Georges Prosper Remi, better known to the world as Hergé, was born on 22 May 1907. A Belgian comic book artist with almost no formal training, he is best remembered for the enduring character of Tintin. The boy adventurer with his trusted dog, Snowy, at his side has captured the hearts and minds of children and adults across the world. Nevertheless, from Steven Spielberg’s 3D film to the controversy over Tintin au Congo, Tintin’s creator remains elusive. We offer a glimpse into the life and personality of the “father of Tintin” with an excerpt from Hergé by Pierre Assouline:

Hergé had retained the soul of a child and never had to put Tintin in perspective; they were the same age. He considered Che Guevara a hero of Scouting. He was superstitious, having his fortune read on the eve of making a major decision. He consulted fortune-tellers, believed in auguries and the evil eye, and was drawn to the esoteric and paranormal. He believed himself different from the ordinary, which is perhaps why he looked on the royal family with both respect and a secret sense of identification.

He felt more a native of Brussels than a true Walloon and above all else was francophone. When in an exuberant good mood he spoke the Brussels dialect with a strong accent. He worried about the future of his country; he believed in the unity of the Belgian nation and was distressed to see signs of its coming apart. He became increasingly critical of his fellow countrymen, in the same way that he would not stand for shoddy workmanship. He often used the uneven pavement of the alley behind Avenue Louise as a metaphor of this. He was too much of a perfectionist to love his country without reservation. And yet, paradoxically, he was the personification of Belgium.

He had always been haunted by the fear of ending up like his mother, locked in a home for the clinically depressed. She had languished there much of her life, her condition untreatable, in the clinic of Doctor Titeca, a name that could not be pronounced in Hergé’s presence because it stirred up such painful memories. He was especially anguished by the specter of old age, easily becoming despondent about the future. His optimism hid a tragic vision of life. He did not have a vocation for happiness.

His friends did not know everything about him. Each knew only a portion of the truth, though he never compartmentalized his relationships. Rare were those to whom he opened himself up. There were certain subjects that were taboo and never mentioned in his presence, such as his mysterious grandfather and the last years of his mother. Another was children.

Officially, of course, he liked children. He even held them in high esteem, as his correspondence testifies. In the minds of most people, “Hergé” meant “children.” The image of his hero was superimposed on his own, and sometimes substituted for it. However, as his colleagues at the Studios knew, he systematically refused school visits. And it happened that he treated children who spontaneously came to greet him with impatience. One day, irritated by the noise of children playing in the courtyard of a special education school located just behind the Studios, he went to the police station and filed a complaint.

In all these cases these were other people’s children. “What I dislike the most are all these little babies and these old ladies,” he once said. When Numa Sadoul asked him if he thought of Tintin as his son, he answered, “That’s possible. I nourished and raised him. But despite all that, I think that I am enough of an adult to do without adopted children.” He erased these lines and replaced them with innocuous comments about being the father of Tintin.

In the early fifties, finding his brother Paul’s behavior toward his family completely irresponsible, Hergé proposed to legally adopt Paul’s two young children. He would see to their needs and give them a solid education, which they were missing, according to him. But their mother refused.

Much later, in 1978, there appeared a surrogate son. Hergé had taken on a second secretary to assist with his daily tasks. Alain Baran, the son of his old friend Dominique de Wespin, was born in 1951 and had recently left the world of dance. Though two generations apart, Hergé and Alain worked so well together that the young man soon represented Hergé in business matters. Hergé trusted him as if he were a member of the family. Their relationship became filial. Hergé had watched Alain, who had lost his father at an early age, grow up, and there was even talk in the Studios of an adoption. Some wondered if Alain were an illegitimate son. Baran found this so flattering that he did not deny it.

All this highlighted the fact that the only thing Hergé had not created was a real family. Twice married (he married Fanny in 1977), Hergé never had children. Germaine and Fanny both wanted to have a family. The problem was that Hergé was sterile due to the secondary effects of the use of radiation to treat a severe rash. It remained his secret. If he suffered from it, it was never enough to make him consult a doctor and seek treatment. Even with his intimate partners he avoided the subject. Yet it makes it easier to understand what a number of his friends knew, without ever admitting it openly: the father of Tintin did not like children, didn’t know how to behave toward them.

One of the most beloved characters in all of comics, Tintin won an enormous international following. Translated into dozens of languages, Tintin’s adventures have sold millions of copies. Yet, despite Tintin’s enduring popularity, Americans know almost nothing about his gifted creator, Georges Remi–better known as Hergé. Granted unprecedented access to thousands of the cartoonist’s unpublished letters, author Pierre Assouline gets behind the genial public mask to take full measure of Hergé’s life and art and the fascinating ways in which the two intertwine. Pierre Assouline is a prominent French journalist and writer. His has written several novels as well as acclaimed biographies of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and detective novelist Georges Simenon. He is also a film producer and was the 2007 winner of the prestigious Prix de la Langue Française. Translator Charles Ruas is the author of Conversations with American Writers and a frequent contributor to ArtNews and Art in America.

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On 22 May 1859, a Scottish doctor and writer admired the world round was born — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His university teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, was a partial model for his most famous character — Sherlock Holmes. Let’s listen in as Holmes explains the Silver Blaze to Watson:

‘Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson — which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. The fact is, that I could not believe it possible that the most remarkable horse in England could long remain concealed, especially in so sparsely inhabited a place as the north of Dartmoor. From hour to hour yesterday I expected to hear that he had been found, and that his abductor was the murderer of John Straker. When, however, another morning had come and I found that, beyond the arrest of young Fitzroy Simpson, nothing had been done, I felt that it was time for me to take action. Yet in some ways I feel that yesterday has not been wasted.’

`You have formed a theory, then?’

`At least I have a grip of the essential facts of the case. I shall enumerate them to you, for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person, and I can hardly expect your co-operation if I do not show you the position from which we start.’

I lay back against the cushions, puffing at my cigar, while Holmes, leaning forward, with his long thin fore-finger checking off the points upon the palm of his left hand, gave me a sketch of the events which had led to our journey.

`Silver Blaze,’ said he, ‘is from the Isonomy stock, and holds as brilliant a record as his famous ancestor. He is now in his fifth year, and has brought in turn each of the prizes of the turf to Colonel Ross, his fortunate owner. Up to the time of the catastrophe he was first favourite for the Wessex Cup, the betting being three to one on. He has always, however, been a prime favourite with the racing public, and has never yet disappointed them, so that even at short odds enormous sums of money have been laid upon him. It is obvious, therefore, that there were many people who had the strongest interest in preventing Silver Blaze from being there at the fall of the flag, next Tuesday.

`This fact was, of course, appreciated at King’s Pyland, where the Colonel’s training stable is situated. Every precaution was taken to guard the favourite. The trainer, John Straker, is a retired jockey, who rode in Colonel Ross’s colours before he became too heavy for the weighing chair. He has served the Colonel for five years as jockey, and for seven as trainer, and has always shown himself to be a zealous and honest servant. Under him were three lads, for the establishment was a small one, containing only four horses in all. One of these lads sat up each night in the stable, while the others slept in the loft. All three bore excellent characters. John Straker, who is a married man, lived in a small villa about two hundred yards from the stables. He has no children, keeps one maid-servant, and is comfortably off. The country round is very lonely, but about half a mile to the north there is a small cluster of villas which have been built by a Tavistock contractor for the use of invalids and others who may wish to enjoy the pure Dartmoor air. Tavistock itself lies two miles to the west, while across the moor, also about two miles distant, is the larger training establishment of Capleton, which belongs to Lord Backwater, and is managed by Silas Brown. In every other direction the moor is a complete wilderness, inhabited only by a few roaming gipsies. Such was the general situation last Monday night, when the catastrophe occurred.’

`On that evening the horses had been exercised and watered as usual, and the stables were locked up at nine o’clock. Two of the lads walked up to the trainer’s house, where they had supper in the kitchen, while the third, Ned Hunter, remained on guard. At a few minutes after nine the maid, Edith Baxter, carried down to the stables his supper, which consisted of a dish of curried mutton. She took no liquid, as there was a water-tap in the stables, and it was the rule that the lad on duty should drink nothing else. The maid carried a lantern with her, as it was very dark, and the path ran across the open moor.

`Edith Baxter was within thirty yards of the stables when a man appeared out of the darkness and called to her to stop. As he stepped into the circle of yellow light thrown by the lantern she saw that he was a person of gentlemanly bearing, dressed in a grey suit of tweed with a cloth cap. He wore gaiters, and carried a heavy stick with a knob to it. She was most impressed, however, by the extreme pallor of his face and by the nervousness of his manner. His age, she thought, would be rather over thirty than under it.’

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes contains a fascinating variety of stories, from narratives by Holmes himself to a meeting with his brilliant brother and the climactic and seemingly fatal meeting between Holmes and the criminal mastermind Moriarity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a prolific writer of science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. The Oxford World Classic edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes includes an introduction by Christopher Roden.

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May 22, 1570

Ortelius publishes first world atlas

On May 22, 1570, bookmaking and map-making history were made. Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish book collector and engraver published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Epitome of the Theater of the World) — the world’s first atlas.

Several features make Ortelius’s work groundbreaking. His was the first book that bound together a collection of maps that were consistently presented. It was also the first map collection to aim at comprehensive coverage of the known world and the first to organize the maps logically, with all those applying to the same continent or region grouped together. Finally, the Theatrum was the first work to include explanatory texts that discussed the regions portrayed.

Ortelius World Map ("Typvs Orbis Terrarvm"), 1570. Source: Library of Congress.

The Theatrum is important for another reason as well. In it, Ortelius drew from the work of several different cartographers, trying to create the most accurate maps possible based on the best sources available. The desire to make his maps authoritative helps explain why Ortelius published several new editions before his death in 1598. He and those who carried on his work expanded the volume as well. The 1612 edition had 167 maps, more than double the 70 maps in the original 1570 edition.

Ortelius was a careful scholar, and his atlas cited the work of 33 cartographers upon whom he drew. His listing of more than 50 other contemporary geographers gives useful insight into the fields of geography and cartography in the late sixteenth century.

Ortelius’s Theatrum quickly became recognized as the standard collection of world maps and as the model for all atlases to follow. By the early 1600s though, those who carried on the Theatrum were less careful than he had been. The work was discontinued after 1612, having been eclipsed in authority by a new atlas based on the work of Gerardus Mercator — the first book to use the name atlas for the genre.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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[See post to listen to audio]

“It’s interesting to hear a piece you’ve written for the first time because you hope that it’s going to sound exactly like you think it’s going to. There are times when, actually there are very few times I have to say, when I’m surprised by what I hear because I hopefully have a feel for what I’m going to hear.

“I remember a long time ago I met the composer Ron Goodwin when I was at school, he wrote 633 Squadron, and he always said he imagined when he wrote his orchestral scores, he imagined the London Symphony Orchestra playing them all the time. I think if I am honest, I normally have the sound of an English choir in my mind, the kind of choir that I know well, the kind of young, English, SATB choir. But of course you hear a lot of pieces done by different nationalities singing in English and that, for me, is very interesting.

“The piece Happy the Man I wrote for the Kyoto Echo Choir, a very fine Japanese choir and they were singing, of course, in the English language. They have a guy in the choir who is bilingual, who sings and speaks both Japanese and English very well and he taught them the English but of course they bring a different sound to the piece and I find that quite intriguing. It gives a different colour to the language and can surprise you in the way that it can make the piece sound slightly different. Equally, I recorded Happy the Man with the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir, a very fine choir from Poland and they again brought a different colour to the piece. Of course they try and sing in perfect English but they’re always going to bring a different sound and I like that. I think it gives different colours and different feelings to the piece.

“If I’m thinking about writing a piece for a choir from another country, depending on which country it’s from one might think of slightly different texts or might use the choir in a different way. I’ve found particularly with choirs in the United States, they often have a fine homophonic sound which I find that I enjoy as something that is slightly different to the English sound which is much more polyphonic and linear. It might have something to do with the kind of buildings that we’ve been brought up in as singers. We sing in resonant buildings and we sing very linear music. A lot of other people don’t have that perspective on sound. Maybe it’s much more, as I say with the American sound, much more homophonic, much more voices singing words in unison.”

Bob Chilcott has been involved with choral music all his life, first as a Chorister and then a Choral Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. Later, he sang and composed music for 12 years with the King’s Singers. His experiences with that group, his passionate commitment to young and amateur choirs, and his profound belief that music can unite people, have inspired him both to compose full-time and, through proactive workshopping, to promote choral music worldwide. He is the composer of Happy the Man, The shepherds sing, The Nine Gifts, and The Angry Planet among others.

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Imagine that time machine has finally been invented. All of the ancient Earth can now be visited. One could experience the world as it was: see long-dissipated cloud systems with one’s own eyes, feel ancient rain and primeval winds, and sense the warmth of prehistoric sunshine on one’s back. A safari into the ancient past with just 5 stops were allowed. Where would one choose to go?

Even today, we have a huge range of climate on Earth, from poles to equator, from bone-dry desert to steamy jungle. But, back in the deep past, one might see sights far stranger, beyond even the dreams (and nightmares) of Hollywood.

For the first stop, let us take a journey back close to the beginning of the Earth, to the early Archaean, nearly four billion years ago. We would need something like a space suit, for then the atmosphere had no oxygen. How to regulate the thermostat? There is tantalizing evidence — controversial, disputed evidence — that the world might, then, have sweltered at nearing eighty degrees Celsius. Be careful as you open those time-machine doors!

For the second stop, the opposite extreme. Go armed with the warmest of arctic gear — in triple layers, at least. Fast forward to three-quarters of a billion years ago. The Earth went through deep freezes more intense than anything before or since. It would be marvellous to cautiously explore that long-gone planet. Was there really, as some scientists now say, a worldwide carapace of ice, both land and sea, with no evaporation, clouds, rain, nor snow? In such a world, the hydrological cycle would be stilled. A brilliant blue sky would hang endlessly above the gleaming ice. Or were there (as some say) patches of frigid open water to spawn small weather systems? If so, this would be a world of slush as well as ice.

Stop three. Well, obviously, we need to go back to the dinosaurs, only a hundred million years ago or so. There, once one has gazed at those ‘terrible lizards,’ take a trip to the arctic circle to find not ice but green forests, of conifer, cycad, and monkey-puzzle tree. Inhabitant dinosaurs adapted to living half the year in darkness, and half in day-round light. How did this greenhouse world function, and how did the polar regions stay so warm? We still don’t quite know.

Stop four. Let’s go for drama. The last ice ages, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, weren’t just cold. They were violent. Order the time-ship to hover in the sky above north America, at, say, 13,000 years ago. One would see a mighty ice-dam bursting and a lake greater than all the Great Lakes put together pour in an awesome torrent into the sea, scouring the land as it roars along. After a couple of weeks of this, sea level is metres higher. The inrush of icy waters have stilled warmth-providing ocean currents, and the temperature now drops like a stone. Best reach for that life-saving warm fleece.

Stop five must be… the future, perhaps in a thousand years time. What would one see, then? The smart money is on the world going back to a state like the Pliocene Epoch, five million years ago: warmer than today, with less ice. One might snorkel, for instance, over the drowned cities of 21st century civilisation…

Alas! A time machine seems to be impossible, but adventure is not. The real high excitement comes in working out what the world was like long ago from the evidence that lies hidden within ancient rock strata. It’s a real detective story, a whodunit stretching back more than four billion years. It might help us, too, to glimpse our future.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Senior Lecturer in Geology at Leicester University. He is the author of The Earth After Us and The Planet in a Pebble. Mark Williams is Reader in Geology at Leicester University. Both are established researchers into palaeoclimates and climate change. Together, they are the authors of The Goldilocks Planet: The 4 Billion Year Story of Earth’s Climate.

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When talking about children’s emotions, it is difficult to avoid saying things that are not already commonly known, or even common sense. Recent advances in the psychology and neuroscience of emotions, however, now offer us a new understanding of the nature of emotion. In childhood and throughout life, our emotions guide our thoughts and our imagination, our behavior and our moral judgments.

Curiosity and wonder, so evident in the enthusiasms of young children and so much a part of their charm, are expressions of the basic human emotion of interest. Many of us may not, at first, think of interest as an emotion. Psychologists and neuroscientists, however, now regard interest as a fundamental emotion that motivates and guides our engagement in the world.

Interest is vital to emotional health in childhood and remains vital throughout life. Without interest, there is no curiosity, no exploration, and no real learning. The psychologist Sylvan Tomkins explained that, “ interest is the only emotion that can sustain long-term constructive or creative endeavors.”

Interest is also of critical importance to our relationships with our children. My therapeutic work with children and families has repeatedly taught me this basic lesson: Children respond to our animated expressions of interest in their interests with evident pleasure. Children enjoy this interaction and they want more of it.

As parents, our enthusiastic responsiveness to our children’s interests is the surest way to engage them in some form of meaningful dialogue or interaction, and a first principle of strengthening family relationships.

Many parents express concern about the limited range of their child’s interests and about their child’s inability to sustain interest (and effort) toward important goals. As a therapist, I am often told, for example, “He’s not interested in reading (or writing, or drawing, or riding a bicycle).” These parents experience frustration and dismay at their unsuccessful efforts — with any form of cajoling, rewards, or punishment — to broaden their child’s interests.

If we look hard enough, however, we will find in every child some interest and a desire to do well. When I talk with “unmotivated” students, I often find that they are interested in many things (although not in their schoolwork). They may watch the History or Discovery channels, but they will not read a history or science book. Some read National Geographic magazine in my waiting room, but they do not do their homework. Many are interested in sports, theater, fashion, Seinfeld and South Park, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart, or theories about the origin of the universe. Often they are interested in music and they are almost always willing to tell me about it.

Many of these children, to their parents’ great dismay, spend hours searching websites when they should be studying. Even more have become addicted to video and computer games, to World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. We may disapprove, but these are their interests. And where there is interest, there is curiosity and a desire to learn.

I therefore advise parents, first, to engage their child’s interests, and then to expand these interests into constructive projects and long-term goals. Make note of moments of interest and effort, and support them. Find out why these activities appeal to him. If he likes playing video games, watch him play. Then play with him. Have him teach you the game. If we want to motivate our children, to build a bridge, we cannot simply meet them halfway. We must do more than that.

In his work with autistic children, child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan taught both parents and child therapists this seminal insight: that even the repetitive behavior of a 2-year-old child who is rubbing the carpet is an expression of interest, and this interest can become the beginning of an interaction, then play, and then dialogue. If we dismiss our children’s interests as frivolous or unproductive, we will miss an opportunity to engage them in dialogue. William Damon offers this wise advice: “Listen closely for the spark, then fan the flames.”

Kenneth Barish is the author of Pride and Joy: A Guide to Understanding Your Child’s Emotions and Solving Family Problems and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University. He is also on the faculty of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the William Alanson White Institute Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training Program.

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When John Ruskin (1819-1900) began Praeterita (1885-9), his unfinished autobiography, he had no obvious models of what an autobiography should look like, nor a clear view of his audience.

As far as models go, Ruskin is closest (though not very close) to John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865). I don’t mean that Praeterita is primarily or explicitly theological. Rather, that Ruskin, like Newman, wanted to write a history of his mind’s development. “How I learned the things I taught,” Ruskin says in Praeterita, “is the major, and properly, only question regarded in this history.” More locally, Ruskin borrowed Dickens’ tone of comic retrospection from David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-1). For the rest, he was hesitant, changing manner and style as he made his own way through his life story. But who was his intended audience?

Ruskin had spent a lifetime addressing a public. He was not interested in his own fame, but only how he might serve the interests of those worthy of praise. Those were primarily painters, writers, architects, and later in his life, anyone who had, as Ruskin saw it, nobly fulfilled their God-given responsibilities. So why write about himself at the end of his active life?

Part of the answer, of course, is simply that Praeterita is a supplement to Ruskin’s public writing. It tries to describe the personal context, the private feelings, which lie behind his celebrations of Gothic architecture, Turner, northern Italy, eastern France, the Alps.

But, despite that, Praeterita can read as if it had no large audience in mind anyway. It is a private, intimate text. Praeterita was not first conceived as a book, but as a series of instalments. Its publication was occasional, and it was circulated in parts between friends, as if it was written for them. Some are individually addressed in the text.

More precisely, Praeterita often sounds as if Ruskin is addressing an idealised group of people who shared his own values. Readers are imagined to be already on his side. They love the mountains and hate restorations of buildings; they contemplate art with care and reverence, and do not look at the world with all the breathless haste of modernity; they care for what they were appointed to do and they spurn social climbing, selfishness, and avarice. Their faith is in God who appointed all people to individual tasks and equipped them with the skills and aptitude to fulfil those tasks.

It is little wonder that Ruskin thought he only had a small audience left.

Ruskin always believed that God had imparted to him responsibilities as an art and social critic to expound the fidelity of Turner’s vision, and to explain the meaning of Gothic architecture. But in the late 1880s, he had to admit, after decades of increasing disappointment and attempts to deny that disappointment, that he had not succeeded as he had hoped. That was the mood in which the autobiography was written.

Ruskin had begun his career with great expectations. He had believed himself, particularly in Modern Painters I (1843), a flag carrier. But his views on Turner had been attacked. The Pre-Raphaelite painters hadn’t followed his advice or lived up to his ambitions for them. Venice, to which he had dedicated enormous energy, remained in peril and the city’s warning to England to hold true to the Christian faith had not been heard. As he penned Praeterita, more than four decades since his public career began, Ruskin could not readily see that his influence had been extensive or helpful. He had either been misheard or not heard at all.

Ruskin in Praeterita sometimes doesn’t bother to explain details of what he is talking about, not because he has forgotten or does not care, but because he is writing for an imagined group of people who understand already. These are the ideal readers of the text — a small cluster who are sympathetic, informed, supportive, and already on board. They live primarily in Ruskin’s imagination not in reality. They are, in fact, versions of Ruskin himself.

That, I think, is the deepest sorrow of Praeterita. In a sense, Ruskin isn’t writing for an audience because he no longer thinks he has one. He had long believed that throughout his life, he had been fully alert to the remarkable revelations of nature and of art, and attentive to the best that had been thought and felt in the past. But those revelations and realisations hardly had availed him, for he now thought that he had persuaded few of their significance. The compelling sorrow of Praeterita is that Ruskin, in the late 1880s, thought he was often talking to himself.

Francis O’Gorman was born in Shropshire and educated at the University of Oxford. He has written widely on English literature, and recent publications include essays on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Edmund Gosse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, and the value of literary research. Recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (2010), and editions of Margaret Oliphant’s The Makers of Venice (2012), John Ruskin’s Praeterita (Oxford World’s Classics, 2012), and, with Katherine Mullin, Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children (Oxford World’s Classics, 2011). He is currently Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds.

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He came as it were from nowhere, setting out on May 20, 1927 on a journey. The non-stop New York to Paris flight was a dream of many great aviators, and they had failed — many of them tragically — to achieve it. Six, all with sterling war records, had died or disappeared trying. The prevailing theory of the experts was to put together a crew of three or four, build a big plane to withstand the stresses and turbulence of the transatlantic flight, strap on as many engines as you can, and fill the fuel tanks to the brim.

Charles Lindbergh, an unknown postal flier, challenged this approach. He scraped together the money for a craft of his own design: tiny, sleek, and as light as possible (not even a radio). He would make the 33 hour trip alone on a course he had sketched out himself. Tall, young, and impossibly handsome, a Midwestern innocent taking on the Atlantic by himself, he put his life on the line (“sleep is death”) competing against the biggest names in aviation. And he bested them all.

Even when they did make it across the ocean (as Richard Byrd and Clarence Chamberlin did within weeks of his flight), their flights were barely saved from disaster. His was picture perfect. In air-crazed Paris — and it was Paris’s frenzied welcome that set the tone for the rest of the world, including the USA — he was lionized for the gracious way that he shared his victory with those who had come before and with those who had died to make his world free. Moreover, the other fliers were tainted by war. They represented aviation’s wrong turn, its misguided use for killing during World War I. He was clean, wholesome, and a symbol of aviation’s better possibilities.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Source: New York Public Library.

In this greedy age, he refused the blandishments of sponsors, movie producers and would-be patrons, turning his back on millions of dollars of easy money. In this age of “normalcy,” of sports heroes and movie stars, of corporate business and unionized labor, he offered America an example of transporting individual achievement, genuine courage, and solid integrity.

It is impossible today to comprehend the scale of his popularity, the void he filled in a bloody era searching for fresh heroes and new departures. War on a scale no one had ever imagined had drained the world of optimism. And in an age desperately searching for a moral equivalent of war, he demonstrated transcendence without menace.

In Paris, the wily American Ambassador Myron Herrick worked a remarkable transformation. Under his admiring but firm hand, this unlettered fly boy became a nonpareil agent of American diplomacy, impressing the world with his modesty, grace, and dignity. Thereafter, tutored by a coterie of advisers, he led American aviation to world dominance.

Yet the Lindbergh story comes with a grave caveat. Like so many others, when he was removed from his own area of excellence, the graceful hero exposed a cloven hoof. As he turned to philosophy and politics, he revealed a deep racism that led to an open flirtation with Nazism.

Thomas Kessner is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation, which will be released in paperback later this year. His other books include Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Dominance, 1860-1900 and Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

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May 20, 1498

Da Gama reaches Calicut, India

On May 20, 1498, sailing for the Portuguese crown, Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, India. Having successfully sailed around the southern tip of Africa, da Gama had pioneered a sea route from Europe to Asia that bypassed the Muslim nations that controlled the overland spice trade.

In his late thirties at the time of his voyage, da Gama was the son of a minor Portuguese nobleman. Why he was chosen by Portugal’s King Manuel to lead the expedition to India is unknown; his only achievement to date had been carrying out a mission for Manuel’s predecessor a few years earlier. Nevertheless, he was named to head the historic voyage.

Vasco da Gama's ship with gods above by Ernesto Casanova (ca. 1880). Source: Library of Congress.

The voyage posed many challenges. The trip across the southern Atlantic left the ships a worrying three months without sight of land, and the expedition met hostile natives in southern Africa — who gave da Gama an arrow wound — and Muslims in eastern Africa. The long voyage also took a serious toll of the crew; around two-thirds died during the voyage, most of disease.

Once he reached Calicut, da Gama’s reception was not very warm. The goods Manuel had sent as gifts were of poor value, infuriating Calicut’s ruler. Still, da Gama was able to leave India with some spices. After a long and harrowing return trip — which included the death of his brother — da Gama reached Portugal in September of 1499, more than two years after having set out.

He was greeted as a hero and richly rewarded by the king. With his voyage, the Portuguese overseas empire was born.

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On 20 May 1609, Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in London by Thomas Thorpe (work now found in the Folger Library). The Bard was nearing the end of his play-writing career and soon to retire. A lifetime of poetry was gathered together and printed — possibly without the permission of the author. To celebrate, we’ve excerpted Sonnet 127 and additional commentary from our Oxford World Classics edition edited by Colin Burrow — The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Enjoy the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s poetry.

Sonnet 127

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her brows so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland’ring creation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

Sonnet 127 begins a group of sonnets which are chiefly about a mistress with dark hair and dark eyes whom Shakespeare never calls a ‘lady’, let alone the ‘dark lady’ favoured by his biographical critics. Scores of women with dark hair and dark eyes who were capable of doing dark deeds have been identified as her historical original (see Samuel Schoenbaum, ‘Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: A Question of Identity’ in Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter, eds., Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, 1980), 221–39). Her appearance is designed to enable the sonnets to dwell on the paradoxes of finding ‘fair’ (beautiful) something which is ‘dark’. This group is likely to contain the earliest Sonnets in the sequence, for two reasons: (a) two of them appear in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1598 (138 and 144); (b) there are no late rare words in this part of the sequence. On which, see Hieatt, Hieatt, and Prescott, ‘When did Shakespeare Write Sonnets 1609?’.

1      black . . . fair Dark colouring (dark hair and dark eyes) was not considered beautiful (with a pun on fair meaning ‘blonde’).
2      Modifies the previous line: ‘or if it was called fair it wasn’t called beautiful’.
3      successive heir the true inheritor by blood. Successive is a standard term to describe hereditary succession (OED 3b) as in The Spanish Tragedy 3.1.14: ‘Your King, | By hate deprivèd of his dearest son, | The only hope of our successive line’.
4      And beauty . . . shame (a) beauty is declared illegitimate; (a) beauty is publicly shamed with having borne a bastard. The desire for paradox here creates a genealogical problem: beauty is both the source of due succession and its own illegitimate offspring.
5      put on Nature’s power usurped an office which is properly Nature’s (through cosmetics)
6      Fairing the foul making the foul beautiful (or blonde). The use of fair as a transitive verb is not common, and would have added to the deliberate strangeness here, which anticipates the witches in Macbeth 1.1.10: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’.
7      no name . . . bower no legitimate hereditary title (or reputation) and no sacred inner sanctum. Bower is usually glossed as a vague poeticism (so OED cites this passage under 1b: ‘a vague poetic word for an idealized abode’), but it continues the poem’s concern with legitimate succession and bastardy, and means ‘a bed-room’ (OED 2). Not even beauty’s bedchamber is safe from profanation.
8      is profaned is defiled, perhaps with a suggestion that her holiest places have been invaded
9      Therefore because of beauty’s profanation (by the abuse of cosmetics) they are black in mourning
raven black Compare the proverb ‘As black as a raven’ (Dent R32.2).
10      brows Q’s repetition of ‘eyes’ has prompted many emendations. Staunton’s is the most convincing, since black brows (eyebrows) are elsewhere referred to by Shakespeare (L.L.L. 4.3.256–8: ‘O, if in black my lady’s brows be decked | It mourns that painting and usurping hair | Should ravish doters with a false aspect’), and are often treated as expressive (e.g. ‘I see your brows are full of discontent’, Richard II 4.1.320).
so suited and similarly attired, and. And may mean ‘As if ’, ‘as though’ (OED 3), as in Dream 1.2.77–8: ‘I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale’.
11      At . . . lack at those who, despite not being born beautiful, do not lack beauty through their use of cosmetics. Beauty here almost merits inverted commas, since it has been so thoroughly contaminated by its context.
12      Sland’ring . . . esteem giving a bad name to what is natural by making real beauty indistinguishable from false
13      so in such a way (leading to that in l.14).
becoming of gracing, suiting so well with that they become beautiful
14      so i.e. black like the mistress’s eyes

The Times Literary Supplement called The Oxford Shakespeare “not simply a better text but a new conception of Shakespeare. This is a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship.” It offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers, including a new, modern-spelling text and on-page and facing-page commentary and notes. It was edited by Colin Burrow, University Senior Lecturer and a Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

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This is the final installement of excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard paired with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout. Read previous posts “A painter and his subject’s humble origins,” and “A former slave in Georgetown,” “Freedom delayed, bought, lost, and regained,” and “A case of mistaken identity.”

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

A comparison of the Peale and Simpson portraits reveals curious similarities. Yarrow is wearing the same style knit cap in both, although the stripes are in different colors. The collar and buttons of his jacket are the same. He has a white shirt and red waistcoat in both paintings, but his jacket is unbuttoned in the Simpson to show more of the waistcoat. Even the pose, forehead wrinkles, and whiskers are the same in the two paintings. Yarrow looks significantly older in the Simpson painting, although he was in fact only three years older. Whether the difference stems from Peale’s desire to produce a flattering image or from some illness that caused Yarrow’s appearance to age rapidly is not known.

As for the clothes, Yarrow might have worn the same, or similar, clothes to both sittings, even if they were several years apart. While he had $200 in bank stock and a house in Georgetown, he was by no means a rich man. But another curious fact is that in the early 1800s, Georgetown College required students to have a blue jacket, blue pantaloons with yellow buttons, and a red waistcoat to wear on Sundays. One of Brooke Beall’s sons went to Georgetown for a semester or two before dropping out. Perhaps Yarrow was wearing a Georgetown uniform for both paintings, one he acquired from Brooke’s son or from one of the Georgetown boys, who Peale said were “teazing” him. Yarrow bought coarse ozanburg from Brooke Beall in 1790 and was probably wearing clothes made from that fabric when he was a slave, but he obviously dressed better as a free man, particularly when there was an artist around that wanted to paint his picture.

The only significant difference in clothing in the two paintings is that Yarrow has a leather greatcoat draped over his shoulders in the Peale painting. The expensive coat is something that only a wealthier man than Yarrow could afford. The coat is just the kind of thing that the great Charles Willson Peale might wear when traveling around Georgetown on a cold January day. It contributes to Yarrow’s look of wealth and substance. Thus, it seems likely that the painter draped his own coat over Yarrow for artistic reasons or to help make a statement about racial equality. Peale biographer Charles Coleman Sellers wrote this about the portrait of Yarrow Mamout: ‘‘When he [Peale] was cool toward the sitter, or uninterested, the portrait is often unrevealing, stiff, and even awkward. But when his heart was warm toward his subject he recorded not only the features but his own friendly feeling with both sympathy and charm.”

Yarrow died on January 19, 1823. Even in death, Peale helped distinguish him: He wrote an obituary and sent it to newspapers. Rarely did newspapers then carry obituaries for African Americans. The Gettysburg Compiler was one of the papers that carried Yarrow’s. Since the obituary contains much the same information and phrasing as Peale’s diary, he surely wrote it. But there is an added fact. The obituary said Yarrow’s body was interred in the corner of his garden, the spot he usually resorted to pray. Yarrow must have excused himself while sitting for the portrait, gone outside to the southeast corner of his lot, bowed to Mecca, and prayed.

Died — at Georgetown, on the 19th ultimo, negro Yarrow, aged (according to his account) 136 years. He was interred in the corner of his garden, the spot where he usually resorted to pray — Yarrow has resided in town upwards of 60 years — it is known to all that knew him, that he was industrious, honest, and moral — in the early part of his life he met with several losses by loaning money, which he never got, but he persevered in industry and economy, and accumulated some Bank stock and a house and lot, on which he lived comfortably in his old age — Yarrow was never known to eat of swine, nor drink ardent spirits.

That Peale was the author explains why the obituary was in a Pennsylvania newspaper.

Yarrow’s death was not the end of the family or Yarrow’s own narrative. He would be talked about in Georgetown for several more decades. Then there was his sister, his son, his son’s wife, and her relatives.

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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“Blasphemy”! That was the only remark that anyone heard from the woman after she stormed out of the orchid society meeting in Florida. Taken aback for a moment, the speaker continued his talk on orchid evolution to an otherwise appreciative audience.

In the course of the last 13 years, five of the six volumes of Genera Orchidacearum have been published. It has been a massive project to monograph the approximately 800 orchid genera established on a firm phylogenetic foundation, each generic treatment including the description and distribution, and what is known about its anatomy, palynology, cytogenetics, phytochemistry, phylogenetics, ecology, pollination, uses, and cultivation. Driving the classification is a heavy reliance on available DNA sequences from multiple genes and gene regions, which have laid bare true relationships beneath many millennia of mainly floral convergences in response to pollinator pressures, as well as many centuries of artificial keys in floras and monographs that used such floral characters to define the genera.

Without these evolutionary studies, we would not be able to answer questions that have plagued orchid scientists for years. Citing only a few examples, we now know that:

• The Orchidaceae is one of the oldest flowering plant families, dating from the Late Cretaceous, some 76-84 million years ago when Tyrannosaurus shook the earth. Reminiscent of Jurassic Park, the answer ultimately came from the discovery of pollen masses of an orchid stuck to the back of a bee. What made this situation unique was that the bee was embedded in amber and so could be dated with some degree of accuracy. Prior to this, the long-standing conventional wisdom was that the orchid family was a relative newcomer to the evolutionary scene.
• Vanilla is one of the oldest orchid genera, which helps to explain its pantropical distribution with the exception of Australia.
• The first orchids were terrestrials, not epiphytes, as some have claimed.

Just as important, evolution is consistent with data from other scientific disciplines such as geology and provides a robust, genetic, predictive framework on which to base other scientific studies of all types in the future.

Dr. Alec M. Pridgeon is presently Sainsbury Orchid Fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he specializes in molecular phylogenetics and co-edits and contributes to Genera Orchidacearum, a comprehensive multi-volume monograph of the orchid family. He has written or co-written more than 50 scientific articles or book chapters and more than 100 popular articles, edited 14 books including the Proceedings of the 14th World Orchid Conference and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Orchids, and compiled the Orchid Action Plan for the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN in Geneva. In 2011 he was elected Chairman of the International Orchid Committee.

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The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. In this week’s VSI column, we give you Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series!

Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction

By Jonathan Slack

When I arrived in the USA as a professor I was surprised to find how specialized American scientists are. Most US biomedical labs just seem to work on one molecular pathway or even one molecule. This means that everyone knows a huge amount of detail about their object of study. On the other hand, a whole career of research would only translate to one sentence of an undergraduate textbook, even if it were deemed important enough for that.

Why do we need so much detail? Biomedical scientists always say that a detailed understanding of mechanism  is needed to invent new cures for disease. If some protein is involved in, say, heart development, then 25 years study of the protein will establish a detailed picture of its functions and interactions and enable drugs to be designed to stimulate or inhibit its activity. This might one day cure some disease afflicting the heart.

To some extent, politicians and funding agency managers promote the same view of events. They seem to believe that there is an inexorable progression from basic science studies of normal mechanisms to the invention of new cures.

I don’t agree.

I think that the relationship between basic science knowledge and new cures is much more complex. Looking at the medical innovations that have really transformed people’s lives, it is interesting to see how few of them really arose from a progressive set of experiments in an academic lab.

In the area of stem cell therapy, the overwhelming success story so far has been bone marrow transplantation. From the first successes in the 1980s to today (when about 50,000 people worldwide receive transplants each year), it has established itself as a truly life-saving form of cell therapy.

Most bone marrow transplants are given for treatment of leukaemias or lymphomas. In the marrow reside the haematopoietic (blood forming) stem cells, which generate all the different cell types that make up the blood and the immune system. Patients are given chemotherapy or radiation to destroy the tumour, but a high enough dose will also destroy the stem cells in the bone marrow. A transplant involves infusing marrow from a donor into the bloodstream.  The stem cells in the graft can implant into the host marrow and over a few weeks can repopulate the host with new blood cells. The procedure enables otherwise lethal doses of cancer therapy to be given and the graft helps to eradicate the tumour through an immunological attack on it.

Was the introduction of bone marrow transplantation based on a detailed understanding of the biology of the haematopoietic system? Actually, at the time almost nothing was known. It was known that high dose radiation killed animals because of marrow failure, and if they received a subsequent graft of marrow from an unirradiated donor they could survive. There was also good evidence that it was cells and not some sort of substance in the graft that enabled survival. But the haematopoietic stem cell itself was not identified in mouse until 1988 and in human until 1992. The exact cell lineage of blood and immune cells, and the normal controls on each developmental step, are still unclear. But the first human bone marrow transplants were actually attempted in the late 1950s, and the first successful ones took place in the late 1960s.

So, to invent this pioneering and effective form of stem cell therapy, it seems that very little needed to be known about the haematopoietic system itself. What was necessary was a lot of other background information. For example, someone had to have discovered cells, developed methods for observing them, classified the cell types in the blood, and figured out that they originated in the bone marrow. Furthermore the nature of leukemia, as an unregulated proliferation of haematopoietic cells, needed to be known, as well as methods for assessing the progress of treatment.

To make bone marrow transplants actually work various other things were needed. Probably most important was an understanding of the genetics of graft rejection and the development of tissue typing to find donors who were reasonably compatible with the host. Almost as critical was the discovery of various types of immunosuppressive drug that are essential for controlling graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), a serious complication of the procedure. Less glamorous but equally vital, there were the advanced techniques for nursing patients who had been taken to the brink of death by chemotherapy or GvHD. All of these innovations came from very disparate areas of work unrelated to bone marrow transplantation.

To invent a new treatment you don’t necessarily need masses of detailed knowledge about the system to be treated. But you do need a lot of other scientific and technical knowledge, so that there is a rationale for what you are doing, reliable methods for establishing effectiveness, and appropriate technical support for the procedure.

The message for research funding bodies is not to be too hung up on the “translational” character of ongoing research. In science, even more than in politics or finance, it is hard to predict the future, and successful innovation needs to be underpinned by a whole variety of things — all hard to predict in advance.

Jonathan Slack is Director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota and author of Stem Cells – A Very Short Introduction.  He is a developmental biologist with an interest in methods for converting one cell type into another.

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The path of the biographer is littered with terrors. Few, to be fair, match the risks listed on the fieldwork forms put out by various Institutes of Archaeology, those exhaustive documents intended to pinpoint every potential danger (and indemnify the sponsoring department against paying for more than a reasonable number of snakebite treatments). But as I’ve often said, biographic research, at least regarding twentieth-century subjects, resembles nothing as much as the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode, or the last five pages of a M.R. James story. You know the type of thing; the lonely academic (writer, archaeologist, explorer) in a dim library (cave, alien spaceship, church) looking over the crabbed and dusty manuscript (letters, runic inscription, half-ruined tomb), unaware that all the time the creepy unknown is just… about… to… pounce!

And then the Doctor comes upon the mangled remains of my corpse, says “Oh no. Not — THEM!” or words to that effect, and you get the theme music.

The research for Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War II, was fairly typical of the process. My subject was primarily active between 1922 and 1936 (when she died), and along with her husband Mortimer Wheeler excavated several extraordinarily interesting Roman and prehistoric archaeological sites in England and Wales. Being of a sanguine temper, I evolved a simple research methodology of showing up at the various museums associated with those sites, asking politely for the Verney Wheeler materials. Then, when I received my inevitable initial answer (always very nicely) that they were sorry to say there was nothing relating to Verney Wheeler in stock, I even more politely asked if I could just have a personal look for them. And just as inevitably, I would poke and prod through dusty wine boxes and disintegrating milk crates, until I came upon a cache of letters and notebooks in Verney Wheeler’s neat, distinctive hand. Because there always was something of Verney Wheeler’s there. Cataloguers had either not been interested enough to note material, or had filed it under Mortimer Wheeler instead — a fair metaphor for Verney Wheeler’s career.

Tessa Verney Wheeler excavating at Lydney Park in the 1920s (courtesy of Lord Bledisloe). Copyright Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount Bledisloe.

Time at the National Museum of Wales morphed from three days to two weeks, once I found the notebooks for three sites (including the Caerleon amphitheatre), a really terrific book of Wheeler-related newspaper clippings by some long-dead press service, and three years of personal and professional letters. The Somerset county archives in Taunton, allegedly uninteresting, produced a very long, very useful unpublished memoir by Wheeler henchman William Wedlake. I could only afford one trip to see it, and read frantically from the moment the doors opened to the second I was cast out into the night, as staff enthusiastically copied relevant chapters for me at top speed (with occasional references to railway timetables and encouraging shouts in my direction). The Verulamium Museum cast up, quite at random: a bill for distempering a London bathroom, a sweet letter typed by Verney Wheeler’s father-in-law, and snapshots and letters from the tent city of students who excavated the Roman town.

Actual locations were just as odd. The basement flat near Victoria, anathematized by contemporaries as dark and dingy, emerged — even in water-stained abandonment — as light and airy by modern standards (although its decaying prewar plumbing was a little scary despite that distempering). The Dorchester County Museum turned out to be keeping its archives in a deconsecrated church on the High Street, a building quite deserted apart from myself and the mice. It was another lightning trip, one week to read, copy, and remember everything related to the great 1930s excavation of Maiden Castle (barring a single afternoon off at Lyme Regis, where the shingle reflected shadowy dinosaurs). I don’t, incidentally, recommend exploring deconsecrated Dorset churches alone at dusk. If you fancy a short break from working over photographs and want to stretch your legs by checking to see what’s on the second floor, it only ensures that you discover where they are keeping the really creepy old folk costumes (the ones with the giant glass eyes and an implication of Tim Burton out of Thomas Hardy). Morris dancers are no preparation for finding those at the top of a ladder. But I did get an excellent recipe for treacle tart from the teashop around the corner, so it was probably worth the palpitations.

Tessa Verney Wheeler excavating at Lydney Park in the 1920s (courtesy of Lord Bledisloe). Copyright Rt. Hon. Lord Viscount Bledisloe.

In writing a biography of a dead subject one is, in the end, deliberately chasing a ghost, but hopefully a benign one. The Roman temple at Lydney Park, most beautiful of all the Wheeler sites, looks over the Wye valley from its isolating hilltop, and it is the place where Verney Wheeler seemed closest at hand. I hope she is there, not in her little Roman brick tomb in St. Albans — pleasant as it is. The temple’s medicinal streams still run rusty-red with iron ore, and the entrances to the sub-Roman and prehistoric mining tunnels gape shyly behind green undergrowth. The azalea gorge that was just planted in Verney Wheeler’s day is almost tropical now, and the great trees of the park rear up over descendents of the same deer her husband drew boyishly into the corner of the excavation report’s site map. It is a fittingly remote resting place for this strange, elusive little woman, who gave so much to others while keeping her own soul hidden away.

Lydia Carr was born in New York City in 1980, and took her D.Phil at Oxford in 2008. She is the author of Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two. She is currently Assistant Editor at the Chicago History Museum and in her spare time, she writes light, bright mystery novels set in the 1920s.

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Over the next week, we are pairing excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout. Read previous posts “A painter and his subject’s humble origins,” and “A former slave in Georgetown,” and “Freedom delayed, bought, lost, and regained.”

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

Since Peale took the painting with him back to Philadelphia, Yarrow obviously did not pay for it. There is no record of whether Peale displayed it in the museum or showed it to the American Philosophical Society. He died in 1829, but the museum continued to operate. When it finally closed in 1852, Peale’s grandson Edmund came across the painting and mistakenly labeled it “Billy Lee,” thinking his grandfather had painted the body servant of George Washington. That the portrait might be of Lee was not an unreasonable assumption. Peale knew him during the terrible winter at Valley Forge. In 1804, after Washington’s death, Peale had stopped by Mount Vernon. While there, he sought out Lee and reminisced about the old days.

This identification of the painting lasted until 1947 when Peale’s biographer Charles Coleman Sellers carefully matched the painting to Peale’s diary entries and concluded the painting was of Yarrow Mamout. Besides, Sellers wrote, “It is not reasonable to suppose that Peale would have painted Billy Lee in his old age, for, despite faithful service to General Washington, Billy was a drunkard and a cripple in his last years at Mount Vernon.” Yet as recently as 1994, a New York Times reporter, writing about an exhibit of the painting, could still get justifiably confused. She identified the painting as “Yarrow Mamout, a servant of George Washington.”

In concluding that the painting of Yarrow had been incorrectly identified, Sellers did not seem to know that Georgetown artist James Alexander Simpson also did a portrait of Yarrow. This second painting certainly would have cinched it for Sellers. It might also have piqued his curiosity. When Elizabeth Broun, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, was asked about the two paintings in connection with the research on this book, she focused on the fact that formal portraits of African Americans prior to the Civil War were rare, and yet there are two of Yarrow Mamout.

Little is known about James Alexander Simpson. The only published research on him concluded he was born in England around 1805, later came to America, and settled in Frederick, Maryland. He subsequently moved to Georgetown. The 1820 census shows a James Simpson living there; of course, it might have been a different man.

Simpson did the portrait of Yarrow in 1822. He became an instructor of drawing and painting at Georgetown College three years later. If the 1805 date of birth is correct, then Simpson was only seventeen years old when he painted Yarrow and twenty when he started teaching at Georgetown. He taught only if there were enough students for a class. Otherwise, he occupied himself by painting the town, the college, and the residents of Georgetown. Many of those paintings still exist. How Simpson himself learned to paint is unknown. His painting of Yarrow is in the possession of the Peabody Room at the Georgetown branch of the District of Columbia library.

Simpson moved to Baltimore in 1860 and died twenty years later. Today, several of his other works are on display at Georgetown University. His painting of Commodore Stephen Decatur, which Simpson copied from a Gilbert Stuart portrait, once hung in the office of the university president.

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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May 17, 1642

Montréal is founded

Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, jumped from the wooden boat onto land. Falling to his knees, he blessed the ground. His followers also came ashore and built an altar, where a Jesuit father offered a blessing. “You are a grain of mustard-seed,” he said, “that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth.” With these words, French settlers founded Ville-Marie de Montréal — Montréal, Canada — on May 17, 1642.

Jacques Cartier had first recommended the site of Montréal for a settlement on his second voyage to Canada, in 1535–1536. In fact, he gave the name Mont-Réal to the 760-foot hill rising above the St. Lawrence River. At the time, the land was home to a large settlement of some 1,000 Huron Indians, who called the site Hochelaga.

Though Cartier claimed the St. Lawrence River valley for France, further exploration and settlement of the region did not begin until the early 1600s. Samuel de Champlain, who led the colonization effort, also saw the site of Montréal as a favorable location, as it lay at the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers and just below rapids that made the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence unnavigable.

Montréal as viewed from Mount Royal in 1784 by James Peachy. Source: National Archives of Canada.

Still, it took nearly four decades after Champlain founded Québec before Maisonneuve and his few dozen settlers finally established the first French settlement at the site. He had been put in charge of the company by a group of men who had religious as much as economic goals in planting the colony. They wanted to convert and educate the local Native Americans and found a religious hospital. Thus, along with building a stockade for defense and homes for the settlers, Maisonneuve had a chapel and hospital built as well.

Despite the colony’s lofty goals, it had poor relations with the Native Americans of the area for decades. Not until 1701 did the settlers and the indigenous peoples agree to a lasting peace. By then, Montréal was well established. The mustard seed had grown.

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We at OUP are no strangers to the changes in publishing and all the different forms a ‘book’ can take. One of our recent medical titles has been adapted as an iPad application (or ‘app’) — Cardiac Imaging Cases: Cases in Radiology for iPad — so we asked the co-author what it’s like to practice and learn medicine in this new form.

By Charles White

For those of us who have been in the radiology business for a while, technology is always changing things for the better. Innovations such as PET scanning, multidetector CT, PACS, and voice recognition software have changed the way we practice.

Education has also been favorable affected. Teaching using PACS is far easier than using sheets of CT film as we once did. Even the way we learn from books is different. Previously this was done in a linear sequential fashion.


• Cardiac Imaging Cases

   

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• Home

   

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• Case 37

   

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• Index

   

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• Case 44: Coronary Artery Calcification

   

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• Photograph and Illustration

   

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Now, apps focused on radiology allow us to personalize our learning in a manner that best suits us. We can review an area comprehensively or quickly jump to a particular topic that is of interest at the moment, perhaps because we have encountered it in our daily work. We can evaluate ourselves using unknown cases. Apps allow us to link to literature for further detail and consult with others using social media. It permits real time display and discussion of difficult or interesting cases with colleagues at remote sites.

This capability has transformed our previously linear approach to practice and learning to a truly multidimensional strategy.

Charles White is Professor of Radiology and Medicine, Chief of Thoracic Radiology, Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Joseph Chen is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Together, they are the authors of Cardiac Imaging Cases, on which the Cardiac Imaging Cases: Cases in Radiology for iPad application is based. Learn more about the Cardiac Imaging Cases iPad application on this dedicated microsite. Marteau is a digital strategy agency specializing in mobile and emerging platforms.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, well-being is what you need. From companies promoting food supplements to lifestyle magazines, think-tanks to government departments, well-being is on everyone’s agenda. Happiness, quality of life, life satisfaction — it doesn’t seem to matter that we don’t know exactly what it is — we definitely want some.

Well-being hit the headlines in 2010 when UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a new well-being measure, developed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), would be used to better understand the state of the nation. He suggested that a measure of the country’s well-being would be a better reflection of how people are doing than economic measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This was soon reported in the media as the PM’s happiness index — with much scorn over both the cost and the concept.

But behind the headlines, the ONS have undertaken an extensive, rigorous piece of work to define well-being and propose appropriate measures. Their concept encompasses objective prerequisites for achieving well-being, such as education, health, housing and income. Combined with these, are more subjective measures of well-being which include a person’s sense of purpose, happiness, and life satisfaction. 

In February 2012, ONS released the first analysis of Experimental Subjective Well-being data from the 2011 Annual Population Survey. This reported on the well-being of adults, but there are also data available, to contribute to the measurement of children’s well-being. One example is the Tellus survey, which ran in English schools between 2006 and 2009. This study investigated children’s opinions of their school and local area; gathered information on their health behaviours, such as eating, drinking alcohol, smoking, drug use and physical activity; and also asked whether the pupils were happy, had friends and could talk to their parents. Over 250,000 schoolchildren aged between 10 and 15 took part in 2009.

This month, the Journal of Public Health publishes an analysis of Tellus 4 data from two local authorities in the north west of England. It focuses on smoking, drinking and substance use amongst school pupils, and relates these behaviours to wellbeing and low income, using the proxy of eligibility for free school meals. Unsurprisingly, older age was the most important factor related to use of substances, but there were some interesting differences between girls and boys. Overall more boys than girls had experimented with drugs, but by the fourth year of secondary school, girls were significantly more likely to have been drunk. Being eligible for free school meals was associated with substance use, taking into account subjective well-being and age. And children who reported being happy or able to talk to their family, were less likely to be regular users. These findings reinforce the need to target health promotion messages to the right age group, and the importance of addressing social determinants of health behaviour. An emphasis on individual responsibility or an individualised approach to prevention, without consideration of the health and social consequences of living on low incomes, is never likely to be completely successful.

So far from being woolly, well-being in our analysis was a useful concept with a real world application. What we need to know more about, of course, is precisely how to enhance well-being, so children do not become regular drinkers or drug takers.  Readers of a certain age might remember the 1994 Blur song, ‘Parklife,’ in which the actor Phil Daniels achieved his sense of well-being by feeding the pigeons. Tackling well-being in the real world is likely to prove more challenging.

Dr Barbara Hanratty is an NIHR Career Development Fellow and GP trained in public health, based in the Department of Health Sciences, University of York and Hull York Medical School. She previously worked in the Department of Public Health and Policy at Liverpool University. Her research interests encompass inequalities, older adults and end of life care.

Siobhan Farmer is a Specialty Registrar in Public Health and a NICE Scholar currently based with the Cheshire and Merseyside Health Protection Unit. She completed her MPH in 2010. Prior to this she led on Drugs Education in St Helens Healthy Schools Programme, after several years in the North East working in young people’s health promotion.

The Journal of Public Health has made their co-authored paper, The relationship between subjective wellbeing, low income and substance use among schoolchildren in the north west of England: a cross-sectional study, free for a limited time.

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This week, Christine Grahame, convenor of the Scottish National Party’s Justice committee, has urged the linkage of the forthcoming Scottish referendum on independence to a referendum on the continuation of monarchy. Her proposal curiously mirrors discussions in the ruling circles of a once-revolutionary England.

Early in 1649, the Union of the Crowns forged in 1603 seemed to have gone the way of the King’s head and the crown it had worn. For a brief moment some of the Rumpers thought England and Scotland (though definitely not Ireland) would be free to follow separate paths. Ms Grahame apparently aims at a parallel (though of course peaceful) outcome, but in a different sequence: once Scottish voters have overthrown the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, they won’t need the monarchy that once occasioned it. Her proposal certainly highlights the distance travelled since Scots celebrated the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 with extravagant accounts of their line of kings stretching back through the mists to Fergus I. Though that royal myth undergirded national identity, seventeenth-century Scots were as conscious as those of the twenty-first-century that a monarchy domiciled on the distant Thames was no longer the Scottish monarchy James VI and I had taken south.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scots are not alone in reading England’s history as a story of neighbourly neglect or worse. Ms Grahame’s call comes in the same week as the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s historic visit to Dublin. The House of Windsor, like the House of Stuart and the House of Hanover before it, has attended intermittently to its Scottish roots. The heir to the throne has even appeared on TV as Scotland’s weatherman. But the occupants of those royal Houses in the days before 1922 rarely paid much attention to Ireland, and few made Dublin visits. The presentation to Queen Elizabeth II in 2011 of a facsimile of the printed Gaelic primer commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I in 1564 was therefore not just a graceful and fitting gesture. It also reminds us of the hollowness of the Irish kingship that Henry VIII had asserted in 1541.

The Irish and the Scots’ experience of the English nation-state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was uncomfortable; perhaps the Welsh only avoided such discomforts by incorporation into that very English state. Not long ago, the rise of the EU seemed to promise new and post-national beginnings, but the EU’s current troubles suggest the excitement was premature. The Queen in Dublin in 2011 spoke affectingly of the twentieth-century Troubles, but the English on the whole still give little thought to the Elizabethan, Cromwellian, and Williamite conquests, or to the significance of 1707. Neighbourliness is going to take some more work.

Derek Hirst’s Dominion: England and its Island Neighbours, c.1500-1707 was published by Oxford in March 2012; his (co-authored) Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane will be published by Oxford in June 2012. With roots in Huddersfield and an education and early career at Cambridge, he has taught at Washington University in St Louis since 1975.

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“You’re an ecologist, so tell me, should I replace all the incandescent bulbs in my house with fluorescent bulbs? And, what about these new light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs?” Well, I have a reasonably well-informed opinion on this issue, but it’s not really my expertise. “Perhaps then you can tell me more about the problem of invasive species?” Now you’re talking; this is something that ecologists can help with.

Ecology is the “branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings,” and was coined as “oekologie” by the German biologist Ernst Heackel in the 19th century from the Greek oikos meaning “house” and ology “the study of”. Ecology is, literally, the study of where living organisms live. By contrast, Environmental Science is a broader, interdisciplinary field in which ecologists work with other physical, chemical, and biological “ologists” to study and seek solutions to environmental problems. It’s a fine line between the two, but one role of ecology is to inform environmental science.

I’m a plant ecologist, and like to think that I’m seeking to understand Dürer’s famous painting “Das Groβe Rasenstück”. Described as a “habitat fragment,” Dürer’s painting (below) is one of the first botanically accurate illustrations of plants in a natural environment. It’s so accurate that we can identify in it over 20 different species (e.g., smooth meadow grass, greater plantain). Looking at this masterpiece, a host of ecological questions come to mind related to important concepts such as competition versus facilitation, community assembly, seedling establishment, limiting factors, population growth, etc. I discuss this painting with students in ecology classes and reproduced it on the cover of my 2002 book.

So, what can ecologists contribute to environmental science? Some of the current “hot topics” and challenges in ecology have an important bearing on issues in environmental science including the problems of non-native invasive species, preservation of biodiversity, use of biofuels and GM crops, and the effects of climate change. Sometimes the debate can get heated as when Mark Davis and colleagues suggested that we shouldn’t “judge species on their origins” as some non-native species may not be as bad as portrayed. Their paper, published in the high profile journal Nature ignited a firestorm of reaction across the internet. Right or wrong, their paper sparked a useful debate. Less controversial, but equally valuable was a study published in Journal of Ecology by Karen Robbirt and colleagues that used herbarium specimens dating back to Victorian times along with good old-fashioned quadrat counts of the spider orchid (Ophrys sphegodes) to document an advance in flowering time associated with climate warming in southern England. Although not controversial, this study was picked up by the media worldwide highlighting the importance of botanical collections and basic ecological field work to address a topical issue.

Not as bad as we think? The non-native Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) dominates the understory of an Illinois forest. Photo by David Gibson (©).

Disparaged by some philosophers as a “soft science” whose highest aspiration is to make the discipline “as hard as physics”, ecology is instead, a most fascinating branch of life science that transcends the hallowed halls of academia to address important and timely issues of environmental science set against the backdrop of evolution. It allows those of us with a love of nature to make a useful and important contribution.

David Gibson is Distinguished Professor of Plant Biology in the Center for Ecology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology, Editor of Journal of Ecology, and a Fellow of the Society of Biology. He has published two books with Oxford University Press, Methods in Comparative Plant Population Ecology in 2002 and Grasses and Grassland Ecology in 2009. Follow his tweets @davidjohngibson.

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Several people pointed out to me that I cannot distinguish a shrimp from a prawn, and I am afraid they are right. The picture copied for the shrimp post had the title “Shrimp cocktail,” but the shrimp there are too big and are really prawns. In any case, I decided to atone for my mistake and write a post on the etymology of prawn. This plan was hard to realize, because the origin of prawn is really, that is, hopelessly unknown: the word exists, but no one can say where it has come from. It is strange that more or less the same holds for shrimp and shark, though both are less opaque. There must have been some system behind calling those sea creatures. The fishermen who coined such names had a reason to call a shrimp a shrimp and a prawn a prawn.

Despite the obscurity that enshrouds prawn, it may be useful to sum up what people thought about its origin, even though the final solution is out of reach (and how many solutions in etymology can be called final?). Characteristically, the earliest English etymologists did not include prawn in their dictionaries. Even the great Franciscus Junius, who mentioned it, could not offer any cognate except (most hesitatingly) Greek perna “ham.” For many years no hypotheses appeared in the successive editions of Webster’s dictionary (Noah Webster was constantly on the lookout for Hebrew cognates, but evidently, no look-alikes turned up). Later “Of unknown origin” was added to the entry. And yet the word surfaced in the fifteenth century, in the full light of history. The attested forms are preyne, prane, pran, prawne, and, finally, prawn. If the word has an Old English antecedent (a suggestion along these lines has been made by an excellent scholar), it may have been prægn (with æ pronounced like a in Modern Engl. pram and g having the value of Modern Engl. y) or pragn. But no such form has been recorded, and even if it existed, we would have no clue to its origin.

Skeat had an idea of which he was never too fond. The Century Dictionary followed Skeat, and here is the relevant entry in full, with the abbreviations expanded: “…perhaps transposed from an unrecorded Old French parne, perne, a prawn (?), = Spanish perna, a flat shell-fish, = Old Italian perna, ”a nacre or narre-fish” (Florio), cf. diminutive parnochie, pl. “shrimps or prawne, fishes” (Florio), from Latin perno, a sea-mussel, so called from its shape, from perna (Old French perne), ham.” In the earlier editions of his dictionary Skeat compared the putative Romance etymon of prawn with the root of barnacle and traced Latin perna to Greek perna “a ham,” the word that caught Junius’s fancy. Later he expunged the comparison with barnacle. John Florio was the author of an early seventeenth-century dictionary of Italian and English.

The first edition of the OED had harsh words for Skeat’s tentative etymology (here and in the later quotation I have also expanded the abbreviations): “A suggested connexion with Latin perna, French perne ham, a ham-shaped shell-fish, a pinna, founded upon a blundered entry in Florio ‘parnocchie Shrimps or Prawne fishes’, (parnocchia (pl. -ie), being a variant of ‘pernocchia, a Nakre or Nacre (mispr. Narre-fish’) is opposed at once to the sense and the phonology.” Perhaps the Middle English word indeed has nothing to do with the words Florio listed, but parnochie is not so strongly opposed to prawn as regards “the sense and the phonology” that the comparison should be rejected out of hand.

Horse-mackerel and prawns by Ando Hiroshige.

In the last full edition of his dictionary, Skeat reproduced the early text of his entry but added British dialectal prankle “prawn” (Isle of Wight): “This suggests a connexion between prawn and prance; with a possible allusion to its bright appearance or quick movements. Cf. Jutland pranni ‘to strut,’ prannies ‘a showy person’.” The idea of a prancing, showy prawn arouses little enthusiasm. Yet in a different form it occurred to Eduard Mueller, Skeat’s predecessor, who found prankle in Peter Levens’s Manipulus vocabulorum, a 1570 English rhyming dictionary (it has been reprinted twice since that time). It seems that Skeat soon felt disillusioned with the prankle connection, because in the concise version of the last edition he said only: “Hardly (through a lost Anglo-French form) from Latin perna, a sea-mussel); cf. Middle Italian parnochhie, ‘a fish called shrimps or praunes;’ Florio.” Translated into plain English, this entry reads: “Origin unknown.” I suggest that two crumbs should be picked up from the debris: Middle Italian parnocchie “shrimp” (plural) and British dialectal prankle “prawn.” It won’t hurt to store up those forms for future reference.

Three more hypotheses should be mentioned for completeness’ sake. Hensleigh Wedgwood, at one time the main English etymologist, now almost forgotten, cited Old Engl. preon “bodkin”, whose cognates in other Germanic languages mean “awl; pin, peg” and which, in a roundabout way, may be related to the verb preen. “From the formidable spur with which the head is armed?” Ferdinand Holthausen, a distinguished German scholar, wrote countless articles about the origin of English words. Some of his conjectures found reflection in his etymological dictionary, seldom consulted outside Germany and almost devoid of value because of its extreme brevity. As early as 1904, he proposed to derive prawn from Old French preon (= Italian predone), from Latin (praedo “robber”; its accusative is praedonem, cf. Engl. predator). He thought that some prawns were parasites; hence robbers. I am not aware of any discussion of this idea.

Curiously, both Wedgwood and Holthausen traced prawn to preon, but one cited an Old English and the other an Old French form. Preon is not far removed from prægen, mentioned above. Finally, we should turn to Charles MacKay, the author of a dictionary in which he attempted (and failed) to trace numerous English words to Irish Gaelic. But his remark on prawn is interesting. He reasoned that since shrimp means “tiny thing,” perhaps prawn does too, and cited Gaelic pronn “small, trifling.” Pronn and prawn may be related, but, if they are, we are facing the dilemma familiar to us from the history of shrimp, namely, which sense is primary “small thing” or “small marine animal”? It would shed some light on the history of prawn if in our search for the etymology we stopped looking for words describing or naming shrimp, sea mussels, and so forth and concentrated on the sense “small.” But no useful word suggests itself, so that perhaps pronn is the figurative sense of prawn, a noun borrowed from English.

Although it is usually said that prawn has no cognates or even look-alikes, this is not quite true. Parnocchie and prankle are close enough. There are also some Frisian words cited by Gerhard E.H. Meier: purr, porr with their phonetic variants (they would have -n in the plural), and poorn “crab.” Since the Frisian words have no known etymology, we will not be closer to our goal if we decided that English borrowed prawn from Frisian. It looks as though for at least six hundred years seamen have used the word pran- ~ parn- denoting “prawn.” Its origin remains unknown, but it hardly goes back to Old English or Old French. We may be dealing with an obscure Mediterranean term, ultimately traceable to some substrate language of that area.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Over the next week, we are pairing excerpts from Jim Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard with the historical comic strip “Flashbacks” by Patrick Reynolds. Together they tell the story of Yarrow Mamout. Read previous posts “A painter and his subject’s humble origins” and “A former slave in Georgetown.”

Cartoonist Patrick Reynolds' "Flashbacks." Used with permission. http://redrosestudio.com/.

Margaret also told Peale that Yarrow became the property of her husband Brooke upon the “decase” of Brooke’s father. She and Brooke had planned to build a larger house in Georgetown and move there when it was done. Brooke asked Yarrow to make the bricks for the house and out houses, promising he would set Yarrow free when the job was done. Peale wrote in his diary:

Yarrow completed his task, but his master died before he began the House, and the Widow knowing the design of her Husband, told Yarrow that as he had performed his duty, that she had made the necessary papers to set him free & now he was made free. . . . Yarrow made a great many Bows thanking his Mistress and said that ever Mistress wanted work done, Yarrow would work for her — but she said that she never called on Yarrow to work for her.

Peale did not mention what kind of house Margaret was living in, whether it was the older wood frame house or the brick house that her daughter, Christiana, and son-in-law, Benjamin Mackall, built on Mackall Square. Nor did he ask a question that would be useful today: What happened to the bricks? Were they sold? Did her daughter and her husband, the Mackalls, use them in their new house? Or did Yarrow use them for the cellar of his house, because there are old bricks on the property to this day? But then Peale was merely recording things in a diary to jog his memory later, if need be. He was not writing for posterity and publication.

Peale went back to Yarrow’s to finish the portrait. The two men talked while Peale painted. Peale later wrote in his diary what Yarrow told him about his financial misfortunes:

After Yarrow obtained his freedom he worked hard and saved his Money untill he got 100$ which put into an Old Gentlemans hands to keep for him — that person died and Yarrow lost his Money — however it did not disperit him, for he still worked as before and raised another 100$ which he put into the care of a young Merchant in Georgetown, and Yallow [sic] said young man no die — but this merchant became a Bankrupt & thus Yarrow mett a 2d heavy loss — yet not disperited he worked & saved a 3d Sum amounting to 200$, some friend to Yarrow advised him to Buy bank stock in the Columbia Bank — this advice Yarrow thought good for he said Bank no die.

This version of the story is remarkably similar to what Yarrow told David Warden several years earlier. Yarrow had not changed it in the retelling. In fact, the words “young man no die” and “Bank no die” appear in both Warden’s book and Peale’s diary. The two men were directly quoting Yarrow’s words.

The quotes from Yarrow also serve as a reminder that English was a second, third, or even fourth language for him and as evidence that he understood investing, business, and law. He was not just blindly following instructions. In law, corporations are said to have a perpetual existence, which Yarrow correctly and poetically simplified to “Bank no die.”

Peale could have empathized with Yarrow’s fierce determination in the face of financial difficulties. Memories of all the money problems Peale had as a young man must have come back to him. How much worse, Peale probably thought, to be broke when you were old — and black.

While Peale was working on the painting that second day, he and Yarrow were getting more comfortable with each other. Peale had the opportunity to ask Yarrow about his lifestyle and the secret to his longevity:

Yarrow owns a House & lotts and is known by most of the Inhabitants of Georgetown & particularly by the Boys who are often teazing him which he takes in good humor. It appears to me that the good temper of the [m]an has contributed considerably to longevity. Yarrow has been noted for sobriety & a chearfull conduct, he professes to be a mahometan, and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God — and conversing with him he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart. He said he never stole one penny in his life — yet he seems delighted to sport with those in company, pretending that he would steal some thing — The Butchers in the Market can always find a bit of meat to give to yarrow — sometimes he will pretend to steal a piece of meat and put it into the Basket of some Gentleman, and then say me no tell if you give me half.

The acquaintance of him often banter him about eating Bacon and drinking Whiskey — but Yarrow says it is no good to eat Hog — & drink whiskey is very bad.

I retouched his Portrait the morning after his first setting to mark what rinkles & lines to characterise better his Portrait.

Of course, the best evidence of what Yarrow was like is the portrait itself. At age eighty-three, he was still a vigorous, confident, and cheerful man. It is a remarkable image for someone who was imprisoned on a slave ship from Africa through the Middle Passage to America, subjugated as a slave for forty-four years, and then twice penniless in his old age. Perhaps Peale was amazed that after all he had been through the man could still smile.

James H. Johnston, an attorney and journalist, has published extensively on national affairs, law, telecommunications, history, and the arts. His contributions include papers on local Washington, D.C., history, Yarrow Mamout, and an edition of The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough. He is the author of From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.

Instead of entertaining readers with make-believe characters, cartoonist Patrick Reynolds draws history. His “Flashbacks” about historical figures and events are carried in Sunday papers around the country. Recently, Reynolds has retold the story of Yarrow Mamout, relying in part on articles by Jim Johnston. The Washington Post in Yarrow’s Georgetown and the Staten Island Advance for New Yorkers carried the series. Reynolds makes quality history accessible to young readers as well as to adults.

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Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

Lacroix as a child loved drawing and sketching. He studied Art History at university; his goal at that time was to be a fashion curator. It was his relationship with boutique owner Francoise Rosenthiel that altered the direction of his career. Without this encouragement, we may have been devoid of his truly spectacular couture.

Christian Lacroix, autumn/winter 99/00, photograph by Niall McInerney, Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive.

If you would like to learn more about Christian Lacroix, find out about his life and work by visiting Berg Fashion Library and reading a limited time, free article.

Hollie Graham is an intern at Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, and you can find their articles online at Berg Fashion Library.

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