Famous Men Research Articles

Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention (review)

Reviewed by: Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention John Lauritz Larson (bio) Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention. By Andrea Sutcliffe. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 296. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $14.95.) Inventors long have fascinated historians, especially historians of technology and industrial progress. From Samuel Smiles's Lives of the Engineers (1862) through modern classics from David McCullough (The Great Bridge [1972] and The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal [1977]), stories about quirky individuals obsessed with technical problems find a ready audience. The present work by Andrea Sutcliffe certainly belongs on the shelf of stories about quirky, obsessive individuals; but as history of technology, this work will disappoint serious scholars. From its misleading title (steam was hardly an American invention even if the steamboat was) to its irrelevant, unsung-heroes-fade-away conclusion, this book—like the early steamboats it describes—never quite delivers. The story Sutcliffe seeks to tell begins with the rivalry between John [End Page 292] Rumsey and John Fitch, two quasi-engineers of the 1780s who were interested in finding a way to drive boats against the currents of America's major rivers. Rumsey was famous for first trying to use the current itself to spin the mechanism of propulsion in a kind of water-walking conveyance; Fitch may well have designed the first true steamboat, but his inability to deliver a working prototype, his irascible personality, and his obsession with securing legal privileges and royalties (rather than earning profits) all conspired to deprive him of the fame and fortune he believed he deserved. Steam begins with the competition between these two and their occasional intersections with famous men (and potential patrons) such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. Soon enough the tale picks up a larger cast of characters: Oliver Evans, John Stevens, Robert Fulton, Joel Barlow, Robert Livingston, William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Gibbons and Ogden (of the famous Supreme Court case), and even, in a parting cameo, Henry Miller Shreve. What brings these men together is a web of lies, charges, counterclaims, misrepresentations, and dirty tricks that seems to make no sense except as manifestations of inherently nasty and dishonest personalities. Here is where the book does not succeed as history. Thanks to impressive research, the facts march across page after page as these oddball competitors stalk each other in pursuit of the fabulous riches they believe await the first man to secure an iron-clad monopoly on steam navigation. But Sutcliffe, who works as a writer more than a scholar, does not place their behavior in any sensible interpretive context. Details abound, but they contribute to no real argument. Movers and shakers (Washington, Franklin, et al.) seem always trying to brush these guys off—with good reason, as Fitch especially seems to have been a terrible pest. Weird domestic triangles mark the private lives of both Fitch and Fulton, but what could possibly link sexual sharing with steamboat invention? A significant historical theme could be built (but is not) out of the fact that every one of these inventors spent more time seeking legal protection and preference than he spent in the workshop trying to invent, which implies a great deal about science, patronage, and entrepreneurship at the turn of the century. Another organizing frame might have come from what these quirky biographies say about the motivations of the actors. But actions in this tale come on almost randomly (note card after note card), sometimes logical, occasionally inexplicable, often spiteful. Despite an impressive bibliography, Sutcliffe makes no reference to classic historical [End Page 293] studies that would help set the context: Robert G. Albion's work on New York Port or Louis C. Hunter's work on steamboats and steam power in America. Instead, we get a story of one damn thing after another, culminating in the minor injustice of Robert Fulton getting credit in the history books for inventing the American steamboat, while the likes of Gibbons and Ogden horn in on the monopoly pretensions of all the inventors. Sutcliffe's volume reminds me of Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World...

Humanistic Self-Representation in Giovan Battista Della Porta's "Della Fisonomia Dell'Uomo": Antecedents and Innovation

This article examines Giovan Battista Della Porta's Della Fisonomia Dell'uomo as a public relations exercise, carried out on behalf of the author himself, other intellectuals, and potential noble patrons. Della Porta's study of human physiognomy includes engravings of famous men and often documents their physical appearances. This article assesses the connections between Della Porta's treatise and cinquecento biography collections, in particular Paolo Giovio's Elogia, which Della Porta frequently plagiarizes for descriptions of Italian luminaries. Della Porta's glorification of famous individuals is in keeping with the nature of early modern scientific culture within the context of late Renaissance court life. By describing his own physical appearance in book 4, chapter 6,Of the clever man, Delia Porta fashions an image of himself as a courtier and a natural philosopher. This self-portrait is compared to those by fellow physiognomers Girolamo Cardano and Gabriele Symeoni.

Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction

Murder on the Reservation: American Indian Crime Fiction Ray B. Browne. Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2004. Let us now praise famous men. But first, before the author, let us examine the book, the first book-length study of crime fiction by and about Native Americans. In Murder on the Reservation, Professor Ray Browne, distinguished university professor emeritus of popular culture at Bowling Green State University, starts with a belief and a thesis. Within the genre of crime fiction, all people are equal, and the increasing role of Native American characters in criminal fiction proves what an important role this genre plays as a powerful democratizing force in American society. Browne endeavors to both analyze and evaluate the individual works of the authors, and at the same time to provide a commentary on the various attitudes toward race relations in the United States that each author presents. Some Indian fiction is intended to right the wrongs that the authors feel have been leveled against Native people. Other authors use Indian lore and locales as exotic elements and locations for the entertaining and commercially successful stories they want to write. Browne's analysis includes Native and non-Native authors of first-class murder mysteries set on and off the reservation. Dr. Browne, who has written and edited books and journals for decades, tells us how the writers were chosen: through the quality of their novels and their backgrounds. Some are mixed-bloods, some whites. Some carry in their hearts the leaden sins of their ancestors and are dedicated to trying to repay the Indians for the injustices they have suffered in the past. Others, because they know Indian cultures from having lived among them, write about them because they know Indian peoples and ways to make good settings and characters. These authors have a primary purpose of writing to entertain and to sell. But regardless of the leading purpose, all are doing all elements of American society a service. Through the most elemental kind of fiction, they center attention on one of the many cultures of our society. They realize that crime gives little distinction to social or cultural identity; it is more interested in vulnerability and accessibility. All people are vulnerable. All blood is red. In Indian crime fiction, Indians are like others, and all others are like them. The authors try to picture the truth as they see it, and through it free us of prejudice and negative opinions. If they only partially succeed, their efforts have been helpful and, perhaps equally important, we have excellent crime fiction in the bargain. At its best, ethnic crime fiction can provide cultural and social satisfaction other than airing the just demands of people who have been culturally mistreated. It dramatizes the conflicts between cultures, reveals the rift of threat to the safety of the dominant society, provides humor, and finally, covertly or overtly re-establishes the reader's feeling of safety from and superiority over other groups of people. In his suggestive book Playing Philip J. Deloria observes that Americans have for two hundred years been playing Indian, and there was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Native Americans (37). Playing in all forms is an anthropological ritual that is part of the process of growing up. So as whites have played they have also been growing up with regard to their feelings about the Indian. In this process of white maturation, the Indians have perforce grown too. Authors are always straining to write different kinds of literature with the conventional type: a new type of play, an experimental poem, canon-smashing conventional fiction, the great Americana novel, as author Tom Wolfe does in A Man m Full (1998). …

John R. Vane (1927–2004)

“Let us now praise famous men.”1 John R. Vane died on November 26, 2004, marking the end of an era of pharmacological sciences that rested on global biological concepts and addressed nature’s grand design, the human body in motion, not in stasis. John Vane was born in Tardebigg, Worcestershire on March 29, 1927, the youngest of 3 children. His father was the son of Russian immigrants and his mother’s family farmed in Worcestershire. The Vane family lived in a suburb of Birmingham, where they weathered World War II, colored by the trappings of war: nights were frequently spent in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. John Vane studied chemistry at Birmingham University, a subject that did not satisfy his native curiosity. On graduation in 1946, a letter arrived in the Department of Chemistry from Professor J. Harold Burn, Chairman of Pharmacology at Oxford, inquiring if any of the recent graduates would like to be trained in pharmacology. John Vane said “yes” while thinking “I’ll do anything but chemistry.” At Oxford, Professor Burn recognized John’s driving curiosity to probe the undiscovered and channeled it into the area of experimental pharmacology. A telling remark is John Vane’s comment on being designated a pharmacologist, “the label hid the truth, as labeling tied one to a discipline.” He preferred the label, “experimentalist.”2 J. Harold Burn was a remarkable energizer of …

Manning the race: reforming black men in the Jim Crow era

Manning the Race explores how African American men have been marketed, embodied, and imaged for the purposes of racial advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Marlon Ross provides an intellectual history of both famous and lesser-known men who have served--controversially--as models and foils for black masculine competence. Ross examines a host of early twentieth-century cultural sites where black masculinity struggles against Jim Crow: the mobilization of the New Negro; the sexual politics of autobiography in the post-emancipation generation; the emergence of black male sociology; sexual rivalry and networking in biracial uplift institutions; Negro Renaissance arts patronage; and the sexual construction of the black urban folk novel. Focusing on the overlooked dynamics of symbolic fraternity, intimate friendship, and erotic bonding within and across gender, Manning the Race is the first book to integrate same-sexuality into the cultural history of black manhood. By approaching black manhood as a culturally contested arena, this important new work reveals the changing meanings and enactments of race, gender, nation, and sexuality in modern America. Manning the Race opens new approaches to the study of black manhood in relation to U.S. culture. Where previous books tended to emphasize how individual black men's identities have been reactively informed by the U.S. regime of race and sexuality, Manning the Race makes the case for understanding how black men themselves have been primary agents and subjects in formulating the identity and practices of black manhood.

Gazing at the Hand: A Foucaultian View of the Teaching of Manipulative Skills to Introductory Chemistry Students in the United States and the Potential for Transforming Laboratory Instruction

abstractMany studies of chemistry have described the rise of the academic chemical laboratory and laboratory skills in the United States as a result of famous men, important discoveries, and international influences. What is lacking is a perspective of the manifestations of the balances of power and knowledge between teacher and student. A Foucaultian analysis of the teaching of manipulative skills to the introductory student in high school and college in the United States during the later half of the 19th and into the 20th century has provided such a perspective. The analysis focuses on the body, specifically students’ hands, and how this body has been redescribed in terms of time, space, activity, and their combinations. It is argued in the first part of this article that the teaching of manipulative skills in the chemistry laboratory can be characterized by effects of differential forms of power and knowledge, such as those provided by Foucault's ideas of hierarchical observation, normalization, and the examination. Moreover, it is evident that disciplinary techniques primarily focused on the physical hands of the student have been recast to include a new cognitive‐physiological space in which the teaching of manipulative skills currently takes place. In the second part of this article, the author describes his own professional development as a laboratory instructor through a series of reflective statements that are critiqued from a Foucaultian perspective. The personal narratives are presented in order to pro‐ vide science educators with an alternative way for their students to think about the relationship between one's manipulative skills and the quality of their data. The pedagogical approach is related to the maturation process of the chemist and contextualized in the current paradigm of laboratory practice, inquiry‐based science education.

The Bell Family Legacies

Before he became a famous inventor, Alexander Graham Bell opened a school for the deaf in Boston in 1872. He always thought that his main mission in life, and his greatest pleasure, was in teaching the deaf. Royalties from his telegraph and telephone patents allowed him to pursue this mission and make other contributions and discoveries. In 1880 the French government awarded him the Volta prize of 50,000 francs, which was used to help establish the Volta Laboratory for research, invention, and work for the deaf. Bell founded and financed the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf in 1890. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847, the same day and month as his grandfather in 1790. His mother had been deaf from an early age. He attended the University of Edinburgh and the University of London in 1868 without earning a university degree (later in life he would receive multiple honorary degrees). Bell moved to Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in 1870, then to Boston in 1871, where he became professor of ‘‘vocal physiology and elocution’’ at Boston University. He married Mabel Hubbard in 1877. She was 4 years old when she lost her hearing to scarlet fever. Alexander, Mabel, and their two daughters first visited Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia (‘‘New Scotland’’) in 1885, where later they built an estate on nearby Beinn Bhreagh (‘‘beautiful mountain’’). Bell conceived of tetrahedral structures for kites, arches, towers, and bridges, and devoted many years on his estate to constructing kites with the intent of learning how to increase the lifting power of aircraft wings. Bell and his closest friend, Samuel Langley, were publicly awarded honorary degrees in aerial architecture. He built a hydrofoil that was clocked at more than 70 mph, and for 12 years it was the fastest boat in the world. Bell also invented a device that performed the same function as an iron lung would years later. He developed methods for detecting icebergs by echolocation, and a way of making freshwater from air vapor for people on life rafts. He even devised an electric apparatus to locate metal, and it was employed (unsuccessfully) to find a bullet in the body of President James Garfield, who was shot by an assassin in 1881. Bell became a U.S. citizen the following year. Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, began analyzing the pedigrees of famous men in the 1860s. The Massachusetts State Board of Health engaged Bell in 1878 to gather statistics on inherited defects, in the pursuit of understanding the laws of heredity. He published a report for the National Academy of Sciences (November 1883) titled ‘‘Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.’’ This was the same year that Galton published his Inquiries into Human Faculty, in which he introduced the term ‘‘eugenics’’ for programs designed to improve human heredity through selective breeding. In his 1883 paper, Bell reported that deaf parents had a much higher proportion of deaf children than did the population at large, and that unlike those with other defects, the deaf strongly tended to marry the deaf. He did not propose that marriages between congenitally deaf people should be prohibited. Rather, he advocated warning them of the risk beforehand and broadening their opportu­ nities for friendship (and so for marriages) with hearing persons through day schools and speech training. Edward A. Fay was professor of languages at the National College for Deaf Mutes and editor of the American Annals of the Deaf. In 1889 Fay headed the census studies of the deaf. Bell gave him all of his records and some of the income from his endowment for research on deafness. Fay published his findings in An Inquiry Concerning the Results of Marriages of the Deaf in America in 1895. According to Bell’s biographer Robert Bruce (1973),

Frühkirche und Amt – neu in der Diskussion

Unfortunatly, many articles published about the Early Church, especially about the ministry, are based only on substantives one can find in the original texts, i.e. on the names which are used for the ministers of the different levels, such πρεσβύτερος and διάκονος, although these terms are not clear in the modern sense. The verbs are almost completely neglected; but the verbs say how the ministers were initiated into their duty. Especially the verb καθίστημι plays a central role in Prima Clementis but also in other early documents. It shows that in the earliest times ministers were installed by a higher authority, by an apostle or an “other famous man”. Therefore, Prima Clementis is a key for the understanding of the beginnings of the apostolic succession, but also – for other reasons – for instance for the understanding of the fragments of the letter of bishop Dionys of Corinth to the Romans. In the light of Prima Clementis this letter is – even indirectly – a testimony for the Roman authority.

The Woman Who Played the Man: Deborah Sampson, Soldier in the American Revolution

Alfred F. Young. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. New York: Knopf, 2004. x + 417 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95 (cloth); $16.00 (paper). About five years ago I heard an eminent historian predict that, while it was not yet clear in what new direction American historical scholarship was heading, it was clear that micro-histories were now passé. This book by Alfred Young, which re-tells the fascinating story of Deborah Sampson Gannett, a Massachusetts woman who achieved short-lived fame after impersonating a male soldier during the American Revolution, proves that prediction to have been premature. Like other recent offerings in early American history, this book illustrates the way a close study of a little-known individual or event can help bring to light new perspectives on the past that have been obscured by conventional historical narratives. As one of a very small number of full-length studies of an ordinary white woman during the revolutionary and early national eras, it makes a valuable contribution to American women's history. It offers nuggets of insight about an array of historical topics (the nature of late-eighteenth-century rural life, how the military worked during the American Revolution, the meanings with which consumer goods could be invested by ordinary people in the early nineteenth century). What's more, it tells a terrific story. Young has long been known as a practitioner of "history from below," which tries to recover ordinary people's impact on the historical process. Until the 1980s, for American historians that usually meant analyzing evidence about large groups of subjects whose collective tracks through the past could be traced more easily (and perhaps more reliably) than individual ones, which tended to be very faint. But since 1990 or so, following the lead of European scholars, American historians like Laurel Ulrich, John Demos, Patricia Cohen, Richard and Irene Brown, and Alfred Young himself have become increasingly good detectives and storytellers, skilled at uncovering information about the lives of ordinary individuals and telling their stories in [End Page 493] historically contextualized, often riveting narratives.1 This is a very good thing for the discipline of history. As human beings, we understand the world better through stories than through social scientific analyses, and American readers are hungry for stories about the American past. Highly readable narratives which give readers access to subaltern perspectives and to social historians' insights about American history are welcome in a field that is becoming overwhelmed with biographies of famous white American men. Writing this kind of book requires a historian to face some big methodological challenges, as Young points out in his prologue. Deborah Sampson Gannett left few of her own words behind. The main source of evidence about her life is a sensationalized, semi-fictional 1797 biography by Herman Mann, with whom she cooperated without being entirely forthcoming. Young begins his book by explaining the difficulties involved in finding Gannett's own voice underneath the layers of fabrication and distortion in Mann's text. Indeed, he continues throughout the book to comment on various interpretive issues. As a result, his voice is quite prominent, explaining here, why he has credited some assertion from the biography, or there, why he has dismissed another. Young's interpretive digressions, making him more than usually present within the narrative, are usually a great virtue: his personal voice effectively reminds us that history is a deeply human, interpretive craft, not a science in which dispassionate, omniscient researchers simply gather and process data. Occasionally, though, his voice becomes more prominent than Deborah's own, which is sometimes barely audible in the problematic sources. For example, her story of a recurring dream of defending herself against an attack by monsters, which Mann had already partially appropriated by telling it in his words, seems to become still less Deborah's own when placed...

Putting Cato the Censor'sOriginesin Its Place

Abstract After reviewing current opinions about the social function of literature in second-century BCE Rome, I focus on two controversial fragments assigned to Cato the Censor's Origines. In the first, Cato portrays the ancestors in a convivial setting as they sing the praises and the manly deeds of famous men; in the second, he gestures towards the pontifex maximus' specialized use of writing and the functioning of the tabula as a locus of memory. By drawing on the field of performance studies, I identify the performative features inherent in both of these fragments and map out how these features inform the positioning of Cato in relation to the identity politics of his time, professionalism, and writing. The aim of this study is to return the Origines to its immediate socio-cultural purview, but working towards this aim will also entail a shift in perspective and a reassessment of our notions of “poetry” and “prose.” In fact, by stressing the performance dimension that underlies the genesis of the Origines as a text, this article will also expose the shortcomings inherent in the hyper-literary approaches that have been so far adopted.

Blinking Sam: the ocular afflictions of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The poor health of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has fascinated the public for more than 200 years. The illnesses of few famous men, with the possible exception of Napoleon, have attracted more speculation. Johnson was an outstanding 18th-century literary figure, an essayist, novelist, and poet, and is particularly famous as the creator of the first important dictionary of the English language. His writings and those of his physicians and friends, particularly his biographer, James Boswell, provide an intimate account of a cultural icon.

How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science (review)

Reviewed by: How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science Barbara Culliton J. Michael Bishop . How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science. The Jerusalem—Harvard Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiii + 271 pp. Ill. $27.95 (0-674-00880-4). J. Michael Bishop is a modest and generous and modestly famous man. On 9 October 1989, at 3:00 A.M., he received the call from Stockholm that leading scientists cannot help but covet: he had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating that genes in otherwise normal cells can, when incited, cause cancer. Excited colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, where Bishop (now chancellor) spent most of his academic life, scheduled a press conference for 11:00 that morning. But Bishop already had plans, and the Nobel Prize was not about to change them. He had tickets for a [End Page 752] "crucial playoff game between the Chicago Cubs and the San Francisco Giants baseball teams," he recounts in How to Win the Nobel Prize, a charming book about his life that, in turns, has been devoted to research, politics, institutional leadership, the public understanding of science, and baseball: "Let the record show that I am an ardent Giants fan. I was unflinching: the press conference was moved to 8:30 A.M. so that I could arrive at the ballpark in time for batting practice, an essential ritual for the cognoscenti" (p. 4). In an anecdote that accompanies his story about the baseball game, Bishop touches astutely on one of the things that keep people away from science and scientists—namely, complex facts: "The Giants won the game and, thus, the National League Championship when Will Clark drove a two-out single 'up the middle' off a no-balls and two-strike pitch from Mitch Williams. I will remember that piece of trivia long after I have forgotten Avogadro's number (a physical constant of some use to scientists, but that does not come readily to mind even now)" (p. 4). In a world in which scientists often seem remote or even fearsome, Bishop establishes by the fourth page of his book that it is possible to engage in highly original experiments with chicken viruses that eventually establish an important principal of cancer; to win the Nobel Prize; and to be a normal human being too. He writes with grace and ease, packing into a book of fewer than three hundred pages a comprehensive and readily accessible account of his research, the ideal social ethos of science, national politics, and the relationship between science and culture. Bishop shared the prize with Harold E. Varmus, who joined his UCSF laboratory in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow but quickly became a colleague. As Bishop writes: "Our relationship evolved rapidly to one of equals," (p. 54) and before long "we became a hyphenated self that gave its name to a social organism—the 'Bishop-Varmus' laboratory," (p. 55) that was the center of study oncogenes. First they isolated a gene, called SRC (pronounced "sark," for sarcoma), from a chicken tumor virus. Subsequently they showed that oncogenes exist in many kinds of tumors, and established a genetic paradigm for cancer. Bishop's explication of the science of tumor genes is one of the best there is. And his description of the defining moment in the laboratory exemplifies his generosity and gentle spirit: he recalls a young scientist who, on the night of Saturday, 26 October 1974, completed a crucial experiment demonstrating that normal DNA contains gene sequences related to the SRC gene that transforms healthy cells into malignant ones. "Where was I at the moment of magic?" Bishop asks; probably home in bed, giving his student the satisfaction of not having to share the magic moment with anyone else, he says without a trace of envy. As his life in science progressed, Bishop embraced a lesson that many in the ivory tower resist: funding for science comes from Congress, members of the House and Senate are creatures of politics, and if scientists want continued support they had better become adept at speaking out in their own interest (which Bishop...

Kathakali: Kottayam Plays (review)

KATHAKALI: KOTTAYAM PLAYS. International Video Edition (DVD). A Vedika Presentation. E-mail: . Web site: . Recording format: Beta. Complete set of four plays (9 DVDs): $400. Individual plays: $100 each. Plays: Baka Vadham (The killing of Baka); Kirmira Vadham (The killing of Kirmira); Kalyana Saugandhikam (The auspicious flower); Kalakeya Vadham (The killing of Kalakeya). Vedika, nonprofit group based in Thrissur, Kerala (southern India), which promotes Kerala's traditional arts through workshops, seminars, performances, publications, and video documentation, has released four major kathakali plays on set of nine DVDs. While the domestic edition was released in January 2003, an international edition will be released in early 2004--of which preliminary version is reviewed here. The plays were recorded before an invited audience in Thrissur, Kerala, in September 2002. Perhaps the greatest single contribution of the international edition, unique thus far among the available video and film documentations of kathakali, is the inclusion of scrolling narrative text and voice-over in English introducing each scene, as well as extensive English subtitles used during the actual performance. These valuable additions enable English-speaking viewers of kathakali as well as students and scholars to deepen their understanding and appreciation of how such highly performative genre expresses the poetic conceits and literary references that are rife in the form. I applaud these unobtrusive captions that can only serve to further our understanding of such rich and complex performance genre. Vedika has wisely chosen to document what are arguably the four most important plays in the entire kathakali repertoire: The Killing of Baka, The Killing of Kirmira, The Flower of Good Fortune, and The Killing of Kalakeya. These plays were composed sometime in the late seventeenth century by the famous Kerala king and man of arts and letters Kottayam Thampuran, and they remain the backbone of kathakali training and performance to this day. With the use of subtitles, English-speaking viewers can finally appreciate Thampuran's highly poetic and literary writing. The Kerala scholars behind Vedika, led by Mundoli V. Narayanan (professor of literature at Miyazaki International College, Japan), have also produced an extensive booklet that accompanies the international edition. The booklet is multi-purposed, but one of its primary intents is to introduce the reader to the playwright who was the first great kathakali reformer in the early days of its development. Kottayam Thampuran hailed from royal family and served as king of northern Kerala principality. From early on, Thampuran was exposed to literature and the arts. He made many important contributions to kathakali, introducing for the first time episodes from the Mahabharata. Until this point, all the plays were drawn from the Ramayana and revolved around the deeds of the gods. These earlier plays centered on single character displays and were very one-dimensional. Narayanan suggests that they were no more than a costume dance accompanied by music (pp. 7-8). Thampuran added depth and emotional complexity to his characters that was not there before and turned kathakali into total theatre that blended all the elements of acting, dance, vocal music, and instrumental music. In Thampuran's masterful hands, the epic characters evolved throughout the story rather than appearing as unchanging constants as they had prior to his work. Thampuran was also instrumental in giving his female characters multidimensionality of moods and states of minds. His plays offered new challenges to the actor in terms of further codifying facial expressions and expanding the musical and rhythmic possibilities and the emotional states that could be expressed. The booklet also provides general timeline of kathakali's early evolution from ramanattom, and contains primer on kathakali with an illustrated list of the mudras (hand gestures) and their various meanings and glossary of terms. …

Addison and Bright at the St Alban's Club

Dr Pearce's interesting survey of Thomas Addison's life (June 2004 JRSM1) draws attention to the subject's melancholic nature. I can add a footnote on this subject. I have recently completed the history of the St Alban's Medical Club which, with its brother club the Sydenham, has continuous records starting in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Thomas Addison was elected to the St Alban's Club in 1830 but had resigned less than three years later. His letter of resignation survives in the club's archives at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. At the time the leading figures in the club were Charles Locock (who later became Queen Victoria's accoucheur) and his boyhood friend Thomas Waterfield. Several of the surgeons and the surgeon-apothecaries in the Club had served with Wellington in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. They were a group of extroverts whose bets and wagers were settled in claret and champagne. Clearly Addison, not by nature clubbable, felt that this was not his scene. His friend and colleague Richard Bright, elected a little later and after Addison's resignation, was happier on such hearty occasions, but the treasurer's book often records that 'Dr Bright came after dinner'. Neither of these famous men, melancholic or not, played a leading part in the club's jolly evening meetings.

NEWTON'S WAR

ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS about Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the great scientist who discovered the laws of motion, calculus, and the law of gravity. But few people know about Newton the fascinating and flawed man. Newton carried on bitter lifelong feuds with two other scientists, Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, over credit for the discovery of the law of gravity and of calculus. Yet he maintained warm friendships with many of the most famous figures of his time, including philosopher John Locke, diarist Samuel Pepys, architect Christopher Wren, and astronomer-mathematician Edmond Halley. During his years at the University of Cambridge, Newton was a quintessential loner and the prototype of the absentminded professor. However, during the second half of his life he became an able government administrator, member of Parliament, and famous public man. His investigation of optics and his articulation of the laws of motion precipitated a scientific revolution. Yet he experimented with alchemy for ...

Bringing History to the Classroom: Spoofs about Problems in Obtaining Research Grants

This article is a spoof on the History of Science and consists of four skits depicting the difficulties famous men and women in science might have had in fictional interviews while seeking funding ...

A Tribute from Johannes Eccard to Orlando di Lasso at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis

A few years ago the library of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, obtained an unusual copy of the 1590 second edition of Icones sire Imagines virorum literis illustrium by Nicolaus Reusner (1545-1602). (1) It contains many blank leaves bound in and several tipped in among the biographical sketches in leones. The tipped-in leaves include handwritten pages by Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. The bound-in blank leaves contain some two hundred inscriptions and signatures related to the nearby biographical subjects. Among the latter is a handwritten tribute from Johannes Eccard to Orlando di Lasso, dated 1593 (fig. 1). How this copy of Icones came to include Eccard's tribute, along with those of so many of his contemporaries, and how the book found its way over the centuries from Europe to St. Louis would make a fascinating story, if only more details were known. Nevertheless, the story of Icones and its dependence on other early printed books is no less interesting, and it is the logical starting point for an examination of Concordia's copy of the book. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Icones is a collection of portraits of noted theologians, historians, poets, jurists, and other learned persons, most of whom lived during the sixteenth century in German-speaking realms. The first edition of Icones was issued in 1587 by the same publisher as in 1590, Bernhard Jobin, with the same tide, followed in a few months by an edition with German rather than Latin text. (2) A facsimile of the first edition was published in 1973. (3) Most of the portraits have brief biographies appended, and many of them are also followed by several poems in praise of their subjects. The selection of subjects is heavily weighted towards reformers of the church, including Martin Luther himself. The only musician to have an entry in the collection is Orlando di Lasso, whose music was highly esteemed by the evangelical church, though his own sympathies undoubtedly lay with the Counter-Reformation. (4) The idea of issuing a collection of portraits of famous men was not new when Icones was first published. According to Manfred Lemmer, an important model for their enterprise was provided in Basel by Peter Perna, (5) who in 1571 began to issue a series of Elogia (inscriptions or epitaphs) of famous men that had been collected in Como by Paolo Giovio (1483-1552), a courtier and historian who eventually became bishop of Nocera. Giovio's inscriptions were in effect a descriptive catalog of a gallery of portraits he had assembled that became famous far and wide. Perna published copies of many of these portraits in three volumes, based on Giovio's collection; these volumes included copies of the portraits and also short biographies (the Elogia) of the illustrious warriors, men of letters, and other notables they portrayed. The portraits were printed from woodcuts made by the illustrator and portrait painter Tobias Stimmer (1539-1584), who had been sent by Perna to Como for the purpose of copying the portraits in Giovio's collection. Among Stimmer's many publications after Perna's collections are the portraits in Reusner's Icones. Perna's Elogia contained few entries for individuals from German realms, which was also true of similar collections that were published soon afterwards. Reusner's Icones filled that gap. Collections of portraits might be considered a subgenre within the larger category of collections of biographies, which has its roots in classical antiquity with writers such as Plutarch and Suetonius. In connection with Lasso, one such sixteenth-century collection is of special interest, Heinricus Pantaleon's Prosopographiae. (6) Among the political figures and learned men whose biographies appear there, Lasso is the only musician, indeed the only representative of the fine arts in general. (7) Since this is also true of Reusner's Icones, one may reasonably ask if there is any connection between the two books. One connection may be the biography itself. …

The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew (review)

For decades, feminist scholars have struggled to bring to light the intellectual and artistic achievements of nineteenth-century women in an effort to reveal those women as more than just domestic angels, adoring wives, and perfect mothers. Given the success of this agenda, a study of hostesses might initially seem to be a step backward. After all, Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew, the subjects of Susan K. Harris's new book, devoted their lives to the facilitation of the careers of famous men, Harris admits that this [End Page 199] devotion hindered and often took the place of their own artistic development. Fields, in particular, has been known primarily (and often patronizingly) as a hostess since before her husband's death. Yet The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess is not a revisionary biography of either Fields or Gladstone (Harris refers to her as "Gladstone" rather than "Drew" because she did not marry until 1886, just towards the end of the period addressed by this study) or a lament for what we, as a culture, may have lost by not encouraging the careers of women. Rather, as her title indicates, this is a cultural study of women's influence within an extremely privileged sphere of the politically and intellectually powerful. This is also, just as importantly, a transatlantic study in which Harris rather refreshingly foregrounds her own method and approach to these women's lives and their "cultural work."

The Emergence of the Dandy

During the Romantic period, arguably the most famous man ever to be famous for not doing much of anything moved through the streets of London and the imaginations of his contemporaries. George “Beau” Brummell, whose name is still immortalized in clothing stores, regency romance novels, and a song by Billie Joel, and whose impact on masculine fashion still shapes what people wear and how they see clothing, made accomplishing nothing more than being well (if austerely) dressed a virtue and an art form. Although he left little or no writing in his own hand, iconographic literary depictions of him or of what he represented were immediately generated by Byron, Hazlitt, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, Carlyle, Balzac, D’Aureivilly and others during the first part of the nineteenth century, and reflections on his image and on the dandies who followed him continued to reverberate throughout literature and art well into the twentieth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the regime of the “man in black” seemed absolute (and lasted at least through to the “man in the grey flannel suit” of mid-twentieth century America); throughout this period Brummell frequently represented all that was abjected by modern masculinity: love of fashion, of fabric, of the shape and cut of one's clothes. Brummell himself bore a complex relationship to the emerging regime of masculine fashionable austerity. He dressed austerely, in blacks and whites, and encouraged the future George IV to do the same (no small personal challenge), but he also paid keen public attention to the details of masculine dress. Men may have been in the process of renouncing the pleasures of personal display during Brummell's lifetime, but Brummell, who turned heads wherever he went, troubled emerging boundaries that at least by the mid-nineteenth century were often to seem natural, permanent, and unquestionable.

明治後期から第一次世界大戦期における地方資産家の事業展開

This article aims at analyzing the business activities of OGUMA Koichiro, one of the famous wealthy men of Hakodate, Hokkaido, from the late Meiji to the World War I era.Oguma attained a resounding success by investing in fishing grounds during the Russo-Japanese War. With his fishing and other business successes, he became one of the most prosperous men in Hokkaido. Thereafter, his main business activities lay in the fishing business.During World War I, he again enjoyed great success in speculating in the shipping business, and used profits from that speculation to contribute to the welfare of his beloved Hakodate. He donated part of his profits to the Hakodate association for Education and built warehouses, an unprofitable business in the region, which Hakodate needed.After the 1920 Crisis, Oguma invested in unprofitable regional enterprises and became the president of a regional bank in Hakodate to contribute to the restoration of Hakodate local economy. However, in terms of business, he gradually departed from Hakodate. And in the middle of the 1920s, his contribution to the welfare of Hakodate began to merge with his non-business activities.