Rainy Sunday coffee

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, Interpretation, Media and Web 2.0

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It is a rainy Sunday here in Brooklyn. My gosh, has it been a full seven days since the last post? It has been a busy week.

I noted with pleasure on Monday that Dan Carlin just released part v of Blueprint for Armageddon. I am listening to the fourth hour of the broadcast as I type this. If you have not heard Carlin’s series on the Great War, I can testify that this is an extraordinary work of interpretation. I stumbled upon the series when the centennial began last summer and listened to them over a weeks-long period going into the fall. I cannot imagine how much time it takes to put these together. It is extraordinarily thoughtful and shows what a passionate generalist can bring to a subject.

Though the United States has not yet entered the fray, the Americans play a larger role in Part v than they do in i-iv. There is an eloquent breakdown of Woodrow Wilson and his role in the leader-up to American involvement. Fittingly Carlin’s Wilson is inscrutable, neither saint nor scapegoat. Carlin understands that history is complicated.

Blueprint requires a significant time commitment–three to five hours apiece–but the reward is high. If you think of how much time you spend on other internet and television content though, it is not that much. One can find them on iTunes and elsewhere too. I usually listen in 30-45 minute chunks when I’m doing something else. As you are stuck inside this January-March, make Blueprint for Armageddon part of your winter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBHXMq2C0R0

The Grey Lady’s technicolor Christmas

23 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Great War centennial, Media and Web 2.0

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The Times understood the significance of the Monvel prints and advertised them heavily in the weeks prior to their release.

As you can see from the advertisement above the New York Times published a special Christmas supplement in early December 1914. What made it so special was the inclusion of several full color plates from artist Louis Boutet de Monvel’s Joan of Arc series. Monvel (1851-1913) had done numerous commissions about The Maid of Orléans over the years. Most famously these projects included a best selling children’s book and a ten panel masterwork in the church of the heroine’s hometown of Domrémy. Illness forced Monvel to abandon the latter project when it was twenty percent complete. The images published in the Times were reproductions of six much smaller panels Monvel had completed for Senator William A. Clark just before Monvel died. Clark hung them in his Fifth Avenue home.

Monvel published the children book in 1895. The 15th century French soldiers depicted here look suspiciously like the zouave units of Monvel's time. French soldiers first started wearing these in the mid nineteenth century and continued through the first months of the Great War.

Monvel published the children’s book in 1895. The 15th century French soldiers depicted here look suspiciously like the zouave units of Monvel’s time. French soldiers first started wearing these uniforms in the mid nineteenth century and some continued through the first months of the Great War.

For the prints to be in the New York Times was a big deal. No one knew this more than the New York Times. The article accompanying the supplement describes the project as “The finest single issue of a newspaper ever seen in the world.” That is some serious hyperbole, but it has a ring of truth to it. The public snapped up 335,000 issues of the special edition, and would have bought at least 40,000 more if the printing presses could have handled the demand. Gushing letters of praise poured in from curators and directors at the National Academy of Design, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and what would eventually become the Brooklyn Museum of Art. People wrote in from as far away as Indiana.

The inserts were indeed beautiful, but there was more to the intense public demand than that. By December 1914 the Great War had settled into a stalemate on the Western Front. The war that everyone had thought would be over by Christmas now a muddy stalemate. Joan of Arc, that heroine of the Hundred Years War, was emerging as a potent symbol of Gallic resolve.

War as it is. This is one of the panels Monvel painted for Clark just a few years prior to the Great War. It is easy to see why readers in December 1914 would have been moved and inspired by the series.

It is unfortunate that the Times did not do something with these prints for the Great War Centennial. Indeed it is not even clear if the plates they commissioned a century ago–and paid a small fortune to reproduce–still exist. Thankfully the six panels from which they originated are still here. Senator Clark died in 1925 and bequeathed them to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.

The Great War took all of France’s human resources. Among the poilus were Monvel’s son Roger and at least one descendent of Joan of Arc herself.

The Great War week-by-week

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, Media and Web 2.0

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Today is Thursday, which means there is a new posting from Indy Neidell and the crew at The Great War. In case you have not seen or heard of this, Neidell and his colleagues are chronicling the First World War week by week as it happened one hundred years earlier. The series began on 28 July and has been going ever since. Yours truly learned about it in mid-November and spent most of Thanksgiving weekend catching up. One thing I like about the series is that it is covering the war from a truly world wide perspective. There is especially a great deal of coverage of the war in Eastern Europe. Neidell has an interesting perspective; he is an American currently living in Sweden.

Mediakraft Networks, the production outfit behind the series, has a unique relationship with British Pathé to use the latter’s extensive library of moving imagery. The film clip up top is the introduction from this past July. One may or may not want to watch the entire series–and it is running through November 2018–but here is a link to the entire run so far. It is worth ten minutes a week.

Archiving the Great War

04 Monday Aug 2014

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Libraries, Media and Web 2.0, Memory, WW1

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I received confirmation late last week that the Library of Congress will be preserving The Strawfoot as part of the LOC’s Web Archiving initiative for the World War I Centennial. The Library of Congress’s goal is to collect and preserve materials born digitally during the Centennial. So much of what is online seems transitory and impermanent. I am very excited about the 100th anniversary of the Great War and think it offers all kinds of interpretive and other possibilities. That the blog will be included in the endeavor means a lot to me. Working on the website these past 3 1/2 years has been a labor of love, with equal emphasis on both words: love and labor. It was a lifestyle change. Writing the blog has its rewards; the site might not get the traffic that some others do but it does have a regular readership.

Longtime followers may have noticed a shift of emphasis in recent weeks and months. It may seem that way but to me it is all cut from the same cloth. I have never thought of myself as strictly a Civil War guy, though the events of 1861-65 have always been a source of interest and fascination for me. I have always been more interested in the causes and consequences of the war; what came just before and after is equally important. That is why I have found volunteering at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace these past ten months rewarding. The Roosevelts–both side of the extended family–offer so many intellectual opportunities.

I am still plugging away on the Theodore Roosevelt Senior and Joseph Hawley biographies, still volunteering at Governors Island over the summers, still writing the content for the TRB social media platforms. There are more connections than might be apparent. For starters, General/Senator Hawley and Theodore Roosevelt knew and admired each other. I find it fascinating that the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost a power struggle with his boss, the unreconstructed Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, over the naming of a new ship in 1917. Instead of Roosevelt’s choice, the destroyer was christened in honor of Confederate naval officer Matthew Maury. These types of things fall under what we now call Memory Studies, which I suppose is broader and more encompassing than just historiography. More of these types of things are going to come out here at The Strawfoot in the coming months.

(image: Theodore Roosevelt at Washington’s Union Station during the First World War, LOC)

Four degrees of the Tonight Show

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Media and Web 2.0

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Johnny Carson in a 1970 publicity still

The other day I was doing a bibliographic instruction session with an English literature class when we digressed into a brief discussion about late night talk shows. I mentioned that when Jimmy Fallon became host of The Tonight Show he changed the subtitle to Starring Jimmy Fallon. The preposition is important. When Leno took over in 1992 he called it The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Conan O’Brien kept the “with” as well.

Without drawing much attention to it Leno and O’Brien were paying tribute to their predecessor. For three decades it was always The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The class, most of whom were not born when Carson went off the air in May 1992, grasped my point. I am sure Jimmy Fallon will do a good job hosting Tonight and I don’t care what he calls his show. I just found the title change curious and was wondering how and why the decision was made to go back to the show name as it was from 1962-1992.

Carson was on my mind because I had just finished Henry Bushkin’s memoir of his years as the talk show host’s attorney, tennis partner, and all-around fixer. Bushkin’s story, good as it is, does not change the basic outline of the Carson story. Everyone knew he was a mean drunk, cold with his three sons & four wives, and increasingly demanding and petty as the years went by. When Carson died after a few months illness he was virtually alone. There was no funeral.

Still the details make for startling reading. It is all the more jarring because the Bombastic Bushkin–whom Carson fired after nearly twenty years service–seems to have no ax to grind. All memoirs, especially tell all memoirs, are self-servicing but Bushkin’s story seemed for the most part a credible read.

What was so amazing was the way he could turn it off and on when the studio light went on and curtain parted. My theory about people like Carson is that they have only a finite amount of energy with which to use their talents. Sinatra was much the same way. On stage with a microphone he was fine as long as he stuck to the songs and spared the audience his cringe inducing monologues. Both men could also be charming and generous, albeit on their own terms. Always though, one never knew when the hammer might fall. And when it did . . .

Forced to choose between family and career many of the most talented individuals choose the latter. It is part of their greatness. We think it is easy because they make it look so.

The reason Carson will always be my favorite of the late night hosts was the way he conducted the show irony free. One of the wort trends in our culture today is the unrelenting irony and the arch “knowingness” that many seem to employ. Sincerity and genuine curiosity seem to have gotten lost. It is one of the worst aspects of our contemporary culture.

Using Getty images

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Media and Web 2.0

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Embed from Getty Images

One thing I have always done here on The Strawfoot is make certain that I use other’s photographs properly. Sometimes the price of doing the right thing means forgoing the ideal image for a post because it is not in the public domain. Usually I use the Library of Congress, National Archives, Wikimedia Commons and the like. Well, our work just got a little easier this week when Getty Images decided to make its catalog available for free for non-commercial use. It is surprisingly easy to do. I embedded the photograph above from the Getty Images website. This is an huge story and incredible resource. Make it part of your arsenal.

Some bully changes at the Strawfoot

20 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Media and Web 2.0, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS)

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As regular readers can tell, I changed the blog theme yesterday. I did this to highlight that there have been a few changes here on the site and in my working life as well. Yesterday was my first day volunteering at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in Manhattan. This is really an honor and a privilege and I am excited about the coming months. I spent a good part of yesterday shadowing the rangers and getting to know the lay of the house. TR’s life and times were fascinating on so many levels and there are numerous interpretive possibilities to explore. The staff are incredibly knowledgable and bring a passion to what they do. I find it amazing that such a gem of a site is right here in the heart of New York City. If you are coming to town, make it part of your itinerary.

If you look in the lower right corner you will note that I created a Facebook page for the blog. I intend to use it for posting quick comments, photos, etc. of a more social nature than what I might put on the blog. It is very much a work in progress and I sure it will morph over time. I had wanted to do this for a while, and was waiting until I received my new iPhone. With it, I can take video and better photographs. It gives me the means to do some things on the fly as well. I downloaded the WordPress and Facebook apps, which will give me more flexibility in my blogging and social media. I am going to blog and Facebook about the writing of the Joseph Roswell Hawley biography as well. Fall is filling up.

(image/Smithsonian)

The humble VCR

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Film, Sound, & Photography, Media and Web 2.0

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One of my vivid memories of the 1980s was the airing of the final episode of MASH in February 1983. Incredible as it sounds, that was more than thirty years ago. For those under a certain age it would be difficult to understand the cultural significance of this event. There was once a time, young reader, when millions of Americans sat down each week, watched television shows such as this, and talked about them the next day around the water cooler or in the school cafeteria. That is difficult to imagine in the internet/satellite/200 channel cable universe we live in today. And yet it was not that long ago.

That winter night college students skipped their evening classes, parents cut the PTA meeting short, and folks hurried home to make sure they did not miss the 2 1/2 hour finale. The reason people were so intent on not missing it is because if you missed it, well, you missed it. I remember fifteen years ago, in 1998, a friend skipping the Seinfeld finale to play softball. Why bother?, he explained. One can tape it and watch later. In the early 80s a VCR was still prohibitively expensive–as in several thousand dollars–for most people. Still, that was changing quickly. Terry Teachout bought his first VCR around this time, and in a Wall Street Journal piece explains how the device changed his very perceptions of art and culture:

What changed my point of view? The VHS videocassette recorder, which was introduced to the U.S. by JVC in 1977. Like many other Americans, I bought my first VCR in 1983, six years later, right around the time that prices were coming down. “Citizen Kane” and “Grand Illusion” were the first “classic” films of which I owned VHS copies. I’d never seen either one before, and I’ll never forget how thrilling it was to be able to view them at will.

(image/Parent Patch)

One Tuesday evening . . .

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Genealogy, Media and Web 2.0

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I just got back from the SOHO Apple store, where I took a One-to-One session on how to use my new iPhone 5S. I am not the type to run out and buy the latest thing just to have it, but the Hayfoot especially need a new phone. I got them early Friday morning and am now realizing how fortunate I was to get them when I did, especially with the her coming home for the weekend and going back to DC today. It was almost too easy; I was in and out of the store in all of 45 minutes, counting the brief wait outside the store. This is my first iPhone and am trying to make the most of it, especially for the blog. I want to take better photos and incorporate sounds and video into my oeuvre. I am really excited about the phone but must say it was a little sad retiring my old flip phone, which was so old but served me so well for so many years. Putting it in the drawer felt like a betrayal.

Five generations of my father’s family in a nutshell

Over the weekend I received the above worksheets from a relative of mine who I have never met but contacted recently to see what information he might have about our family history. I knew who he was because a mutual relative. To be precise, my grandmother was his aunt. He, his brothers, my dad and his brothers grew up in Boston together in the 1940s-1960s. This information is a coup for me; not only does it corroborate some of the work I have already done, it adds a great deal I did not know. This is information that even my father did not know. I am sure of that because he would have shared it with me when we sat down in the late 1990s and hashed out the family tree to the best of his knowledge a few years before he died. Now I am trying to flesh out the details of this new stuff I have. It is my goal to become a professional-level genealogist and learn about standards, levels of proof, and that type of thing. Between this and what I received from an aunt on my mother’s side a few weeks back, I have got a lot of material to work with in the coming weeks. It is going to be a busy fall with this and everything else.

A reading copy

22 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Libraries, Media and Web 2.0

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This past Saturday I was at the public library doing some preliminary research for a longterm project I am about to undertake. I was taking notes from a regimental history published in the early years of the twentieth century. (Aside: Though many were indeed released by honest to goodness publishing houses, these tomes are the essence of vanity publications; read any one and you would swear that particular regiment saved the Union single-handedly and that its colonel was the bravest, most noble individual ever to put on his country’s uniform.) I was taking copious notes and decided that if I were to for on this project properly I would need my own copy. At about 7:00 pm that night I ordered it from Amazon. It was a print-on-demand title, offered in this case from BookPrep. It is a so called reading copy, a fresh printing of a rare book to be used for highlighting and writing in the margins. Sure enough, the book says on the back flap that it was printed on Saturday May 19. The next day, of course, was Sunday. Well, today is Tuesday and because of my Amazon Prime my book was waiting for me at the front door. So, I ordered the title late on Saturday; it was printed that day and shipped free via two day air. Here it is next to me on my desk as I write this. I tell the story not to flog the products and services of any organization, but to demonstrate how quickly things can be disseminated in today’s world. Incredible.

(image of rare books/F.O. Morris)

The Strawfoot

~ a New Yorker's American History blog

Category Archives: Media and Web 2.0