Vietnam Zippos - "Pure Art without Ambition"

Photo: Michael Sullivan, NPR

Vietnam Zippos is an exquisite book of Bradford Sullivan's amazing collection of engraved soldiers' Zippo lighters marking their time in Vietnam. The whole of human experience is told in the stories on these lighters.

Photo: New York Times

Beyond the poignancy and dark humor of the subject, we would be remiss to not mention the book design which is suited to the topic absolutely perfectly.

Photo: Frank Zeller, AFP/Getty

Vietnam Zippos by Sherry Buchanan
NY Times on Bradford Edwards
NPR on Bradford Edwards

Glass House Modernism Circa 1883

Phillip Johnson's Glass House (1949)

Having wasted a little too much time yesterday with the Making of America periodical database, I couldn't stop thinking about the article about the future of lumber substitutes from an 1883 issue of The Manufacturer and Builder. Amongst the suggested materials was a reference to glass veneers that would be strong enough to replace wood and have an appearance of real ornamental lumber that would fool the experts.

Glass as Lumber Substitute (1883)

As absurd as glass lumber sounds, consider for a moment petrified wood. When mineral-rich water runs through a piece of wood, the natural cellulose gives way to decomposition as the material is replaced by mineral deposits. Instead of a chunk of wood, you are left with a fossil of stone. Perhaps the silica of glass could be constructed in a petrified wood-like order and fired to create glass lumber.

Clearly, I am out of my depth. If anybody knows about these 19th century glass veneers for construction, please let us know.

Phillip Johnson Glass House
Petrified Wood
Previously, Making of America archive

"Making of America" Periodical Database

The Cornell periodical database is a goldmine for the endlessly curious. Not only are the periodicals scanned but the pages are also OCR'd so they can be searched by keyword.

aterials accessible here are Cornell University Library's contributions to Making of America (MOA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The project represents a major collaborative endeavor in preservation and electronic access to historical texts.

Making of America database

Some favorites:
Lumber Substitutes from The Manufacturer and Builder, 1883
Thirst in the Desert from Harper's,1898
Bee Pastures of California by John Muir from The Century, 1882

Photos from Bobby Kennedy's Campaign

Vanity Fair excerpted the forthcoming The Last Campaign about the abbreviated Bobby Kennedy presidential bid. As expected, it's an unbelievably sad story of the events of the 1968 campaign, illuminated by the stellar photographs of Bill Eppridge.
A Time it Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties by Bill Eppridge

Also:
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America
Vanity Fair excerpt with photos

Recreation of Ternary Calculating Machine Based on Brief Written Descriptions and a Stained Glass Window

Printer and amateur mathematician Thomas Fowler decided that a Base 3 number system would streamline his job as treasurer for the Poor Law Union. After toiling in secrecy behind his printing press, Thomas constructed a working ternary calculating machine in 1840. Haven't heard of ternary? Me neither. It is one more, duh, than binary.

Unfortunately, neither the machine nor drawings survived and the only evidence of its existence is a brief written description and church stained glass window depicting the mystery machine. From this scant history, Mark Glusker recreated the machine from the sort of plywood commonly used for dinosaur skeleton kits.

An impressive piece of mechanical and mathematical history, but you better watch the video yourself to decide if it was really a labor saving device. Its complexity may explain why it didn't catch on.

Link (Thanks, Maria!)

Civil War Diorama Drama

There's a rather bizarre little news item involving the Camp Mabry Museum here in Austin. The museum's Executive Director, Jeff Hunt, is accused of destroying a 5-foot-by-10-foot diorama of the Battle of Palmetto Ranch, apparently unhappy with historical inaccuracies it portrayed. Hunt maintains it was carefully disassembled, but museum employees say they witnessed him having an emotional 'tantrum' over the diorama, and that he spent an after-hours weekend last October irreparably destroying the display. The diorama had been constructed for the museum by the students of Glen Frakes, a history teacher in Gilbert, Arizona.

Glen Frakes...says his students spent more than three years and thousands of hours building the diorama for the Camp Mabry museum, and Hunt tore the diorama apart, soldier by inches-tall soldier, over the course of a weekend last fall...Over the years, Frakes and his students have had dioramas placed all over the country, including in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

The story takes an even more bizarre turn when it's revealed that Hunt authored a book about the Battle of Palmetto, which served as a reference by Frakes and his students for accuracy when building the diorama.

Link (via The Austin Chronicle, above photo by Glen Frakes)

National Archive Eyewitness Documents

The National Archives Eyewitness site highlights historical events as they were recorded by the individuals that experienced them. Interesting stuff, to be sure, but the quantity of documents is a little scant.

The photo above is from a 1919 transcontinental military exercise to determine the condition of the coast to coast roadways. 29 year old Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the observers on the trip and reported that it took a whopping 62 days over terrible roads to complete the journey. Though the mission was supposed to be self-sufficient, it would have been rude to turn down free lemonade.

Link

Protective Power of a Thousand Stitches

Embroidered senninbari garments ("Thousand Person Stitches") were simple caps, belts or vests that Japanese women would give to soldiers to wear before they went into battle. I love the public-stitching-jam aspect of making one: "a woman from the family or community would stand in a busy location like the entrance to a train station and entreat passersby to add one stitch each. When one thousand stitches had been collected, the belt was believed by some to have special power to protect the bearer from the hazards of battle." Beautiful.
Link

American Heritage Jr. Library: Steamboats on the Mississippi

The American Heritage Junior Library book on steamboats reads like a damn novel.

From Steamboats on the Mississippi:

There were many notable races, but the most famous of all was the one between the Robert F. Lee and the Natchez in 1870... All the glass in the Lee's pilothouse was removed, as were the steam escape pipes, and various doors, windows, shutters, and projections - anything that would cause air resistance... A captain trying to set a new record or show his heels to another boat would cram the fireboxes with fuel, throw in pitch or oil or fat sides of pork to make the fire burn faster and hotter, tie down the safety valves to raise the steam pressure to a screaming pitch - and hope for the best.

One of my very favorite books, and this isn't sickeningly sweet nostalgia for a book I read in a tree house as a kid - I read it the first time a couple of years ago! There is a chapter called "Scoundrels and Cutthroats!" A champion of a book. I wish history was always told so effortlessly.


American Heritage Junior Library "Steamboats on the Mississippi"
Out of Print
Link