implied (Gould, Stevens, Gibbs, Howard), but not explicitly acknowledged. All of the named relationships in the plot (son, brother, daughter, twin) are between black men, women, and children. None of the five stones calls anyone a "servant." It is a family plot.
In the 1750s, Pompey Scott and Violet Robinson buried at least three young children: Pompe, Mary, and Pegge. Their graves are clustered together, each gravestone testifying to the bond between parents and children. Still, the different surnames underscored the fact that enslaved Newporters could not form autonomous households. In 1779, during the British occupation of Newport, Pompey and Violet lost their teenage daughter, Susannah.
They buried her near her siblings under a gravestone that marked an important shift by naming her the "daughter of Pompy and Violet Scott." Perhaps the Scotts, like so many other black Newporters found a greater degree of freedom in British-occupied territories than they had under American rule.
The nested dependency of enslaved women is encapsulated in this epitaph. Dinah, herself a slave, defined in relation to her husband, himself a slave.
Time, weather, and lawnmowers chip away at 18th-century gravestones in Newport.
These four young children are buried in a group. Were Jack and Sango the same man? Many black Newporters went by more than one name. It is possible that all four children had the same father (Sango/Jack), with Hager's son born after Cuffe and Tom, but before Nancy. It is also possible that the children's parents were three different couples (Jack & Violet, Sango & Violet, Jack & Hager). Whatever the configuration of this family group, their burials suggest family ties. The children are buried together, as siblings often were.
This gravestone is badly weathered, with a large hole and substantial chips. It will probably not last through many more winters.
In 1790, the musician Newport Gardner (also known as Occramar Marycoo) commissioned John Stevens III to carve a gravestone for his baby daughter, Silva. Stevens charged Gardner 15 shillings for "cutting a pair of Grave Stones for your Child Silva," a debt that Gardner paid with 10 bushels of potatoes.
Gardner, who had been born free in West Africa, paid his own ransom the next year. Over the next several decades, he was a pillar of civic life in Newport, becoming a music teacher, schoolmaster, deacon, and published composer. In 1826, he led a group of African-born Rhode Islanders and their families back to Liberia. One witness to the departure quoted Gardner's farewell: "I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years — it is in vain. Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied."
Slaveowners defined slaves as dependents. They erased family ties between slaves, but insisted that a familial bond existed between slaves and the people who enslaved them. Gravestones from the 18th century often identify slaves as the "servant of" a white slaveowner in much the same way the gravestones of dependent Euro-Americans defined them as the "wife of" her husband or the "son of" his parents. Cato's epitaph goes a step further, telling his life story as a series of enslavements to different masters.
"Servant" was the preferred euphemism in 18th century New England. A two-year-old is not a "servant."
Mille and Katharine were teenagers when they died. Were they sisters? Did they have parents nearby? Or did they survive the Middle Passage as young girls, only to die in Newport?
This gravestone explicitly defines Mille and Katharine in terms of their relationship with their enslaver, Henry Bull. It is a double stone, a style that white Newporters usually reserved for married couples or young siblings. The form is a reminder of the forced intimacy that slavery thrust upon the enslaved. There is no way to know whether Mille and Katherine loved one another, hated one another, or even whether they lived in the Bull household at the same time (Katharine may have been enslaved after Mille's death). Yet, in memorializing them together, side by side, this stone also raises the possibility of mutual support and camaraderie.
The mismatch of surnames on Genny's gravestone also calls attention to the precariousness of her status as Pero's "wife." Her legal status as a slave always trumped her marriage. Providence residents may recognize the surname Waterman — Waterman Street is one of the main roads bounding the college green at Brown University.
Gravestones are public monuments. In an era when black Rhode Islanders were gaining access to the public sphere, they created enduring memorials to their spiritual, financial, and philanthropic achievements.
In 1784, Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation law. All slaves born before that year would remain slaves for life; children born to enslaved mothers would be emancipated at age 21. While some Rhode Islanders remained enslaved until the state abolished slavery in 1842, a patchwork of self-purchasing, private manumission, and escape efforts transformed the diasporic community in the decades after the American Revolution. Before the war, most black Rhode Islanders were enslaved; after the war, most were free.
Rosannah Hicks's gravestone demonstrates how much had changed for free families by 1817. Not only do Rosannah's parents, Cudgo and Freelove Hicks, share a surname, they claim the honorific "Miss" for their beloved daughter.
Gravestones are memorials for the dead. They are also public declarations made by the living. For black Rhode Islanders living during the transition from slavery to freedom, funerals and memorials were a way of demonstrating familial love and financial independence. Like the epitaph that Pompe Stevens carved for Cuffe Gibbs, Ceesar Wheaton's epitaph is an explicit testament to both affection and self-determination
A 1790 letter from Newport's Free African Union Society to its members regarding conduct at funerals demonstrates the Society's belief that "sober" funerals would win the approbation of white Newporters. These hopes were never realized. It read:
"We also particularly recommend to all and every Member that shall find freedom, That they dress themselves and appear decent on all occasions, that so they may be useful to all and every such burying, as above, and within described, that all the Spectators may not have it in their Power to cast such Game contempt, as in times past.
And above all things, Dearly Beloved, That ye be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the Devil, is a roaring lion walking about seeking whom he may devour.
And no, brethren, we exhort you to warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, be patient toward all men. May God Almighty bless the works of our hands, and prosper us untill time shall be no longer."
This cluster of gravestones shows how family ties endured over an entire century.
The first burial in this plot is Prince, a "Servant of Jn Stevens" who died in 1749. John Stevens, a stonemason and carver of gravestones, enslaved several people (his account books mention that he also hired black Newporters for short-term jobs like building chimneys and laying foundations).
The other five stones in this group commemorate relatives of Zingo Stevens, who was emancipated in John Stevens's 1774 will (after 7 years of service to Stevens's widow).
The first of these is a portrait stone for Zingo's wife, Phillis, and their son, Prince. Prince was a common name among black Newporters, but it is possible that the may have been named for the earlier Prince. Was the older Prince Zingo's father? A mentor? A brother in bondage under the same roof? Note the language of this epitaph—Phillis was the "late faithful Servant of Josias Lyndon Esq. and Wife of Zingo Stevens." Under the logic of this memorial, Phillis's most important relationship was with her enslaver; her marriage was secondary. (This stone was carved by John Stevens III, the son of Zingo's enslaver).
Zingo's second wife, Elizabeth, and their stillborn daughter (d. 1779) are buried nearby. His third wife, Violet (d. 1803) is also there. The final stones are for Zingo's daughter, Elizabeth (if her age is given correctly on the stone, she was Phillis's daughter, born c. 1768), and her husband, Cuffe Rodman. Cuffe died in 1809, but Sarah survived until January 23, 1863. She died at age 94, three weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
The gravestones of Charles Haskell and Lucy Haskell are monuments to the couple's prosperity and achievements. Lucy's epitaph also invokes an understanding of salvation as the erasure of racial distinction, in which spiritual equality is imagined as a state of whiteness.
President William Henry Harrison may be best known, rather unfortunately, for being the country’s shortest serving president. But he’s also credited with two other unusual facts. It's because of Harrison that we have the phrase, “keep the ball rolling”, which he adopted after his supporters pushed a ball of tin from Cleveland to Columbus. We can also thank Harrison for election merchandise; his campaign of 1840 has been regarded as the first marketing-savvy campaign, complete with symbols, slogans, songs and souvenirs.
Even in the beginning, this effort contained name-calling and spin. The Democrats portrayed Harrison as a backwards and unsophisticated, and even took a shot at his mother: “Why he’s just a backwoodsman. He eats corn pone [corn bread] and drinks cider. His mother still lives in a log cabin.” But Harrison’s campaign just embraced the “man of the people” image and even adopted the log cabin as a symbol—despite the fact that Harrison had been raised to a wealthy family on a Virginia plantation.
For Harrison’s supporters, there were campaign songs and plenty of merchandise, including neckties, whiskey decanters, pitchers and flags. In fact throughout the 19th century, flags played a key role in political campaigning, which is the subject of a new exhibition at the George Washington Museum and The Textile Museum.
While the exhibition does focus on flags, there are also other textile-related ephemera—such as the unexpected presence of political throw pillows. One of the more unusual items relates to Theodore Roosevelt, where the candidate is depicted inside a red heart. It was, according to the Museum, designed for women to buy and display at home to influence male voters. Somehow, women were deemed worthy of election merchandise marketing—even before they got the the right to vote.
Here is selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through to April 10, 2017.
From horrifying foot-binding practices in Imperial China to life-threatening surgeries in modernity, humanity has been finding harmful ways to modify the body since the dawn of civilization. The Victorians were no exception to this.
The Victorian era, roughly the 1830s to 1900, is notorious for its bizarre notions of beauty, and its even more bizarre secrets to attaining it. The ideal of the time was modeled after those afflicted by consumption (tuberculosis). Pale skin, dilated eyes, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and a meagre and fragile figure. To achieve this particular look, women of the era employed several harmful practices. From swallowing arsenic—which they knew to be poisonous—to diluting powdered charcoal in water before ingesting it, to using figure-molding corsets in a never-ending quest for the “perfect” 16-inch waist, there was no limit to what fashionable Victorians would do.
Most of these practices have, thankfully, gone out of style. We no longer swallow ingredients present in rat poison, and corsets no longer disfigure women’s internal organs. There is one gruesome dietary idea, however, that has managed to survive—the tapeworm diet.
The idea is simple, and gross. You take a pill containing a tapeworm egg. Once hatched, the parasite grows inside of the host, ingesting part of whatever the host eats. In theory, this enables the dieter to simultaneously lose weight and eat without worrying about calorie intake.
Both ideas fit nicely into Victorian ideals, as illustrated by The Ugly-Girl Papers by S.D Powers, one of the most popular beauty guides of the era. First and foremost, the guide states that “it is a woman’s business to be beautiful.” Beauty takes time and effort and no plain girl could forego the tediousness of beauty regimes if she wanted to find a husband. One can therefore conclude that Victorians were very much willing to make sacrifices to attain ideal beauty.
But the guide also recommends that women find a “healthy” balance in the pursuit of beauty. When it comes to maintaining the figure or losing weight, the author claims:
“If stout, [a girl] should eat as little as will satisfy her appetite; never allowing herself, however, to rise from the table hungry.”
The tapeworm diet may thus have been the perfect solution. Allegedly, a woman would never rise hungry from the table, yet she would continue losing weight. All concerns for health and discomfort could be dismissed with the claim that beauty is pain, and sacrifices must be made.
And sacrifices were most certainly made once the desired weight was achieved. To get rid of the now-unnecessary parasite, dieters would employ the same methods as those unwillingly afflicted by the worms. In Victorian England, this included pills or special devices. One such invention, created by Dr. Meyers of Sheffield, attempted to lure the tapeworm by inserting a cylinder with food via the digestive tract. It comes as no surprise that many patients choked to death before the tapeworm was successfully removed. Other folk cures prescribed holding a glass of milk at the end of either orifice and waiting for the tapeworm to come out. Whether this actually holds any validity remains an issue of debate, as we have yet to prove that parasites have a preference for bovine lactose.
What’s scariest about this diet is not that it may have been used by the same people who willingly ingested carbon, but that its idea continues to be around. Like air pollution and zombie films, it simply refuses to die. Its presence is evidenced by the numerous online forums dedicated to the question of the diet’s efficiency, and the (fairly dubious) reports of Mexican clinics that will give you the treatment for a couple thousand dollars.
With both Victorian and modern dieters, the actual popularity of this radical diet is murky. Historians disagree on whether people actually ingested tapeworm pills, or whether the advertised products were simply placebos meant to dupe desperate people. Likewise, reports on Mexican tapeworm clinics are hard to believe, as are most of the testimonies of its advocates. Moreover, rumors of stars like Maria Callas losing weight with the diet have often turned out to be simple manipulation of facts. It seems, then, that at no point of its history has the tapeworm diet been an actual fad.
This doesn’t negate, however, that there are people willing to try it. If the “tapeworm pills” of the Victorian era were indeed a farce, it does not change the fact that people bought and swallowed them in the hopes that a gigantic worm would live in their digestive system. Likewise, a simple Google search on the diet will pull up dozens of diet blogs that cover the topic. The comments sections will take you on a sadly humorous trip full of obvious scams and willing participants asking for more information.
Even reality TV star Khloe Kardashian suggested that she wanted to get a tapeworm on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The statement evoked an article from Vice on the legitimacy and dangers of the diet. Claiming concern for public health, the FDA has officially banned tapeworm pills. Unrealistic expectations of female beauty, it seems, retain its parasitic grip on pop culture.
Frank and Joseph Bily were born in the late 19th century on a farm near the predominantly Czech town Spillville, Iowa. They went on to become farmers themselves, as well as carpenters; to pass the time during the slow winter months, they took up clock making as a hobby, fashioning elaborate wooden facades and carving finely detailed statues for time pieces that grew ever larger and more complex.
Taking up the unique pastime in 1913, the Bily brothers went on to make over 20 clocks during the next three decades. Their creations featured fully automated displays with multiple figurines and internal music boxes. Their largest clock, The Apostles' Parade, stands 9 feet 10 inches tall and features miniatures of all twelve disciples of Jesus. Their masterpiece, American Pioneer History, took them four years to complete; Henry Ford offered to buy the clock for a million dollars in 1928, but was turned down. Another notable clock in the collection was made in 1928 to commemorate Charles Lindbergh's historic Transatlantic flight.
As their clock collection grew, the Bily brothers gained local fame—at one point their sister began charging curious visitors a dime to see the lovingly crafted timepieces arrayed in their home. However, their clock making always remained a purely recreational activity, pursued only when there was no other work to be done. They never sold a single clock, and rejected offers for commissioned projects. In 1946, they bequeathed their collection to the town of Spillville on the conditions that the clocks would be neither sold nor moved.
Today, the entirety of their collection is on display at the Bily Clocks Museum. The museum was set up in a building where Antonín Dvořák took up residency with his family during the summer of 1893. While sojourning in Iowa, he composed his String Quartet in F (also known as the "American Quartet") and his String Quintet in E-Flat. The second floor of the museum has an exhibit commemorating the famous composer's time in Spillville.
In Iceland's Vatnajökull National Park, the waters of the mighty Dettifoss are ever-crashing.
The waters of the falls comes from the nearby Vatnajökull glacier, whose sediment-rich runoff colors the water a greyish white. The superlative of "most powerful" comes from its water flow coupled with its height. The falls, fed by the wide River Jökulsá, fall a total of about 150 feet, causing a massive, crashing spray.
This can make getting close to the falls difficult. The pathways surrounding are frequently slippery, and authorities warn visitors to maintain a safe distance due to frequent accidents on the paths. This doesn't stop visitors though. Dettifoss is the Niagara of Iceland (although more powerful) and draws thousands of sightseers.
On December 20, 1792, the whaling ship Asia was making its way through the Desolation Islands, in the Indian Ocean, when the crew decided to stop for lunch. According to the ship's logger, the meal was a great success: "At 1 PM Sent our Boat on Shore After Some refreshments," he wrote. "She returned with A Plenty of Woggins we Cooked Some for Supper."
Right about now, you may be feeling peckish. But you may also be wondering: What in the world is a woggin?
New species are discovered all the time. Unknown old species—extinct ones, found as fossils and then plugged into our historical understanding of the world—turn up a lot, too. But every once in a while, all we have to go on is a word.New or old, known or unknown, no one knew what a woggin was until Judith Lund, whaling historian, decided to find out.
Like all professionals, 18th-century whalers had their share of strange jargon. A "blanket" was a massive sheet of blubber. "Gurry" was the sludge of oil and guts that covered the deck after a kill, and a "gooney" was an albatross. Modern-day whaling historians depend on their knowledge of these terms to decode ship's logs—vital for understanding the sailors' day-to-day experiences, as well as gleaning overall trends. Being elbow-deep in whaleman slang is just part of the job.
So when Lund ran into a word she didn't know, it caught her eye. Lund was at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, trying to dig up some data on oil harvest rates. "I was reading a logbook and charging along beautifully," she says, "when I came across the fact that whalemen on that voyage were eating woggins and swile."
Lund had heard of swile—it's whaler slang for "seals"— but woggins were new. She asked the museum librarian, Michael Dyer, who didn't know either. "The woggin was a mystery to both of us," she says. So Lund did what any curious person would—started emailing everyone she could think of, asking if they had ever heard of it.
One of these people was Paul O'Pecko, the Vice President of Collections and Research at Mystic Seaport. "You know how once somebody mentions something to you, that the piece of information seems to jump off the page when you are not even looking?" he asks. This quickly happened with woggins. As soon as Lund's network was alerted, more mentions from ship's logs began flooding in. A Sag Harbor vessel sailing in 1806 "kild one woglin at 10 am." New Bedford sailors from 1838 describe "wogings in vast numbers & noisy with their shril sharp shreaking or howling in the dead hours of the night." In a 1798 diary entry, Christopher Almy of New Bedford writes of "one sort the whalemen call woggins," which have stubby wings. When they move over the rocks, he says, they "look like small boys a walking."
When Lund's inquiry hit O'Pecko's desk, something splashed out of his memory, too. Years before, in his own research, he had come across the story of Jack Woggin, a beloved ship's pet. He dug up the account from an 1832 whaling magazine, and sent it along. "A person looking overboard saw a Penguin (Genus aptenodytes), commonly called by the sailors a 'woggin,'" writes the author, explaining how Jack got on board. Here, finally, was the smoking gun: a woggin is a penguin.
But the mystery was only half solved. Penguins, as we understand them, live in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet sailors in the north were also getting in on the action, reporting that they had "caught 10 wogens" or "saw wargins." "Whalemen were noticing them before they went far enough south to see true penguins," says Lund.
At this point, it was Storrs Olson's turn to snap into focus. Olson, an ornithologist with the Smithsonian Institution, had been added to the email chain early on, but the mystery hadn't gripped him. "It was something sailors ate, and they would eat almost anything," he says. "I did not pay a lot of attention at first."
But when it became clear that woggins were in the north, too, an intriguing suspect loomed: what if they were great auks? Also flightless, with large, hooked beaks and white eyespots, great auks went extinct in 1852, hunted to death for their fluffy down. (Arctic sailors also burned them for warmth, as there was often no wood where they were exploring.) As such, we know very little about them, and they have achieved near-mythical status among ornithologists, who grasp at every scrap of evidence about how they lived.
Dyer—the librarian from New Bedford—had found another major clue: the notebook of a schoolboy named Abraham Russell, decorated with a careful sketch of a "Sea Waggin found on the banks of Newfound Land." The drawing looked as though it had been traced from a particular illustration of a Great Auk found in a popular navigational guide. Further finds reinforced this theory, and finally, the group of detectives nailed it down: A southern woggin is a penguin. A northern woggin was a great auk.
Lund and Olson released their first woggin exposé in 2007, in Archives of Natural History. A follow-up was published this month. (The new paper is a true rollercoaster—early on in the list of woggin cameos, an explorer from 1860 reports that the birds "excited my wonder and attention." Mere lines later, sealers from 1869 are showing off "a bag full of woggins' hearts, which we can roast on sticks, and who doubts that we shall make a heart-y supper?")
"Our paper was received with considerable interest by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English," it points out, suggesting that woggins may soon officially march into the historical lexicon.
Until then, Olson is using the woggins to learn more about great auks—he has already expanded their probable springtime range down to the coast of North Carolina, based on a sighting from 1762. And Lund keeps the word in her back pocket, a new species of diverting vocabulary. "I run across it occasionally, and it's amusing and interesting" she says. "The woggins live again."
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Flying over Ireland is always a magical experience. But then travelers speeding over County Donegal started noticing a particularly mystical sight: a 300-foot-long Celtic cross, made of thousands of trees.
This strange emblem has been secret growing for quite some time. The man apparently responsible was Liam Emmery, a forester from the region. Emmery died in 2010, at age 51, after an accident left him unwell for two years. Emmery planted different types of trees years ago, keeping the mysterious project mostly to himself.
The resulting effect has been visible for a few years now, but the dry autumn of 2016 made it particularly eye-catching, the yellow cross vivid against a background of spruce green.
It's not just the stilted dialogue and cringe-worthy innuendoes that make this Dating Game clip from 1978 seem off somehow. Bachelor number one is Rodney Alcala, who would be sentenced to death for the murder of at least 50 people just two years from this airing, but his true victim count could be as high as 130. When he appeared as a contestant on the show, he was a convicted rapist in the middle of his killing spree.
The Bachelorette, Cheryl, doesn't pick up on any of this. In fact, she ends up choosing Alcala over the other two contestants despite his lackluster answers like, "Nighttime is the best time," and "I'm a banana... peel me." However, she cut things off immediately after their one date, claiming that she found him "creepy." How right she was.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Less than four years after gaining independence from the United Kingdom, the Caribbean nation of Belize notched a smaller, yet somehow lasting, triumph in 1985. That winter, the Chicago Cubs sent their star outfielder Gary Matthews, Sr., to visit the country, which is often claimed to be the most Cubs-friendly land outside the Windy City. Matthews's visit was the culmination of a love affair that had begun in 1981, the year when Cubs games began being broadcast in the country.
The relationship has continued to this day. Right now many Belizeans at home and inside the United States are cheering on the Cubs, who have returned to the World Series for the first time since 1945 and are attempting to break a championship drought that stretches all the way back to the first Roosevelt administration, 1908. The team finished the 2016 season with the best record in baseball, wracking up 103 wins (and 58 losses), an achievement that put them a whopping 17.5 games ahead of their closest division rival, the St. Louis Cardinals.
Melanie Walker, who was born in Belize and lives in the Los Angeles area, is watching the Cubs' championship run with nostalgia. "Of course I'm a Cubs fan," she says. The 42-year-old remembers watching the team play during her childhood. Her husband has been taping the Cubs' playoff games while she works at the Little Belize restaurant in Inglewood, California. He's a Dodgers fan, but she's confident the Cubs are going to win it all this year.
Why the Cubs—and why Belize? Like a lot of stories from this part of the world, it began with pirates. In this case, however, the outlaws were local TV impresarios, not swashbuckling Johnny Depp look-alikes. In the early ‘80s, there were no television stations in Belize, the only country in Latin America whose official language is English. (Anyone with a set would use it to watch VHS tapes.) In 1981, however, Belize City business couple Arthur and Marie Hoare began transmitting the famous Chicago television channel WGN-TV via satellite, bringing programming to Belize. Channel 9, the Hoares' bootlegged Belize affiliate of WGN, brought Cubs and Bulls games into living rooms and bars throughout the country, sparking an interest in Chicago sports that has continued—with varying levels of enthusiasm—to this day.
"As [WGN's] signal was relayed into Belize City by the Hoares, 'world and country' were glued to their television sets to see the mighty Cubs win or lose (mostly lose)," remembered politician Michael Finnegan in a 2013 article in the Belizean paper Amandala.
Belize was ripe for adopting a professional baseball team. In the early ‘80s popularity for the sport was picking up in Belize: It had a well-attended travel-baseball league, and game broadcasts from a handful of American cities could be heard on shortwave radios. But "when the Cubs came on, and it was the only station [people] could view, they naturally gravitated to the Cubs," says G. Michael Reid, a veteran Belizean journalist.
Other factors helped solidify the connection. There was (and still is) a large community of Belizeans in Chicago. "[They] started going to Cubs games and holding up signs like 'Hello, Belize!'" says Richard Wilk, a professor at Indiana University who was working in Belize at the time of Matthews's visit. "You could go out to the Cubs game and hold up a sign, and your grandma down in Belize would be able to see it." Eventually the Cubs organization—and even Harry Caray himself—began acknowledging its Belizean fanbase. The small country appreciated the recognition, says Wilk. "Belizeans are always getting lumped together with Jamaicans. They hate that."
Also, the Cubs were actually good. In 1984 they went all the way to the National League Championship Series, and three of their players—Ryne Sandberg, Rick Sutcliffe, and Matthews—finished in the top-five of National League MVP voting. (Sandberg, the Hall of Fame second baseman, would win the honor.)
The country's tiny size may have kept American television executives at bay. In a 1989 Washington Post dispatch from Wrigley - South, reporter William Branigin explained that "U.S. broadcasters consider the Belize market so small that trying to stop the operations would not be worth the trouble."
The turnout for Matthews—who Belizeans often refer to as just Sarge, his nickname—was enormous. During his parade through Belize City, "I couldn't get close to the road. I couldn't see a thing," says Wilk. Not too shabby for a country whose population was approximately 165,000 people at the time. According to Wilk, more people came out for Matthews than for Princess Margaret, who had visited the year before, and even Queen Elizabeth, who visited in 1986. Matthews brought baseball equipment along with him, which he donated to youth league teams, further enhancing the Cubs' reputation.
As the Cubs faded back into mediocrity, however, and additional TV channels sprouted up in Belize offering more than just WGN, many Belizeans moved on. Basketball is probably the biggest sport in Belize right now, says Reid, who admits he's not a Cubs fan. He lived in New York City for some time, and is actually a fan of the Knicks, "which is kinda like basketball's version of the Cubs—they just can't win."
Most of the fans watching the Cubs in Belize today are Gen-Xers who grew up watching the team, says Jerry Martinez, a 36-year-old banker from Santa Elena, a city in the western part of the country. If the Cubs can lock up the World Series, Martinez thinks the romance may be rekindled. There are still diehard fans in the country, he says, but "people here usually ride with winners," especially younger Belizeans.
However the season turns out, Martinez is determined to make his son a Cubs fan. "I grew up a Cubs fan and will die a Cubs fan," he says. "We're the lovable losers that introduced Belize to baseball."
The little Danish village of Jelling was the seat of the country's first Viking monarchs. King Gorm and his son, Harald Bluetooth (whose name and runic symbol were later given to Bluetooth technology) left behind massive pagan mounds, runic stones, and a Christian church to commemorate the paradigm shift that occurred between their reigns.
The first stone was erected by King Gorm the Old following the death of his wife, Queen Thyra, sometime around the mid-10th century. It reads, "King Gormr made this monument in memory of Thyrvé, his wife, Denmark's adornment." This is the oldest known writing referencing Denmark as a cohesive nation, and because of this the stone is sometimes called "Denmark's birth certificate."
The second, larger stone was erected by King Harald Bluetooth and reads, "King Haraldr ordered this monument made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian." This stone, erected some time after the first, is significantly more Christian in fashion. It marks a point of transition between paganism and Christianity in Denmark. This is driven home by the intricate Viking-style carving of Christ on the cross on the converse side of the stone.
Just beyond the stones are two massive mounds, constructed with architectural precision equal to the Egyptian pyramids. These are a traditional Scandinavian pagan burial, and the first is believed to be King Gorm's original tomb. The purpose of the second mound remains a mystery. The scant remains of a massive Viking ship have been unearthed between the mounds.
Towards the end of his reign, Harald had Denmark's first stone church erected at Jelling to solidify his Christianization of the nation. The church has been strikingly well-preserved, with frescoes from the 1100s still vivid and intact.
These are family heirlooms of sorts belonging to the Danish royal family, all of whom have descended from Gorm and Thyra's line, but the stones, the mounds, and the church are significant to all Danes. They represent the origins of their national identity, and they carry it with them when they travel out into the world—an image of the Christ carving appears on all Danish passports.
In the middle of the 19th century, a source of dolomite limestone was discovered in eastern Iowa. Shortly thereafter, multiple quarries began operating near the town of Anamosa, and proved so successful that the companies began building a striking stone town out of their gleaming white stock in trade.
However, the advent new technology made the business dry up, and today only a glimpse is left of the ambitious project that was Stone City.
Through the second half of the 19th century—particularly in the two decades after the Civil War—the quarries did a brisk trade, thanks to continuous demand for the high-quality stone in the construction of railroads, bridges, and building foundations. It was under these heady and intoxicatingly optimistic circumstances that Stone City began to form.
Reaching a population of 500 by 1880, the quarry proprietors began undertaking grand building projects to ornament their town. One of the first such structures, completed in 1883, was the magnificent Columbia Hall: a 54-room hotel that included a bank, a tavern, and an opera house that hosted some of the most famous entertainers of the time. Other notable buildings included a water tower, a blacksmith shop, a massive barn, a quarry office, a general store that also served as a post office and rail depot, and a few mansions for owners themselves. All of the buildings looked impressive, fashioned as they were of the same stately limestone the company produced.
However, when Portland cement started being produced in nearby Waterloo in 1905, the demand for Anamosa Limestone declined precipitously. Multiple Stone City quarries closed, and the estates of the proprietors were sold. An artists colony settled in the town in 1932; the artists in residence included Grant Wood, whose Stone City Iowa was his first major landscape (and was painted in the same year as his famous American Gothic). The colony was an artistic success, but a commercial failure. In 1938, Columbia Hall was torn down for the stone, which was taken to Cedar Rapids for use in various building projects.
While some of the buildings succumbed to the elements or were destroyed by fire, many thanks to being converted to private residences as well as preservation efforts by the Stone City Foundation.
A couple years ago, a story started to make the “news of the weird” rounds about roughly 100 brains missing from the University of Texas at Austin’s psychology department.
Curious about what kind of work goes into nailing a brain napper, I filed a public records request for any reports regarding the theft of the specimens.
A couple weeks later, I heard back: there weren’t any.
Turns out, that while this had been reported on as being the result of some recent Herber West-ian nefariousness, the real story was that the university was never quite sure how many brains it had in the first place, or even who the original owners of the brains happened to be. The collection’s own curator expressed doubt if their rather morbid crown jewel - the brain of infamous clock tower shooter Charles Whitman - was ever actually among the specimens.
So when an audit revealed that half the collection was missing, rather than call the police, the department issued a mea culpa and promised to keep better track of the brains in the future. After all, they couldn’t really prove what was missing in the first place. Which just goes to show: inadequate bookkeeping is a far more terrifying threat than zombies.
In 2015, American multinational corporations held an estimated $2.5 trillion in overseas tax havens, more than the GDP of the entire country of France. These tax havens are scattered across the globe, and one of the largest is inconspicuously situated in a five-story office building in the city of George Town in the Cayman Islands.
There are nearly 100,000 corporate entities worldwide that use the Cayman Islands’ 0% tax rate to dodge corporate taxes, a number higher than the territory’s population itself. These thousands of corporations could together form a miniature city or a major financial district, but in fact thousands of their offices have the exact same address.
The Ugland House in George Town covers a mere 10,000 square feet of land, but is simultaneously the official home of a whopping 18,857 corporate entities. Spanning just five stories, there is one corporation registered for every three square feet of space in the Ugland House. As President Barack Obama has remarked, “either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”
On the tip of a causeway in the Rhine River, a 3.3-meter-tall bronze female figure watches ships go up and down the busy waterway. Sharing a name with the slate promontory towering overhead, the Loreley Statue is a relatively recent addition to the historic riverscape, and memorializes a relatively recent mythological figure borne of German Romanticism.
Since the beginning of navigation on the Rhine River, the treacherous curve under the shadow of Loreley has destroyed an untold number of ships, claiming the lives of countless sailors. While practical explanations of the perilous site chalk it up to a rocky riverbed combined with an unusual drift, 19th-century poets created a more enchanting explanation involving a river siren enticing men to their doom.
The legend involves a young woman, Loreley, with long blond hair and a beautiful voice. One version describes Loreley as a mermaid who fell in love with a human and thus came ashore from the Rhine in the form of a farmer's daughter; another claims she was a sorceress from the nearby village of Bacharach. In either case, she fell in love with a young man who did not love her back, and thereafter sat on a rock overlooking the river, serenading it with sad songs. The beauty of both her voice and appearance was so enchanting that she caused distracted sailors to break their ships on the rocks and drown.
Like her origins, the end of Loreley's tale also varies. One version tells of the son of a local lord (the Palsgrave, or count palatine, to be exact) who heard about the nix and wanted to see her. When he came on his ship and spotted Loreley, singing and combing her hair, he immediately fell under her spell. He attempted to go ashore to speak with Loreley but slipped, was swallowed by the river, and drowned. When the lord learned of the accident, he dispatched soldiers to capture Loreley. Fearing her power, the arresting party, upon finding her, ordered Loreley to instead jump to her death.
Apparently happy to comply, Loreley held out an amber necklace and called to the Rhine, "Father, Father, fast, fast! Send the white steeds to your child, she wants to ride with the waves and the wind." Two rushing white waves in form of horses emerged from the Rhine and carried Loreley away with them. This is the origin of the "Father Rhine" nickname the river bears to this day.
The Loreley Statue was installed in 1983. Shipwrecks still occur at the dangerous curve, the most recent on January 13, 2011, when a tanker ship loaded with 2,400 tons sulfuric acid capsized. Thus, legends persist that the ghost of Loreley still appears—singing, combing her hair, and leading sailors to their deaths in the watery grave at the bottom of the Rhine.
For reasons science has not been able to discern, we are all inexplicably fascinated by the domino effect. Like moths to a flame and vampires to a pulsing vein, we can't help but be transfixed by the organized disaster of individual objects falling in unison.
This video by LXG Design does the domino effect with a twist—or, shall we say, spark?
Using 8,000 matches to form a red flower figure, the visual rhapsody of flame begetting more flame is hypnotizing. To make the video even more appealing, LXG Design shows it to us a second time in slow motion. Now, it isn’t just the rapid consumption of the matches that is enthralling, but the intensity and movement of the flames.
It's as destructive as it is captivating. As with a car wreck, you just can’t look away.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
