On this day in 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmet Till (see previously) was murdered in a brutal fashion by two vigilantes after for his alleged offense of a white woman at her family’s grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
His violent death and the subsequent acquittal of his killers focused attention to the persecution and injustice of American apartheid and galvanised the burgeoning civil rights movement. Two years later on the anniversary of the killing, segregationist senator Strom Thurmond representing the state of South Carolina dishonoured Till’s memory by staging his twenty-four long filibuster to prevent the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The stunt only forestalled the vote until September when it was signed into law. On the same day in 1963, organisers held the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with Martin Luther King Jr delivering his “I Have a Dream” address from the Lincoln Memorial, this non-violent rally and calls to end systemic racism formative in the ways the US and the world view equality and the catalyst for the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Rights Act of the following year.
Friday, 28 August 2020
the death of emmett till
Thursday, 27 August 2020
album amicorum
Long before the more modern manifestation of social media, there were friend books (see previously here and here) and as the Guardian reports one of history’s finest exemplars Das Groรe Stammbuch of Philipp Hainhofer has been acquired for the library of Wolfenbรผttel (also home of Jรคgermeister) nearly four centuries after the institution tried to purchase the celebrated and celebrity-filled volume.
The seventeenth century equivalent of an influencer found in Augsburger merchant and diplomat had acquired many followers whose signatures were illuminated with an elaborate artistic commission, and include autographs from the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope, the Medicis, various kings and many other contemporary luminaries. The duke for whom the library owes its patronage tried to purchase it from the estate of Hainhofer after his death but it was at the time fame and followers were out of his price range.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฐ, ๐ฅ, libraries and museums
an act to prevent pernicious political activities
Passed in August of 1939 and amended most recently in 2012, the US federal law prohibits all government employees of the executive branch—with the exception of the president and vice president—from engaging in most forms of political activity and advocacy, the Hatch Act (see previously), named for the bill’s sponsor Democrat senator representing the state of New Mexico Carl Hatch (*1889 – †1963), was instigated by accusations by Republican members that the opposition party—Hatch’s own—were utilising employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA, a New Deal recovery project to employ millions in public works and conservation activities to lift the US out of the Great Depression that followed World War I) as a political machine to influence elections, especially in swing-states like Tennessee and Kentucky. The main thrust of the law is to prevent intimidation or bribery of voters by office holder, the uniformed military and other authority figures and establish ethical norms—moreover precluding federal employees in general from aligning with extremist groups on the far left or the far right that advocates the overthrow of the government, specifically to discourage membership in the Communist Party and the German-American Bund.
added precaution
Becoming rather an ossified, stock phrase itself, to act out of an abundance of caution is a borrowing from post-classical legal Latin ex abundante cautela, whose final word plus deponent suffix we encounter in other aphorisms and maxims, like caveat lector.
omnia omnibus ubique
Having first encountered the massive catalogue on Things Magazine (with more on the theme mail-order shopping), we were quite intrigued and a bit frustrated that Project Gutenberg where the 1912 tome in its entirety is archive (an undertaking it took thirteen years to scan) is unironically blocked in Deutschland, and so appreciated the curation by Open Culture of some of the limitless wares on offer by ringing up “Western One” (true to the motto above) for anything at any time day or night.
Some of the particularly Victorian goods and services available included an on-call taxidermist, engage a band of musicians for an occasion, cocaine infused throat lozenges all shipped anywhere in the Empire. The flagship store of course still exists though now under the ownership of the state of Qatar. Much more to explore at the links above.
zugspitze
Highest peak of the Wetterstein Mountain range that forms the border between Germany and Austria, the first team of mountaineers to summit it, Josef Naus, guide Johann Georg Tauschl and a survey assistant identified sadly only as Maier, did so on this day in 1820. Though smuggling operations or goatherds might have accomplished this feat first, this documented ascent was in service to the Royal Bavarian Topographic Bureau (Kรถniglich Bairischen Topografischen Bureau) and their commission of an atlas of the kingdom, culminating with the group planting a bergstock to mark their success. Maximilian I was pleased with the confirmation that the summit lay on his side of the border.
Wednesday, 26 August 2020
unbuilt architecture

catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ก, ๐️, ๐ฝ, architecture
video freaks
Hyperallergic directs our attention to the extensive raw footage of the US party conventions of the summer of 1972 as captured by a San Francisco-based collective known as Top Value Television—TVTV. These guerrilla documentarians came together to cover these political events and remained active through 1979 filming a range of projects as a counterpoint to mass media. The archives of UC Berkley (previously) has digitised hundreds of hours of their content and made it available on their website along with curated programmes and profiles of members of the group.