Karen Hill

Charles Baudelaire’s mother had reservations about Les Fleurs du Mal. Theophile Gautier warned the poet of its “scabrous nature.” M. Bourdin, writing for Le Figaro (a newspaper largely reflecting government views), was scandalized: There are times when one doubts Monsieur Baudelaire’s sanity; there are those when there is no longer any doubt; most of the … Read more

Admiral Robert E. Peary’s ship, the Roosevelt, steamed north through the ice-packed waters of Smith Sound in 1908, her wooden hull specially fortified to meet the harsh barriers of ice, her primary means of propulsion a 1,000-horsepower engine rather than the sails of previous arctic exploration ships. Peary’s methods differed in another fundamental way: years … Read more

When in 1857 Frederick Law Olmsted became superintendent of the area that would become Central Park, he described it as “a pestilential spot, where rank vegetation and miasmatic odors taint every breath of air.” The land was a chaotic mix of swamp and brambles, squatters’ shacks and open sewers. Some 300 hovels dotted the unpromising … Read more

When the shooting of Gone With the Wind began, producer David O. Selznick was still searching for Scarlett O’Hara. Actresses flocked to Hollywood, talent scouts combed the South, and Selznick’s backers banged on his door. Over the course of two and a half years he’d shot 165,000 feet of film (27 hours), spending $105,000 on … Read more

Apparently George Smith, who first made a candy on a stick for a Connecticut candy manufacturer in the early 1900s, had other moneymaking interests: Lolly Pop was one of the finest racehorses of the time.

Humphrey Bogart cured a hangover by getting drunk again. And to make sure he had some company he formed his own drinking club, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, with his wife Lauren Bacall as den mother, Frank Sinatra as secretary. Members were by and large Hollywood Democrats with an inclination for the bottle. Regulars included … Read more

Aristotle provided the first conclusive argument for a spherical earth when he noted during a lunar eclipse that the shadow the earth cast on the moon was circular. Lactantius of Alexandria was an early apostate from the scientifically based cosmology of the ancients. In “On the False Wisdom of the Philosophers,” a chapter in his … Read more

By the mid-1930s the U.S. Navy had begun to solve some Japanese diplomatic messages with relative ease. But just as the Navy succeeded in breaking what the United States called the Red code, Japan’s Foreign Office installed new, more sophisticated coding machines in its major embassies, and the ensuing transmissions had the Navy baffled. The … Read more

If one had stood at the corner of New York’s 34th Street and 5th Avenue at eight o’clock on a given night in the 1870s, one might have seen a string of stately carriages arrive at Number 350 on 34th. There the creme de la crème of New York Society would descend in a glitter … Read more

For a long time the exceedingly small size of an atom, one hundred-millionth of an inch is typical, made it very difficult to make even an informed guess about its structure. Sir Isaac Newton imagined atoms as “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles.” Others decided they were red, or gray, compact, and densely populated with … Read more

The strange custom of dancing on the very tips of one’s toes is not as old as ballet itself. Only after the dance was several hundred years old did this stylized position, which many now consider the essence of ballet, catch on, and one Italian girl at the Paris Opera was largely responsible. The classic … Read more

For thousands of years, communication moved only as fast as a horse could run or a ship could muster subject to the vagaries of the wind. But in the 19th century, an invention popularly attributed to Samuel F. B. Morse suddenly transcended the miles, within countries and beyond. Miraculous wires began to creep over Europe … Read more

In 1972 Germany’s “Bonnie and Clyde” were declared Public Enemies Number One. In the two years since its formation, the Red Army Faction, popularly called the Baader-Meinhof gang, had stunned, divided, and terrified the country. Over 100 police had been hospitalized and 1 killed, while judges’ chambers were gutted and American installations fire-bombed. A new … Read more

An Egyptian stele from about 1500 B.C. portrays a young man with a withered leg, symptomatic of poliomyelitis. The Procession of the Cripples by Hieronymus Bosch also captures the cruel effects of the disease. In the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, what had been isolated instances erupted, unpredictably, into devastating epidemics. … Read more

In Mexico’s Estadio Olimpico, a crowd of 80,000 gasped as high jumper Dick Fosbury flew over the bar at seven feet, four and a half inches to win a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics and set an Olympic record. It wasn’t only the height that astounded them (Russia’s Valery Brumel still held the world … Read more

The shadowy actor of whom we know so little, with whom we credit the pinnacles of English literature, has been the object of veneration, gentle skepticism, and the most bitter abuse. The camps are divided, the theories myriad. Some worship the poet as a god; others denounce him as an illiterate, drunken rustic, usurer, and … Read more

The assignment of a color to each sex serves the obvious purpose of distinguishing infants, who otherwise look pretty much alike. But the particular choice of blue dates back to ancient times, when evil spirits purportedly plagued young children but could be warded off with certain colors. Blue, emblematic of the heavens, had an immanent … Read more

In 1803 Thomas Jefferson secretly appropriated funds for exploration of the upper portions of the Missouri River and from there westward to the Pacific, a region not yet under the sovereignty of the United States. He asked his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and frontiersman William Clark to evaluate the territory for potential annexation, taking careful … Read more

James Joyce began writing Ulysses in March 1914 at the age of 32. At that time he lived in Trieste with his wife, Nora Barnacle Joyce, and their two children in a flat furnished only with replicas of antique Danish chairs, perhaps emblematic of his love of Ibsen. His scant income was derived from two … Read more

At the age of 15, William T. Grant left school to help support his mother by running messages in a New England store. The ambitious youth soon purchased an interest in the business and proceeded to buy out his partners. The ensuing years saw this small-town store swell to a massive, nationwide variety-store chain, third … Read more

Four centuries ahead of his time, Leonardo da Vinci conceived workable plans for drawbridges and armored tanks, submarines, air conditioners, and machine guns. He imagined, too, the horseless carriage, a model of which stands in the museum in Vinci, about 20 miles west of Florence. The small, compact unit, constructed of wood, has three wheels … Read more

The reasons underlying the celebration of Christmas on December 25 are not entirely Christian. For one, no one really knows when Jesus was born. No one worried much about the birthday until the 3rd century, at which time Clement of Alexandria proposed May 20, but speculation continued. In 336 the Western Church designated December 25, … Read more

It starts with the school uniform, insignia on the pocket, and persists for years thereafter, at dinners, offices, weddings, clubs, the blue blazer cropping up everywhere with the same safe respectability. Men of all ages turn to it with relief as an easy answer to what to wear on just about any occasion. Casual yet … Read more

This is “My Challenge to Death,” Houdini advertised with bravura, drawing fascinated and mystified crowds to witness his spectacle of daring. They would gather in droves along a pier on a river or canal where the preeminent magician stood handcuffed, vulnerable, right by their side. Here there was no stage, no discrete and distant world … Read more

In 1856 some workmen were digging for limestone in a cave in the valley of the Neander River near Dusseldorf. Some old bones turned up but the workers, more interested in their paychecks than paleontology, brushed them aside and many were lost. Fortunately, the owner of the quarry salvaged a skullcap, part of a pelvic … Read more

On November 8, 1884, France’s President Grevy signed a decree that “a Universal Exposition of Products of Industry shall be opened in Paris May 5, 1889.” The last decade had seen a flourishing of trade, a vigorous expansion of industry, and rapid increases in national income. The country had salved the wounds of the Franco-Prussian … Read more

The cesarean section has become so quick and safe in recent years that many doctors opt for it rather than waste precious time during a prolonged labor and risk the complications that might accompany a vaginal delivery. The operation has in fact become so popular among obstetricians that despite increasing awareness among women of natural … Read more

The Reverend Sylvester W. Graham preached that, rather than being born again, one’s life could be salvaged by vegetarianism and bran. Living in New England in the early 19th century, the former Presbyterian preacher was an early champion of the low-fat, low-salt diet, brown bread as opposed to the socially sanctioned white, and fruits and … Read more

No one has seen a dodo for three centuries. Furthermore, no one ever saw one anywhere except on the remote volcanic island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. When the Portuguese arrived on Mauritius in 1507, bountiful game was there for the plucking, and so they plucked. The dodo was among the island’s many species … Read more

We’ve all seen mug shots in post offices and police stations of shady, unshaven characters with deep, mean eyes and unkempt clothes, and most of us would prefer not to cross their paths, though apprehending them if we do is the reason for the FBI’s list. Back in the 1940s the Associated Press, the United … Read more

Although of mixed origins, the Thoroughbred breeds true to type and has held a place alongside other breeds in the General Stud Book of the English Jockey Club since the 18th century. How did they breed the Thoroughbred, a variety of horse for which people will pay millions? Horse racing has been popular in England … Read more

Women everywhere melted at the sight of the inimitable Rudolph Valentino in his silent film role of the seductive Sheik. But although thousands yearned for his affections, his bride was apparently not among them. Jean Acker and Rudolph Valentino, young and new to Hollywood, married on a sudden impulse in 1919 and realized the same … Read more

In June 1783, a horde of soldiers, still unpaid for their services in the War of Independence, stormed Philadelphia to voice their complaints to Congress. The country was then a loose union of 13 semi-independent sovereignties. There was no president, no money in the Treasury. The wise gentlemen in Philadelphia’s Old City Hall decided it … Read more

A visionary scientist made a serendipitous discovery and fought over a decade for the scientific community to accept it. When they did, the world received the lifesaving drug penicillin. In 1928 bacteriologist Dr. Alexander Fleming, a modest man, son of a Scottish farmer, was working in his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, a … Read more

The Edsel was named after Edsel Ford, the son of Henry, of course, but only after a long, convoluted, and expensive chain of experiments, arguments, marketing research, and trial and error. And after all that, the adventuresome car for the upwardly mobile family was branded with an old-fashioned, grandfatherly name, scarcely well suited for a … Read more

In the spring of 1947 a Bedouin boy known as Muhammed the Wolf was herding his goats on the western shore of the Dead Sea near the desolate ravine the Arabs call Qumran. This may seem a strange place for the boy to have been, but he was among a group of contrabandists smuggling goats … Read more

It isn’t Muhammad Ali or Mount Everest or the world’s fattest woman who bears the distinction of inspiring the Guinness Book of World Records, it was a golden plover that started it all. In 1954 Sir Hugh Beaver was hunting in the green hills of Ireland. He shot down ducks and geese, but a flock … Read more

The massive stones on England’s Salisbury Plain have stood for over 4,000 years, witness to the wanderings of prehistoric nomads, to the rise and fall of tribes, to rites, mysteries, and ceremonies forever eclipsed. Well before the complexity of its design was revealed, the elegance and imposing size of Stonehenge inspired scores of theories about … Read more

When Marie Antoinette was wallowing in riches in her Petit Trianon and her husband, Louis XVI, was gorging himself regularly on eight-course meals, many in Paris were hungry and some were starving. They found even bread, the staple of the French diet, beyond their means. Hearing of this, the frivolous queen is alleged to have … Read more

Although Franklin Roosevelt was reelected to the presidency in 1936 by an overwhelming majority (he carried every state except Maine and Vermont), there was one very significant place where the majority opposed him: the Supreme Court. Social ills plagued the country and Roosevelt was determined to extend his New Deal, but the judicial veto threatened … Read more

The sight of cows, however emaciated, lumbering through the sultry and congested streets of Calcutta, is a peculiar one to the western eye, and many deride the ban on killing cattle in a country where millions go hungry. But what appears an arbitrary and irrational practice arose not only from religious beliefs, but from the … Read more

The next time you find an excuse to break open a bottle of bubbly, be it New Year’s, a wedding, or a whim, you might raise your effervescent glass in solemn thanks to one blind Benedictine monk who made it all possible. Three centuries ago there lived in northern France a great blender of wines, … Read more

The terrible tragedy is they didn’t put out the San Francisco fire of 1906. The fire raged for three full days, devouring all in its three-mile path, razing the city, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and helpless. At 5:13 A.M. on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault shifted and heaved with enough force to … Read more

When the police ambush the infamous duo in the climactic scene of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Faye Dunaway writhes and twists beneath a deluge of fire in a slow-motion death that looks agonizingly real. While the motions are all her own, special effects don’t always preclude the necessity of good acting, some technical tricks did … Read more

When Michael Cimino’s 3-hour-and-39-minute epic was screened in New York in November 1980, United Artists’ managers blanched, the critics brandished their pens, and Cimino hastened to explain that the film had been edited with undue speed to meet a release deadline. No doubt about it, his two-year obsession, his beloved vision of the 19th-century West, … Read more

Chubby Checker may have popularized the twist, but he did not invent it. The twist step goes way back to the early black minstrel and medicine shows. At the turn of the century, Jelly Roll Morton used to sing down in New Orleans about “sis . . . out on the levee doin’ the double … Read more