sandr020

Avery Brundage (1887-1975) grad­uated civil engineering from the University of Ill­in­ois in 1909. His links to anti-Semitism were first seen in his university days, where he was pres­id­ent of a fraternity chapter who would accept any Aryan male who did not have a Jewish parent. Brundage was a fine athlete who won the American National dec­athlon three times. He competed in the 1912 Summer Olymp­ics in Stockholm , where he represented the USA in both pentath­l­on and decathlon, but did not win any medals. He began to involve himself in sports administration, event­ually at the American Olympic Committee level. In 1928, Brundage was elected AOC president. Many sports administrators disliked women’s involvement at the top level. So the anti-woman movement was not pleased when, in July 1932, American athlete Babe Didrikson did brilliantly to win two Olympic gold medals in javelin and 80m hurdles. Didrikson was charged with “professionalism” because she had appeared in an advertisement ...

I normally think of the Edwardian era as time of culture, literature, science, medicine and peace. But 1905 began with a series of strikes and demonstrations in the Russian streets . In Jan a protest march in St Pet­ersburg was led by a workers’ organ­isation, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers . c200,000 mar­chers moved to the Wint­er Palace to present pet­itions to the Tsar, but soon 1,000 protest­ors lay shot dead that Bloody Sunday. Anger spread throughout Russia with more strikes and mar­ches. In March the universities were shut down by radicals. In July, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa and avoided death only when the firing squad seized the ship instead. Odessa’s citizens turned out to support the sail­ors and many were massacred on the steps leading to the wharf. Albert Einstein 1905 In St Petersburg Leon Trotsky set up a Soviet Workers’ Council to organise opposition to the Tsar. But Trotsky and his supp­or­ters were soon imprisoned. A...

Bobby Shafran drove to Sullivan County Community College in New York for his first day of university. The other students were thrilled to see him there, telling him how their summer holidays had been and asking newcomer about his. He was particularly surprised when girls warmly kissed him, and called him Eddy. Soon Michael Domnitz, whose best friend Eddy Galland had just changed colleges, solved the mystery. Domnitz asked Bobby if he was adopted, and if so, what was his date of birth. It was 12th July 1961, the same date as Galland! Shafran phoned Galland, and they immediately arranged a meeting. Both Bobby and Eddy were gobsmacked that their two faces, clothes and hairdos were utterly identical! The story of the twins’ reunion made the local news­papers. And an even more striking event occurred. David Kellman , a 19-year-old student at another New York college, saw the twins’ faces in a newspaper and thought he was looking at himself. They turned out to be identical triplets. All thr...

In 1870, the vast area called Rupert's Land was transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company and purchased by the new Dominion of Canada. The sudden shift of authority and resultant uncertainty among the inhabitants of the region erupted into the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70 . It was essential that order be restored by the newly formed federal government in Ottawa. In 1872 a colonel in the Canadian Militia was dispatched into the Northwest on a governmental fact-finding journ­ey. He recommended that a regiment of 550 mounted riflemen be organised to preserve order in the terr­it­ory, and to protect the surveyors and railway builders who were working their way to the Pacific coast. In Ottawa, 1st Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald (1867–73) was soon aware of the viol­ence in the USA’s western plains and did not want these problems repeated in Canada! In May 1873 Macdonald successfully introd­uced a bill to est­ab­lish a police force in the territor­ies: Manitoba, parts of Sask­a...

Over the past 150 years, The Republican Party/Grand Old Party moved from a racially prog­res­s­ive, Northern party.. to one that that domin­ates the South and gets almost no support from non-white vot­ers. These changes are totally counter-intuitive to a non-American historian, so I have examined three historians: Annabelle Quince , Natalie Wolchover  and Tim Stanley . The Whigs formed in opposition to the policies of Democratic Pres­id­ent, Andrew Jack­son (1829–37). The Whigs supported the suprem­acy of the US Congress over the Presidency, and favoured a programme of mod­ernisation, banking and pro­tectionism for manufacturing. It appealed to entrepreneurs, planters, reformers and the growing urban middle class, but not to labourers and farmers. Slavery was only one of many issues in the country’s politics then, usually rel­atively minor. The American South based its econ­omy on the en­slavement of non-whites, and the two major parties, Democrats and Whigs, were willing to let...

Jan Tomas Forman was born in 1932 in Caslav, now part of the Czech Republic. During the Nazi occupation, Forman's Protestant mother Anna Švábová died in Ausch­witz in 1943. As a member of the Protestant anti-Nazi Underground, Milos’ putative father Professor Rudolf Forman was arrested for distributing banned books; he died while being int­errogated by the Gestapo in a concentration camp in 1944. Forman had no idea what had happened to his parents. During the rest of his childhood, Forman was raised by relatives. Aged 18, Forman joined the newly founded Prague film school Famu and began directing documentaries for Czech television. He was a mover and shaker in Prague’s theatres and cinemas in the 1950s and early 60s. Forman’s films, and others of the Czech new wave, intro­duced to the cinema portrayals of working-class life eg A Blonde in Love (1965), not of soc­ialist realism. The more liberal faction of the Communist party, then in ascendancy, appropriated these movies as exp...

I have two important reasons for focusing on Neil Simon. Firstly my family life seemed to replicate his: Russian parents, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, impoverished in the Great Depression and very keen on tertiary education. Secondly I saw every American play and musical in the 1950s and early 60s, but didn’t enjoy the experience until Neil Simon’s works started arriving in Australia. Neil Simon (1927–2018) was born and grew up in Manhattan, where he lived with his Russian parents and his older brother Danny . His parents were not happy together, made worse by financial hardship caused by the Great Depression. The two boys were sometimes forced to live with various aunts and uncles, instead of in the family home. Needless to say, Danny and Neil took refuge at the cinema as children, finding particular delight in comedies. Neil studied for a short time before signing up for the Army Air Force Reserve, then served as a sports editor for the Lowry Field Base newspaper. He studied at th...

No nation was as interested in domestic genre scenes as the post-Reform­ation Dut­ch. The Dutch middle class wan­ted small, realistic im­ages of their own life, im­ag­es where ed­uc­at­ion, explor­at­ion, science, busin­ess and Prot­es­tant vir­tues were honour­ed. In the book  Vermeer’s Hat (2009), Timothy Brook focused on these small, domestic interiors of Delft as shown in eight paintings by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). His work suggested that a study of globalisation should start in the C17th; this would improve our understanding of the complex exchanges that brought the world together in a more integrated economic unit back then. Vermeer,  Officer and Laughing Girl, 1655–60  50 cm x 46 cm, The Frick Collection Starting with the household objects and activities found in Vermeer’s paintings, Brook was interested in viewing trade markets across the world, perhaps parts of the world that C17th Europeans didn’t know much about. He thus uncovered something ...

The film Woman in Gold , directed by Simon Curtis, was about the recovery of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907. Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 (Moritz Bleibtreu)’s finished portrait painting, made of gorgeous oil, silver and gold, took three years to complete. His 1907 painting, commission by the husband, had originally been titled Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. It was the first of 2 port­raits that Klimt painted of Adele; then Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II in 1912. When Adele died in 1925, her 6 paintings by Klimt were not left to Austria. She spec­if­ied in her will that the paintings were to be left to her husband and asked that he donate them to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death, to be put on display in the prest­ig­ious Belvedere Palace . However Adele's husband, wealthy sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer 's own will stated that his estate, including the Klimt paintings, was to go to his heirs. But Ferdinand did not die until WW2, and by that tim...

I can recognise and love every one of William Hogarth 's (1697-1764) works of art. What I did NOT realise that one of his dogs, Trump (c1730–1745), appeared in a number of his engavings and paintings. Apart from looking ugly, it has been suggested by Hogarth's biographer Ronald Paulson that this dog appeared as an emblem of the artist's own pug-nacious and dog-matic character. Hogarth was clever and famous for blasting whatever he con­sid­ered to be politically corrupt, vulgar, criminal, charitable and patriotic. The artist was disparagingly nicknamed the Painter Pugg.   But Hogarth continued to use the dog as his trademark in a sat­ir­ic­al 1763 engraving The Bruiser . The image was   based on his 1745 self-portrait with Trump, replacing art critic Charles Churchill who was lampooned as a drunken bear. Note the rude dog, urinating on a copy of the “Epistle to William Hogarth”, published by Charles Churchill, archenemy of the painter. How prescient William Hogarth was!! ...

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Medit­er­r­anean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was bapt­is­ed. Touristy Plaza de la Merced was where the art­ist etched his first drawings outside his home. Picasso was messy, both boisterous and silent, amor­ous and domineering. His love of bullfighting stemmed from child­hood visits to Málaga’s Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta, making picadors and bulls a recurring motif in his work.   Guernica, 1937 3.5 × 7.8m Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid Photo credit: publicdelivery Early on Pablo shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By 16, his work got him into the prestigious Royal Acad­emy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid . And studied the Spanish masters he admired at the Prado Museum . Picasso was young when Paul Cézanne, Geo...