Who2 Editorial Blog
Notes and Commentary from the Editors
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Who's on the Million-Dollar Bill?
Grover Cleveland, apparently.(Seems to be borrowed from this.)
Interesting side note from the U.S. Treasury: Bills bearing the image of Santa Claus may be legal tender.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 10:47 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Wife Wants Fossett Declared Dead
The wife of adventurer Steve Fossett has asked a court to declare her husband legally dead."After nearly three months we feel now that we must accept that Steve did not survive," Peggy Fossett said in a statement.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 7:14 PM 0 comments
Belated 60th Congratulations
We missed it: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last week.They were married on 20 November 1947, just two years after the end of World War II. The queen is the first English monarch to be married for 60+ years.
In a nice touch, the royal couple celebrated with 10 other couples who also were married on the same day in 1947.
The BBC has 60 fascinatin' facts about the royal marriage. ("13. The fabric for the dress was woven at Winterthur Silks Limited, Dunfermline, in the Canmore factory, using silk that had come from Chinese silkworms at Lullingstone Castle.") And Royal Insight magazine has a different look back.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 1:08 PM 0 comments
Monday, November 26, 2007
Reinhold Niebuhr, Running Mate?
"Does Civilization Need Religion?" asked theologian Reinhold Niebuhr 80 years ago in the title of one of his many works on church and society.
Civilization may need Niebuhr, according to several U.S. presidential candidates. A recent Religion News Service feature calls Niebuhr an "unseen force" in the 2008 elections and mentions his influence on Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Niebuhr's writings also touched past public servants ranging from JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Reagan-era ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Why so influential? "Niebuhr's Christian realism -- his recognition of the persistence of sin, self-interest and self-righteousness in social conflicts -- highlights the distinction between the acknowledgement of evil's existence and America's own involvement in that evil," says the RNS story, which ran in September. Heady stuff -- and, for a guy born 115 years ago, amazingly in tune with the modern mood of Americans struggling through post-invasion Iraq.
The New York Times also ran a very lively article last year on modern Niebuhr-influenced liberalism.
Niebuhr was a fascinating guy. (He's also credited with creating the well-known Serenity Prayer -- "God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed...") Read more about him in our new profile. Or, read up on the current presidential hopefuls in our Who2 Loop, Candidates 2008.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 5:11 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Is This Man D.B. Cooper?
New York magazine unmasks the latest candidate for jumpin' skyjacker D.B. Cooper.
(Of course, there have been others.)
It was 36 years ago this weekend. Here's a nifty Cooper timeline.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 3:01 AM 1 comments
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Kennedy and Sirhan
Robert F. Kennedy would be 82 years old today. He was only 42 when he was shot to death by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.Sirhan has been in jail for almost 40 years, and he's still only 63 years old.
Three people born the same year as Bobby Kennedy: Paul Newman, Barbara Bush and Margaret Thatcher.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 3:55 AM 0 comments
Friday, November 16, 2007
The First Lady Who Never Was
Philosophy & First Ladies editor Paul Hehn has published a new profile of not-quite-First-Lady Anna Harrison.You may recall that her husband, William Henry Harrison, died 30 days after giving a 100-minute whopper of an inaugural speech, in the snow, without a hat or coat. Anna was still back in Ohio, packing, when he died.
Discover the whole nutty story in our new profile.
(William Henry Harrison, incidentally, was the first president touched by what used to be called The Curse of Tecumseh.)
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:15 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
New! Who2 Almanac
We're beta-testing a terrific new feature for our site: the Who2 Almanac.For a sneak peek, try storyteller Garrison Keillor or President Ronald Reagan.
The Who2 Almanac is our response to the changing sizes of the Internet, with all of us sifting more and more information on ever-smaller screens. Almanac pages help mobile users and impatient Web searchers find the absolute essentials:
- How old is Oprah?
- Where was Mozart born?
- Are the Olsen Twins old enough to rent a car? (Yes, if they pay extra.)
The Who2 Almanac even has its own domain: almanac.who2.com. For now the home page is simply a gawky (but useful!) list of page names. But we're working on that.
Tip of the stovepipe cap to the boys in Who2 Labs, especially "late 20s Web programmer" Adam DuVander and Mike "Smarter Stuff" Duffy, for this swell new feature.
Enjoy!
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:31 AM 0 comments
Monday, November 12, 2007
Wallace Shooter Released
Arthur Bremer, would-be assassin of George Wallace, released from prison after 35 years.See The Taxi Driver Connection for notes on Bremer's weird domino effect on Hollywood, Hinckley, and Reagan.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:32 AM 0 comments
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Norman Mailer, 1923-2007
Norman Mailer has died at age 84. The cause was reported as renal failure, though he also had lung surgery last month.
The leads from various obituaries:
"Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as 'The Naked and the Dead'..." (Associated Press)
"Norman Mailer, the prolific writer whose public brawls and macho swagger often overshadowed his Pulitzer Prize-winning prose that challenged society's views of politics and sex..." (Bloomberg)
"Norman Mailer, one of the last surviving literary lions to roar out of World War II..." (USA Today)
"Norman Mailer, the pugnacious two-times Pulitzer Prize winner who was a dominating presence on the U.S. literary scene across seven decades..." (Reuters)
"Norman Mailer, who co-founded The Village Voice 52 years ago, and whose walloping roundhouses, arrogant, despairing egocentrism, and tough-guy panache penned some the most powerful prose of the 20th century..." (The Village Voice)
"If Norman Mailer... wasn't larger than life, he sure gave it a run for its money." (The San Francisco Chronicle)
So long, Mr. Mailer, and thanks for some very colorful times.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:07 AM 0 comments
Monday, November 05, 2007
The Gunpowder Plot, +402 Years
Monday is Guy Fawkes Day.Yikes! Parliament historians describe what happened next:
All the co-conspirators... were probably subjected to extensive torture which formed part of the punishment for treason at the time... The executions took place on 30th and 31st January (Fawkes was executed on the 31st) and included hanging, drawing and quartering. The heads and other portions of the conspirator's bodies were set up at various points around Westminster and London.Hence the traditional November 5th greeting, "Don't quarter me, bro!"
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 5:51 AM 1 comments
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Cronkite, Child of 1916
Walter Cronkite turns ninety-one today.He's been retired for 26 years -- longer than he held the anchor chair for The CBS Evening News.
Fun fact: Cronkite was such an icon in his day that Swedish news anchors are known as Kronkiters.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 4:37 AM 0 comments
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Curious Birthday of Sarah Bernhardt
Our friends at Infoplease asked us to look into the exact birthdate of 19th-century superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt.Most everyone agrees she was born in 1844, but the exact date may be October 22, 23, or 25... or something else entirely. The tale is both lively and confusing.
First, a bit about The Divine Sarah, as she was known in her day. Cornelia Otis Skinner, in her 1967 book Madame Sarah, puts it this way:
I recently mentioned this name to a group of university drama students and was stunned to hear one of them ask, 'Who was Sarah Bernhardt?'... My impulse was to cry out, 'Who was Sarah Bernhardt!' Who, in her prime was known as The Eighth Wonder of the World and even in her declining years as the greatest personality France had had since Joan of Arc? Who, in every civilized city of the globe, was received with more frenzied enthusiasm than kings and military heroes in her own day or Presleys and Beatles in ours? Who had emperors kneeling at her feet, crowned heads showering her with jewels and adoring mobs throwing their jackets on the ground for her to walk on?Whew. Still, it seems more or less true. Bernhardt's specialty was highly-charged melodramatic roles like La dame aux camélias (aka Camille) and La Tosca (later adapted as an opera by Puccini). Onstage her mesmerizing charisma sent audiences into hysterical ecstacies. Offstage she wore lavish furs, traveled the world in private railcars, made and spent millions of francs, took lover after lover, and generally blazed a chinchilla-lined trail for the outsized screen celebrities of the 20th century.
Bernhardt herself reached the early edges of Hollywood, appearing in a few short films before her death in 1923. By then she was regarded as a French national treasure -- so much so, in fact, that a half-dozen Paris addresses already claimed to be the place of her birth.
In fact, there are questions about Bernhardt's place of birth, her date of birth, her mother's name, and her father's identity.
In trying to iron out the date (at least), we've consulted a dozen books on Bernhardt, from her own 1907 autobiography Ma double vie (My Double Life) to the excellent and glossy 2005 book Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama by professors Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, which accompanied a major Bernhardt exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York.
Here are the basics as we find them: Bernhardt's mother was a Dutch woman of Jewish descent who made her way in Paris as a courtesan. Most agree that her name was Youle (or Julie) van Hard. She was by no means married to Sarah's father; some say he was an accountant or law student named Édouard Bernhardt, other say he was a naval cadet (or officer) named Morel, and a hearty fringe group says it was an "uncle" named Edouard Bernhardt or Ker-Bernhardt, who later emigrated to Chile.
Of course, some also say her mother was really named Bernard to start with, or that she later changed her name from Van Hard to Bernard to Bernhardt.
If there was ever a birth certificate to clear all this up, it is nowhere to be found. Most scholars agree that it would have been destroyed along with other records of the day in the massive 1871 fire at the Paris Hotel de Ville (that is, City Hall).
Many biographers go by a somewhat-accepted tradition that she was born on October 23rd. Skinner says, "The locale may be disputed but two dates remain in common agreement, that of her birth and that of her death... For Sarah Bernhardt was born on October 23, 1844, and died March 26, 1923."
In his 1942 book The Fabulous Life of Sarah Bernhardt (great title!), Louis Verneuil says Bernhardt was born on October 23, 1844 and calls it "a definite event which was registered legally at the time."
But Verneuil doesn't say how it was "legally registered" or where he comes by the information, and that's the rub: Neither Verneuil, Skinner, nor anyone else we have read, is able to give any specific basis for October 23. The closest thing we found was Elaine Ashton's 1989 book Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage, which suggests that the actress herself was responsible:
Bernhardt sometimes celebrated her birthday on 23 October, although 22 October 1844 is the birthdate officially recorded in the Dictionnaire de Biographie Francaise, where her parentage is cited as the out-of-wedlock union between the Jewish coutesan, Julia Bernardt (sic) and the naval officer, Paul Morel, a native of Le Havre.If Bernhardt did like to celebrate her birthday on the 23rd, or any other day, she never put it in print herself. My Double Life (which, incidentally, can be found online at Google Book Search) skips her birth entirely, jumping right to the opening words "My mother was fond of travelling... she used to send my nurse clothing for herself and cakes for me."
Drama queen that she was, Bernhardt was not particularly hung up on facts. It seems she told many different tales to journalists and penny biographers during her six-decade career.
Arthur William Row, who claims to have become Bernhardt's press representative in 1916, described her attitude in his 1955 book Sarah the Divine: "Often when a weird story was brought to her notice, she would remark with the greatest insouciance, 'Oh, it wasn't that way at all!' Then she would add even more lurid details and send the gossip away a bit dazed with the picture she drew."
Row, for his part, comes out for October 22nd.
On the other hand, in The Art of High Drama Kenneth Silver notes that on the 1944 centennial of Bernhardt's birth, "French national radio attached a plaque to the building at 3 rue de l'École de Médecine." He translates it thusly:
25 October 1944As Silver points out, this would have been right after the Nazi occupation of Paris ended. Did French national radio have inside information on Bernhardt's date of birth? Or did they just throw up any date while indulging some national wartime pride?
Here was born
Sarah Bernhardt
Glory of our Theater
To complicate matters a bit more, Professor Ockman, in the same book, describes finding an "unidentified newspaper clipping" in the Bibliothèque de la Comédie Francaise in Paris, which included a copy of a baptismal certificate saying Bernhardt was born on September 25th.
Your high-tech modern-day sources aren't much help. Photos of her grave in Père Lachaise (same cemetery as Jim Morrison!) show simply the dates 1844 and 1923.
Most websites say October 22, 23 or 25 while showing no uncertainty about the date. But many of the more recent book biographies say frankly that there is ultimately no way to know the true details of Bernhardt's birth.
And that leaves us... where?
Based on our own research, we feel comfortable with October of 1844 as Sarah Bernhardt's month and year of birth. We don't feel comfortable naming any individual date. The 23rd is the traditional front-runner, but we can find no specific support or evidence for that date. When you add in the uncertainty about her father and place of birth, naming any specific day seems more like a best guess than a reasoned conclusion.
Therefore: We have listed simply "October 1844" as her date of birth in our profile of Bernhardt. We also note in the profile that the 22nd, 23rd, and 25th are the dates most often given. And we thank Infoplease for a very interesting question.
A side note: Those interested in reading more about Bernhardt may enjoy The Divine Sarah by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (1991, Alfred A. Knopf). Gerda Taranow's 1972 book Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend is a very lively study of Bernhardt's acting talent and techniques.
And Robert Gottlieb, writing in The New York Review of Books this May, provides a fine overview of Bernhardt's life and fame, plus a bibliography of over five dozen books to choose from.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 11:21 AM 2 comments
Friday, November 02, 2007
Paul Tibbets, Hiroshima Pilot
Paul Tibbets, Jr., the American pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan in World War II, has died at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.Tibbets was 30 years old when he flew his famous mission in the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. He had been flying bombers in Europe and Asia since 1942. Tibbets painted his mother's name on the nose of his plane the day before the mission.
Here's a clear page on the Enola Gay and its mission. Or try the archived pages from the controversial 1998 Smithsonian exhibition.
Tibbets' plane is now on display at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:09 AM 0 comments
