August 30, 2018 On History The Unburied Stone By Matthew Komatsu Manazuru peninsula, Japan Hanōkizawa-san tells me to stop the car, and from the backseat points at an anonymous granite cliffside ten meters away. “There,” he says. “That’s where it came from.” We are driving south along a paved road built against the cliffs that fall into the Pacific outside the Japanese village of Yoshihama. He wants to show Yu Wada-Dimmer, our interpreter, and me the origin of the tsunami ishi, or “tsunami stone” that appeared on Yoshihama’s beach when the high waters of the 1933 tsunami receded. The stone, once used as a warning to low-living villagers, was then buried by man in the sixties, only to be unburied when the ocean surged inland once more on the afternoon of Friday, March 11, 2011. I can just barely discern the scar of a large boulder ripped clean from the crag, but it could be the former home of any rock that has since tumbled to a saline grave. Eighty-five years have passed since 1933. Hanōkizawa is now 89, which means he was a child, four or five, when it happened. “How do you know this is where it came from?” I ask. “Because my father told me,” he replies. Read More
May 15, 2018 On History The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints By Chantel Tattoli Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can’t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches—all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses—and dump them on a bureaucrat’s desk, like payment rendered in coin. Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). “I need to see your ID,” Humrich said. I showed my passport—using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: “These are nice and clear.” On the walk home, while the sky pissed rain, I slipped the cards under my sweater. It occurred to me that I knew approximately zilch about how an identity could be apportioned in ten parts, each the size of a petal. Thumb marks were used as personal seals to close business in Babylonia, and, in 1303, a Persian vizier recounted the use of fingerprints as signatures during the Qin and Han Dynasties, noting, “Experience has shown that no two individuals have fingers precisely alike.” The Chinese had realized that before anyone: a Qin dynasty document from the third-century B.C.E, titled “The Volume of Crime Scene Investigation—Burglary,” pointed up fingerprints as a means of evincing whodunnit. Read More
April 25, 2018 On History The Strange History of the “King-Pine” By Nina-Sophia Miralles Recent pineapple decorating trends. “There is no nobler fruit in the universe,” Jean de Léry writes of the pineapple. Charles Lamb loved the fruit erotically: “Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lovers’ kisses she biteth.” Pieter de la Court professes: “One can never be tire’d with looking on it.” How did these men, and so many others, become so enraptured with the pineapple? And how have we forgotten its former grandeur? In 1496, when Christopher Columbus was returning from his second voyage to the Americas, he brought back a consignment of pineapples. Little did he know that this golden gift, nestled among the tame parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, and pumpkins, would be the crowning glory of his cargo. The fateful pineapple that reached King Ferdinand was the sole survivor: it was the only specimen that had not dissolved into a sticky rot during the journey. It produced enough of an impression for Peter Martyr, tutor to the Spanish princes, to record the first tasting: “The most invincible King Ferdinand relates that he has eaten another fruit brought from those countries. It is like a pine-nut in form and colour, covered with scales, and firmer than a melon. Its flavour excels all other fruits.” At least part of the excitement came from the fruit’s spiked form, which sent Europeans into rapture. King Ferdinand’s envoy to Panama, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes, writes, “[It is] the most beautiful of any fruits I have seen. I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other of so exquisite and lovely appearance.” The sweetness of the pineapple, too, should not go unmentioned. Renaissance Europe was a world essentially bereft of common sweets. Sugar refined from cane was an expensive commodity, and orchard-grown fruits were subject to seasons. The pineapple may well have been the tastiest thing anyone had ever eaten. But delicious or otherwise, it was still the preserve of adventurers, and the pineapple might never have made it into common lore if it hadn’t coincided with yet another global development: the widespread dissemination of the written word. Read More
February 26, 2018 On History Napoleon’s Chamber Pot: Propaganda and Fake News By Nina Martyris Charles Steuben, Napoleon’s Return from Elba, 1818. A few weeks ago, shortly after the news broke that the curator of the Guggenheim Museum had offered President Donald Trump a gold toilet as an artwork-commode for his private quarters in the White House, I found myself in Montreal, examining a toilet meant for another powerful rump. The cream-colored chamber pot had been custom made for the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte when he was a prisoner of the British on the island of Saint Helena after his 1815 defeat at Waterloo. The English furniture maker commissioned to design the former emperor’s household furnishings had come up with this elegant Grecian chamber pot. But it turned out to have a fatal flaw: a neoclassical laurel wreath encircled its rim. Out of the question, said the scandalized British authorities when they laid eyes on it. Fearing their hostile prisoner would misinterpret the laurel as a symbolic nod to his long-gone imperial status, the pot was, so to speak, never pressed into service. Read More
December 18, 2017 On History An Intimate History of America By Clint Smith Arthur Rothstein, Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1937. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren’t what they once were—that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints. We got into an elevator that brought us down to the bottom level of the museum, where visitors begin their journey with displays that outline the earliest years of black life in this country. We made our way through the exhibitions that document the state-sanctioned violence black people experienced over the course of generations, pausing to study the images and take in their explanations: How, even after the Civil War, the Black Codes in South Carolina made it so that grown men had to get written permission from white employers simply to be able to walk down the street in peace. How in Louisiana a black woman’s body, by law, was not her own. How in Mississippi an interracial marriage would put a noose around your neck the moment the vows left your lips. The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there. But to walk through these early exhibitions was to be told that the smog is not your imagination—my imagination—that it is real, regardless of how vehemently some will deny it. With family recently visiting Washington, D.C., from out of town, my wife and I took my parents and my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather to the museum. I had been there once before and was struck by a single institution’s remarkable ability to capture so much of black America’s complex relationship—tumultuous, inspiring—with this country and how so many of the exhibitions complicated various accounts of American history that are misrepresented in our broader social discourse. Every monument or homage to Thomas Jefferson I have come across, for example, presents him singularly as the nation’s intellectual founding father and as a paragon of our collective ideals. At this museum, his statue stands before towers of bricks, each bearing the name of a person Jefferson enslaved, some of them his own children. In the exhibitions on the civil rights movement, the museum has made a thoughtful and purposeful effort to document the work of women in the crusade for equal rights, many of whom are often erased from discussions of civil rights work in our American-history textbooks. Exhibitions like these invested me in the museum not only because they tell the story of black America but because they insist that the story of black America is indeed the story of America itself. America’s economy cannot be disentangled from the free labor that built it, just as America’s culture cannot be unbound from the black artists who cultivated it. Read More
October 30, 2017 On History The Ruin: Roosevelt Island’s Smallpox Hospital By Selin Thomas Renwick Smallpox Hospital. Photo: Andre Costantini To drive up FDR Drive—on Manhattan’s east side, on a slick cold night—is to find solitude. You edge between island and water like a cell in a vein. To the left, streets reach like facades to a vanishing point. Buildings of stone and steel and glass, illuminated from within, look like cave drawings depicting our humanity and its dystopia. Row by row and by the thousands, people in a furious, confused sequence are stacked atop one another. They work or eat or drown in the blue light of televisions. The city is illuminated like it’s the world’s carnival, and this can inspire an isolating sentimentality of being abandoned to the future, when humanity has built then ruined everything and itself, when it is left without want and is poorer for it. It is not as cynical as it sounds. These are the mythical happenings that bind you to this place by their sheer wild or gentle force. This is a place alive. So consumed might you be by this turning shadowbox of life to the west that you might miss, despite the flood lights, the ruin to the east: a mid-nineteenth-century stone hospital across the river, at the southern end of Roosevelt Island. Designed by the venerable James Renwick Jr., the crumbling building is a federal, state, and city landmark that has sat, decaying, for decades opposite ever-ascendant Manhattan. Because it was landmarked in 1976 as a ruin, to wither is its fate. Read More