#1884 - 1926

[oldpaintings]

Interior of the Sculpture Museum, 1884 by Jens Wang (Norwegian, 1859--1926)

[davidhudson]

Emil Jannings, July 23, 1884 - January 2, 1950.

With F. W. Murnau on the set of Faust (1926).

[publicdomainreview]

Front cover to Flatland (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott, who died #onthisday in 1926. Read Ian Stewart's introduction to the strange tale of A. Square's geometric adventures, the first ever book that could be described as “mathematical fiction” https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/aspiring-to-a-higher-plane #otd

[quietcalligraphy]

Devotion: The Two Girlfriends (Henri de Toulouse-Latrec, 1884)

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

(Vita Sackville-West. Letter to Virginia Woolf. January 21st, 1926)

[mass-monumentalist]

This one is more somber than most (despite the sunny locale). When I set out to photograph cemeteries in Massachusetts, I imagined sprawling hills of death's head graves and a famous grave (or two).

But we cannot discount those that have been forgotten.

This is "Cemetery Hill" in Northampton, MA - it is the final resting place of the unclaimed bodies of those that died at the Northampton State Hospital, a mental institution that ran from 1856-1993.

The records seem to indicate that these people were buried on Cemetery hill: John A. L. Adams (Dec 1852-15 Feb 1905), Annie Bazzell (unknown - 19 November 1904), Kate Benton (unknown - 13 Sep 1903), Jennie Johnson Bregquist (4 Dec 1875 - 1926). Sarah Chapin Brundage (1842 - 27 Mar 1906), Thomas Grove Chaffee (19 Sep 1837 - 26 Jan 1912), Miles B Hicks (1821 - 21 Feb 1898), William Kuhn (1847 - 6 Dec 1884), Catherine Lockerly (1830 - 6 Jul 1884), Francis Alden Loud (10 Oct 1825 - 19 Mar 1885), Elizabeth Lowe (14 Oct 1880 - 12 Oct 1905). Nancy Sage Main (Oct 1813 - 26 Apr 1903), Josephine Villancoeur Monier (unknown - 19 April 1905), John O'Brien (1832 - 21 Sep 1883), Emma Patterson Petterson (unknown - 10 Feb 1905), Melvin C. Stone (unknown - 3 August 1906), and Michael Tool (unknown - 24 January 1905).

Cemetery Hill - Northampton, MA

[whencyclopedia]

Discovery of X-Rays

The discovery of X-rays – a form of invisible radiation that can pass through objects, including human tissue – revolutionised science and medicine in the late 19th century. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923), a German scientist, discovered X-rays or Röntgen rays in November 1895. He was awarded the first Nobel Prize for Physics for this discovery in 1901.

The thrill of the discovery became caught up in the late Victorian obsession with ghosts and photography. X-rays could 'photograph' the invisible, penetrating flesh, exposing bones and the human skeleton. 'Bone portraits' became popular, and photographers opened studios for a public fascinated by otherworldly images of skeletons.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

Wellcome Collection (CC BY)

One of the first medical uses of X-rays occurred in 1896 when John Francis Hall-Edwards (1858-1926), a British doctor, located a needle embedded in a colleague's hand. X-ray technology soon moved from being seen as a new form of photography to a modern diagnostic tool used by hospitals and medical practitioners.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a meticulous scientist, but the discovery of X-rays may have been an unintentional result of his work with cathode rays in his Würzburg laboratory in Bavaria, Germany.

Early Years

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Prussia (Remscheid-Lennep, Germany) on 27 March 1845, to a German textile merchant father and a Dutch mother. He was an only child and spent his early years in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. His father, Friedrich Conrad Röntgen (1801-1884), managed a cloth manufacturing business in Apeldoorn. The family had also moved due to political unrest in Prussia.

Röntgen attended the Utrecht Technical School from 1861 to 1863 but was expelled when a fellow student drew a caricature of a teacher. Röntgen was implicated but refused to name the student responsible. Despite excellent marks, he did not graduate with a technical diploma and could not obtain a degree in the Netherlands. He was accepted by the Mechanical Technical Division of the Federal Polytechnic School in Switzerland in 1865, where he gained a diploma in mechanical engineering and, in 1869, a PhD in physics with his thesis Studies on Gases.

The German experimental physicist August Kundt (1839-1894) was Röntgen's supervisor. In 1866, Kundt designed the Kundt Tube, a glass apparatus that measured the speed of sound in gases. Kundt significantly influenced Röntgen and his research career.

Röntgen followed Kundt to the University of Würzburg in 1870, where he worked as an unpaid assistant during a time of rapid advancements in experimental physics. Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was researching electromagnetic radiation and established the connection between light and electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell also took the first colour photograph in 1861, based on his three-colour theory that the human eye sees colour through a combination of blue, red, and green light. Massachusetts-born Samuel Morse (1791-1872) developed the electric telegraph, which transmitted messages over long distances, and Morse code to encode messages, while Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) invented the telephone.

Of particular interest to Röntgen was the work of German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) and British chemist William Crookes (1832-1919). Both scientists studied cathode rays – invisible streams of electrons whose behaviour can be observed when an electrical current is passed between the two electrodes (cathode and anode) in a glass vacuum tube. It is called a cathode ray because the electrons are emitted from the cathode (or negative electrode) when an electrical current heats it, and the electron stream glows. Johann Wilhelm Hittorf (1824-1914) was the first to detect cathode rays glowing green in the glass wall of a vacuum tube in 1869 but did not realise that X-rays had been produced during his experiments.

Röntgen became fascinated with the fluorescence caused by cathode rays hitting certain materials, such as salts like barium platinocyanide, which glow a greenish-yellow colour when exposed to cathode rays. It was this fascination that led to the discovery of X-rays.

Continue reading...

[vintage-russia]

Sketch of Natasha's costume for the opera "The Mermaid" (1884)

Viktor Vasnetsov (1848-1926)

[sourcreammachine]

presidents of the united states if there was a single, non-renewable six-year term:

(based on who’d be most likely to win an election in that year, not spinning any convoluted alternate history)

🔘george washington, 1788-94

🟤john adams sr, 1794-00

🟢thomas jefferson, 1800-06

🟢james madison, 1806-12

🟢elbridge gerry, 1812-14*, died

🟢james monroe, 1814*-18

🟢daniel d tompkins, 1818-24

🟢john adams jr, 1824-30

🔵andrew jackson, 1830-36

🔵martin van buren, 1836-42

🟡henry clay, 1842-48

🟡zachary taylor, 1848-50*, died

🟡millard fillmore, 1850*-54

🔵franklin pierce, 1854-60

🔴abraham lincoln, 1860-65*, killed

🔴hannibal hamlin, 1865*-72

🔴rutherford b hayes, 1872-78

🔴james garfield, 1878-81*, killed

🔴chester arthur, 1881*-84

🔵grover cleveland, 1884-1890

🔴benjamin harrison, 1890-96

🔴william mckinley, 1896-01*, killed

🔴theodore roosevelt, 1901*-08

🔴william taft, 1908-14

🔵woody wilson, 1914-1920

🔴warren harding, 1920-23*, died

🔴calvin coolidge 1923*-26

🔴herbert hoover, 1926-32

🔵frank roosevelt, 1932-38

🔵john ‘cactus jack’ garner, 1938-1944

🔵harry truman, 1944-50

🔴thomas dewey, 1950-56

🔴dwight d eisenhower, 1956-62

🔵john fucking kennedy, 1962-63*, killed

🔵lyndon b johnson, 1963*-68

🔴richard nixon, 1968-74*, resigned

🔴gerald ford, 1974

🔵jimmy carter, 1974-80

🔴ronald reagan, 1980-86

🔴george bush sr, 1986-92

🔵william clinton, 1992-98

🔵al gore, 1998-04

🔴george bush jr, 2004-2010

🔵barack obama, 2010-16

🔴donald tronald, 2016-2022

🔵kamala harris*, 2022-, (based on biden’s 2020 win, not on any 2024 events)

[breelandwalker]

basic witch question: how can i study and research folk magic and historical witchcraft?

I've been trying to search like this: "name of country/place +folk magic" on academic article sites but I haven't found much practical stuff and sometimes I don't find anything.

thank you for your attention

Good question!

The first thing you'll want to do is set aside the idea that you're going to find overt and accurate historical descriptions of witchcraft as we define it today. VERY few people who practiced some form of folk magic would have identified themselves as witches, because up until very recently, it was something you could be arrested, fined, and executed for doing. Even just the suspicion of such was enough to cause panics and widespread paranoia. What you're most likely to find is a collection of folk beliefs ABOUT witches and witchcraft, rather than actual witchcraft practices.

There are plenty of folk magic practices that resemble things we do in modern witchcraft, but they wouldn't have been called witchcraft by the people doing them back in the day. If you nailed a cluster of broomstraw over your door or scattered eggshells in your garden, it wasn't to cast a spell - it was just The Done Thing to keep trouble out of your home and help the crops grow.

Be prepared to find a lot of Christianity blended into the practices you do find. During the Christianization of Europe, new beliefs blended with older ones and created some very interesting regional amalgamations. So you'll often find invocations of saints or the Blessed Virgin, or particular psalms or prayers included as essential parts of certain charms. (It's also worth noting that the recitation of certain prayers was a method of short-term timekeeping, since they didn't exactly have clocks or timers.)

Be prepared also to find a lot of references to the Devil and devil-worship. For several centuries, the idea of witchcraft and demonolatry (consorting with and calling upon demons for power and supernatural aid) was synonymous across much of the Western world. It's very difficult to find a mention of witches in contemporary medieval or renaissance literature that is not immediately accompanied by some mention of devils or demons or familiars. This is a record of the superstitions of the day, NOT the practices of actual witches, no matter what Margaret Murray would have us believe.

To find the folk magic practices, if you can't find them by searching the term outright, study the regional folklore of the place you're interested in. Look particularly for anything to do with healers or spirits or fairies or ghosts or local superstitions. Where you find these, you will find whatever regional protection rituals the country people used to ward off trouble from ethereal beings, and possibly references to other related practices for love or luck.

Naturally, if you go back to classical antiquity (Greeks and Romans) or further, things will look very different. It all depends on the time and place.

It's important to note that most of the books we have which document these beliefs were written during the 19th-20th century spiritualism and occult fads, and while there is an earnest effort in most of them to record things academically from good sources, they should still be taken with a grain of salt.

Here are some titles I've found useful in my studies:

British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (Sikes, 1880)

Culpeper's Complete Herbal and English Physician (Culpeper, 1850 edition)

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (Yeats, 1888)

Magic and Husbandry: The Folk-Lore of Agriculture (Burdick, 1914)

Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (Folkard, 1884)

The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (Summers, 1926)

The Superstitions of Witchcraft (Williams, 1865)

You can find these and many similar titles on Project Gutenberg or Global Grey Ebooks. (And since they're in the public domain, they're free and legal to download!)

One final note - If you run into anything that mentions "folkish" traditions, bloodlines, or theosophy, put it down and walk away. That direction lies the pipeline to racist hate groups.

Hope this helps!

[psikonauti]

Gerardo Dottori (Italian,1884-1977)  

Burning City, 1926

oil on canvas

[mybeingthere]

“I...go on my bicycle or by train

out into the environs of Berlin.

And if...I find an interesting

plant...then I am obliged for the

next three or four months to make

virtually daily expeditions to

that spot in order to search again

and again for that same plant.”

Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt (1865 - 1932) was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as Urformen der Kunst.

Born in Schiele, Harz, Germany, he worked as an apprentice in an artistic form of iron casting at the iron foundry in Mägdesprung between 1881 and 1883 and studied art at the Institute of Royal Arts and Museum (later named College of Fine Arts, or Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in Berlin between 1884 and 1890. In 1890-1896 he participated in a project in Italy, run by Moritz Meurer, collecting plant material for drawing classes. During this period Blossfeldt started systematically documenting plant samples photographically. Some of his photographs appear in Meurer’s publications at the turn of the century. He started teaching at the Institute of Royal Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin in 1898, and continued working there as a professor from 1921 until 1930. His first exhibition was held in 1926 at the Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin; and published the book Urformen der Kunst.

[huariqueje]

Vico S. Spirito di Palazzo Napoli    -    Galante Francesco , 1926.

Italian,  1884 -1972

Oil in canvas,  43 x 31 c.m

[6kate1bishop6]

the hatford family history, as made up by me

disclaimer: this is an entirely made up family history that is based solely off of really quick google searches on life expectancies and such, if its not compatible with canon in places that is my bad also i made this all up so i could write about my oc so just ignore the redacted part of the family tree for the time being, a lot of this is based more on creating a comprehensive family relationship as opposed to making it historically accurate so my apologies

okay so starting from the top we have henry hatford born 1853 died 1893, he is a husbandman in suffolk just outside of ipswich, a lot of land in suffolk was enclosed (common land, which is kind of like parks basically green spaces that are free for anyone to use, was taken by often the rich and wealthy and mostly turned into agricultural land) so henry hatford is a farmer of enclosed land that is owned by like a lord, the agricultural scene in the mid 1800s was in decline i think but the hatfords farm remained fairly successful or at least affloat, imagine they were farming whatever the most popular crop at the time was

henry marries betje hatford nee de boer born 1855 died 1897 and this is where we get to the crime stuff, betje is from amsterdam we're not gonna question too deeply how and why she emmigrated to the uk or how she met henry maybe they had a meet cute when she arrived in london or henry was visiting mainland europe and they met there but either way they met and got married yippee, betje is from amsterdam and thus has family there, as rotterdam began to supplant amsterdam as the most popular port her family became desperate, in 1875 the port of felixstowe was opened and as betje was uniquely positioned near the port and her family were desperate they began a smuggling business, the port was newly formed and as such it was easier to bend the rules, the hatfords are now committing crime! with their new income they are able to buy out the hatfords farming land from whoever owns it and it becomes the hatford family estate, they build a house, likely something that looks similar to bletchley park just not on such a big scale, a victorian house which is larger than a standard suburban victorian home and not terraced but still has the bay windows and all those bells and whistles

so betje and henry hatford are committing crime, whats next? kids of course! their first child is ivo hatford born 1879 died 1922, ivo is their only surviving child, they also have katja hatford 1881-1882 and godfried hatford 1884-1884, as ivo is her only survivng child betje throws her all into him and nurtures him to take over the family business

ivo marries jessamine hatford nee kemp born 1882 died 1828, jessamine and ivo only have one child ingrid hatford born 1905 died 1959, ingrid is raised as the heir to the hatford crime family because betje instilled gender equality for committing crime into ivo, ingrid marries michael hatford nee fisher born 1903 died 1943, michael is obviously not a hatford by birth but was welcomed into the family graciously and decided to take the hatford family name imagine ingrid and michael as a childhood friends to lovers situation, michael dies during the second world war when working on the raf base in woodbridge which is the third point in our triangle of ipswich and felixstowe, the base opened in 1943 and fixed faulty aircraft and we'll say he died in an accident on the base sure

ingrid and michael had four children, three of which survived, edwin hatford born 1924 died 1985, antonis hatford 1926-1930, paula williams nee hatford 1928-1974 and sofia hatford 1929-1980

so paula marries mark williams 1924-1969 and have one child rachel williams 1945-present or at least still alive as the books are taking place

sofia is more interesting sorry not sorry paula, sofia marries paul cranmer 1920-1952 and they have two children lucile hatford nee cranmer 1946-book present and gabriel hatford nee cranmer 1950-book present, when sofia discovers paul has been abusing her children she kills him and begins a rerlationship with her life partner carla samuels 1927-1981, the kids revert to using sofias maiden name and all is happy yippee

back to the main hatford timeline, edwin is ingrid and michaels only surviving son so he gets raised to lead the hatford crime family because the hatford feminist spirit gets lost at some point post ww1

edwin marries theresa hatford nee hardings born 1934 died 1999, theresa and edwin have two children stuart hatford born 1957 and mary hatford born 1962 died 2005 and now we are in canon land so things start to get a little iffy

this is what is canon to me but ive just made this shit up so

theresa is a very demanding mother and puts a lot of pressure and judgement on mary, stuart is raised to be the next hatford heir but when edwin unexpectedly dies in 1985 the hatfords are left a little loose footed, theresa pushes mary to marry nathan and the marriage goes ahead in 1986, the books sort of imply that this was a power alliance kind of marriage or at least not a marriage born of love so the marriage helps to ensure the hatfords stay in power, it probably provided them with some moriyama connections

we can probably expect that if they weren't from the beginning the hatfords are probably now enmeshed in the drugs trade as well as other smuggling endeavors, this new alliance is likely to provide them with connections within america to smuggle things there

so neil is born 1988 and they go on the run in 1998 when he is 10, the books state that neil and mary spent a week in england with stuart and mary didnt want to stay with the hatfords because they were still a dangerous crime family, but what we see of stuart is less violent crime lord and more devoted family man who is also the leader of a crime family

what i propose is mary did not want to return to her family because she didn't want to stay with theresa, who died a year after they went on the run

considering nathan would probably have staged people at all airports on his side of america as soon as he discovered what mary had done, the hatfords smuggling abilities would have come in handy to find a way to extract neil and mary from america under the radar, their smuggling connections within europe would help form the basis for marys european connections and arguably the people who helped forge documents for them

now stuart, as i was coming up with this storyline to flesh out stuart in order to interact with my oc i have i think biased myself to a more positive overall view of stuart personality wise

but anyway now to talk shit about him, i think stuart would be a new labour voter i cant explain why he just gives blairite vibes to me, i think he owns proprty all across the uk and could feasibly be a landlord but also i dont want to make stuart a landlord, of his london properties he probably uses the ones in soho and near canary wharf/greenwich the most

anyway this took me like two hours to write out and all of yesterday to plan, if you intend to use any of this family history could you please credit me, if its not historically accurate then my apologies my english history knowledge unfortantuely has a glaring gap when it comes to the 1800s

[publicdomainreview]

Front cover to Flatland (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott, who died #onthisday in 1926. Read Ian Stewart's introduction to the strange tale of A. Square's geometric adventures, the first ever book that could be described as “mathematical fiction” https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/aspiring-to-a-higher-plane #otd

[dragoneyes618]

Pogrom is one of four words that antisemitism has given to the contemporary vocabulary - the others are genocide, the attempt to kill an entire people; Holocaust, the Nazi murder of six million Jews between 1939 and 1945; and ghetto, the name given to the enclosed areas in many European cities where Jews were forced to live until the twentieth century, and during the Holocaust.

While technically, the word "pogrom" refers to three waves of attacks against the Jews of Russia (in 1881-1884, 1903-1906, and 1918-1920), today the term is used to refer to any antisemitic attack.

The Russian pogroms radically affected Jewish life. American Jews, many of whose ancestors come from Russia, are very likely living here because of the pogroms. In 1881, when the pogroms began, more than half of world Jewry lived under Russian rule. However, the violent attacks quickly prompoted waves of Jews to flee the country, with most going to the United States. Twenty years later, during a second wave of pogroms, the number of Jewish immigrants in 1905-1906 alone exceeded 200,000.

The pogroms also caused a major upsurge in Jewish support for Zionism. The First Aliyah (wave of immigration to Palestine) came in response to the 1881 Russian pogroms, and the Second Aliyah in reaction to the ones that began in 1903. In 1989-1990, rumors of impending pogroms caused an immediate and enormous upsurge in Soviet-Jewish emigration to Israel.

In addition to the killings and looting, the most disquieting feature of the pogroms was the support they received from the Russian government. In the aftermath of six hundred pogroms that took place between 1903 and 1906, it was revealed that the pamphlets calling for the attacks had been printed on the press of the czar's secret police. My grandfather Nissen Telushkin, the rabbi of the small shtetl of Dukor, told me that Russian Jews used to wish for a corrupt police chief because he could be bribed to stop a pogrom. It was the "idealistic" police chief whom the Jews dreaded because when the order to make a pogrom was issued he could not be bribed. 

What was a pogrom like? Shocking eyewitness testimony was given by Sholem Schwartzbard. I offer it hesitantly The description is so sickening that images from it have on occasion haunted my nights. Schwartzbard himself was a survivor of the pogroms of 1918-1920, which occurred during the brief interval when the Ukraine was an independent republic under the rule of Simon Petlura. After the Soviets defeated the Ukrainian forces, Petlura escaped to Paris, where Schwartzbard assassinated him in 1926. After a three-week trial, in which Schwartzbard offered evidence of what Petlura, his troops, and the Ukrainian masses had done to the Jews, a French court acquitted him. This excerpt reveals the nature of a pogrom:

"At the end of August [1919], when I was in Kiev, Petlura's advance guard entered. They murdered all the Jews they met on their way. In the center of Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya Street, I saw the corpse of a young man stretched out on the pavement and, her head on his dead body, a woman lamenting for her one and only son. Hoodlums shouted obscenities, mocking her despair. One sermonized: "This is good. We'll show you, damned Jews, we'll slaughter you all."

[Elsewhere} they forced unfortunates to eat their excrement. They shoveled earth over them and buried them alive. Nor did they spare the dead...In Tripole on the Dnieper, Petlura's birthplace, after the fifth pogrom, forty-seven corpses of the old, the sick, and the children were left lying in the street, and no living soul remained after them. Dogs began to pick at the bodies, and pigs to nibble. Finally, a Gentile who used to work for Jews, out of pity dug a grave and buried them. The Haidamacks [Ukrainian soldiers] learned of it and for that they murdered him...."

All of the events described above occurred in the twentieth century.

- Jewish Literacy, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, pages 258-259

[your-resident-boat-person]

I'm not joking send me asks about ocean liners I love it

Here are my top 25 favorite Ocean Liners.

#1) SS America (1939)

#2) RMS Olympic (1911)

#3) RMS Queen Mary (1935)

#4) RMS Mauretania (1907)

#5) SS United States (1951)

#6) RMS Carmania (1905)

#7) RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (1967)

#8) SS Île de France (1926)

#9) SS Germanic (1874)

#10) RMS Berengaria (1912)

#11) RMS Carpathia (1902)

#12) SS Nieuw Amsterdam (1937)

#13) SS France (1960)

#14) SS Bremen (1928)

#15) SS Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse (1896)

#16) RMS Adriatic (1907)

#17) MV Georgic (1931)

#18) RMS Oceanic (1899)

#19) RMS Queen Mary 2 (2004)

#20) SS Great Eastern (1858)

#21) SS City of Paris (1888)

#22) RMS Aquitania (1914)

#23) RMS Majestic (1889)

#24) RMS Umbria (1884)

#25) SS Atlantic (1871)