WSJ Historically Speaking: The Great American Road Trip

In 1903, physician Horatio Nelson Jackson (at wheel) and his driving partner Sewall K. Crocker became the first men to drive an automobile across the U.S. PHOTO: ISC IMAGES & ARCHIVES/GETTY

In 1903, physician Horatio Nelson Jackson (at wheel) and his driving partner Sewall K. Crocker became the first men to drive an automobile across the U.S. PHOTO: ISC IMAGES & ARCHIVES/GETTY

The Great American Road Trip was born in 1856 with the publication of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road.” Or at least that’s where the idea of such a journey came into being, since 160 years ago there were no states between Texas and California, let alone cars, highways or motels.

A lone traveler’s creature comforts back then consisted of liberty and opportunity: “Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose,” the poet wrote.
Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: Five Millennia of Swimming Pools

The swimming pool and centuries of tradition ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The swimming pool and centuries of tradition ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

For many people, the perfect July Fourth weekend includes three All-American ingredients: fireworks, a barbecue and a pool party. We share the first two emblems of national identity with the Chinese and the Australians. Only the third, the backyard swimming pool—in John Cheever’s words, “that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county”—is indelibly American, a ubiquitous symbol of suburbia. Continue reading…

The Sunday Times: Wrong kind of feminist, right kind of candidate

Hillary Clinton was greeted with cheers in California last week but after 20 years as a political insider she has been struggling to connect with younger voters REUTERS

Hillary Clinton was greeted with cheers in California last week but after 20 years as a political insider she has been struggling to connect with younger voters
REUTERS

Some revolutions happen in an explosion of blood and violence; these are the ones that people remember. Others take place with a stroke of a pen, the pull of a lever, a collective shout of “Aye”; these are the ones that work.

By becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president last week, Hillary Clinton once again proved it is the quiet revolutions that matter most. She has gone further than any other American woman before her, and she did it by using rather than abusing the democratic process.

Clinton is writing a new chapter of US history. Whatever happens in the election — and I am absolutely confident she will win against Donald Trump — America has entered a new era of gender equality. The “highest and hardest” glass ceiling — the one with 18m cracks in 2008 — has at last been shattered.

So why are millions of women not taking to the streets to celebrate her victory? The answer is as simple as it is ironic: Clinton is a victim of her own success. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Tragic Side of Weddings

Weddings are happy affairs. What could possibly go wrong? From left, Christian Bale, Calista Flockhart, Dominic West, Anna Friel in 1999’s ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream.’ PHOTO: FOX SEARCHLIGHT/EVERETT COLLECTION

Weddings are happy affairs. What could possibly go wrong? From left, Christian Bale, Calista Flockhart, Dominic West, Anna Friel in 1999’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ PHOTO: FOX SEARCHLIGHT/EVERETT COLLECTION

If April is the cruelest month, then June is the happiest—at least for those hoping to say “I do.” Surveys show that in America, about 16% of all weddings occur in June, making it the most popular wedding month. In many parts of the country, flowers are at their peak and the weather is perfect. What could go wrong?

A great deal, it turns out. With so much riding on the day, weddings occupy a curious place in the human psyche, wedged somewhere between the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair. The notorious “Red Wedding” episode a few years back in HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” in which the host Lord Frey massacres his helpless guests, may have pushed the envelope in terms of good taste, but its bloody denouement came as no surprise to lovers of tragic opera—or the classics.

The ancient Greeks regarded weddings as potentially very dangerous. Too much happiness was thought to incur the wrath of the gods. Only a prodigious number of sacrifices could stave off disaster, and even then the slightest mistake could upset all the careful preparations. A wedding day transformed into a funeral was a stock theme in Greek mythology and poetry. In one version of the Trojan War narrative, Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon, walks to the altar dressed as a bride, unaware that she is about to be killed to appease the goddess Artemis, who had held up the warriors’ voyage to Troy. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: How Earthquakes Have Changed History

A 6.0-magnitute earthquake in Napa, Calif., on August 24, 2014, damaged buildings and caused injuries. PHOTO: RICK LOOMIS/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

A 6.0-magnitute earthquake in Napa, Calif., on August 24, 2014, damaged buildings and caused injuries. PHOTO: RICK LOOMIS/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

The Big One is looking a little more likely these days. Since the California earthquake of 1857, tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault are thought to have shifted by as much as 26 feet. Only last year, scientists raised the chances of a quake in California of magnitude 8.0 or greater in the next 30 years to 7% from 4.7%. Unfortunately, for all the sophisticated science behind this prediction, nobody knows whether this means devastation tomorrow or many decades from now. Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: Four Millennia of the Hotel Industry

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

May is a merry month, not least because it heralds the start of tourist season. That’s good news for a visitor-friendly country like the U.S., where tourism has generated nearly $1.6 trillion of annual economic output in recent years.

Orlando, Fla., and New York are the two most popular destinations, though New York claims to have the better-quality hotels. Whether or not that’s true, it’s a sales pitch that has been used for at least 4,000 years. Tourism and its adjunct, the hotel industry, are as old as civilization. When the Sumerian King Shulgi of Ur (circa 2094-2047 B.C.) wanted to boast about his achievements, the list of accomplishments included having improved the roads in and out of Ur and “built there lodging houses…and installed in those places experienced men. Whichever direction one comes from…the traveler who reaches nightfall on the road can seek haven there as in a well-built city.” Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: As You Dislike It: The Anti-Shakespeare Club

Why people still brush up on their Shakespeare. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Why people still brush up on their Shakespeare. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

In David Lodge’s 1975 novel “Changing Places,” a group of university professors play a party game called Humiliation, competing to see who has read the fewest great works of literature. A professor of English literature is in the lead, having declared his ignorance of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” when Harold Ringbaum, a man with “a pathological urge to succeed,” declares that he’s never read “Hamlet.” The more he insists, the more the others scoff—until Ringbaum angrily swears a solemn oath to the fact, by which time everyone is stone cold sober with embarrassment.

Ringbaum’s faux pas neatly sums up Shakespeare’s towering presence in modern culture—underlined by the tempest of celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, which falls on Saturday. His reputation exists on a plane separate from other writers. With apologies to a speech from “Richard II,” Shakespeare himself has become a precious stone set in a silver sea of words.

Yet over the centuries, a surprising roster of famous writers and celebrated personages has picked quarrels with the Man from Stratford. Though complaints about the Bard have run the gamut from the moral to the artistic, one type is almost unique to him. I call it WAMS, or the What-About-Me Syndrome.

Among the first to suffer its ravages was Shakespeare’s friend, fellow dramatist and eventual British poet laureate Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: The Second Life of Troubled Inventions

Thomas Edison, circa 1870s, with his phonograph PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION

Thomas Edison, circa 1870s, with his phonograph PHOTO: EVERETT COLLECTION

It’s been a difficult time for the high-profile medical startup Theranos. For months, controversies have shadowed the linchpin Edison blood-testing device that the Palo Alto, Calif., company​ has developed. The method uses a few drops of blood, obtained by a finger-stick, instead of the usual multiple vials.

The fate of the Edison device, named after the inventor, remains unclear. But the story of Thomas Edison himself offers some hope. Not all troubled products remain troubled.

In 1875, the 28-year-old Edison had already obtained almost 100 patents without having invented something truly new. He thought he had the answer in the electric pen. Edison wanted to take the tedium out of copy-making by designing a motorized stylus that would act like a kind of stencil, able to punch words through a stack of papers up to 100 pages thick. Continue reading…

The Wall Street Journal: Amanda Foreman on five novels about the status of women

Amanda ForemanThe Tale of Genji
By Murasaki Shikibu (c. 1000)

1 . “The Tale of Genji” is the world’s first novel in any language, which is all the more remarkable considering that until the Heian era (794-1185) there was no native written tradition in Japan. The male educated elite wrote in Chinese, a language forbidden to peasants and women. In frustration, Heian elite women invented their own form of writing by transliterating Chinese characters into Kana, a form of phonetic Japanese speech. Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973-1014), a lady in waiting at the imperial court, transformed that desperate act of the dispossessed into the purest expression of aesthetic genius. The result is that Heian culture is the only one in the world that was conceived and curated by women. The greatness of the novel lies in its astute psychological portraits and exquisite evocation of time and place. But at its core lies a meditation on the female condition—on whether there can be any meaning in a life of gilded isolation.

The Book of the City of Ladies
By Christine de Pizan (c. 1400)

2. French Renaissance writer Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) was not only the first female political philosopher in history but also the first writer to do battle with the misogyny of medieval Europe. Her “Book of the City of Ladies” is an unflinching defense of womanhood. She wrote it, she claimed, so that no woman would ever have to feel the shame that she herself experienced after reading endless denunciations of the female sex. From Aristotle down to Boccaccio, the message was clear—women are morally wicked and intellectually inferior. The book is, all told, a remarkable work, not least for its audacity: The author delivers, slipped between inspirational histories of female paragons, the first enunciation of “no means no”: “It therefore angers and upsets me when men claim that women want to be raped . . . that it could give women any pleasure to be treated in such a vile way.” Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: Before Chocolate Bunnies: An Easter Season History of Cocoa

In the week leading up to Easter, estimates say Americans will have bought more than 70 million pounds of chocolate. PHOTO: ISTOCK

In the week leading up to Easter, estimates say Americans will have bought more than 70 million pounds of chocolate. PHOTO: ISTOCK

A combination of drought, violence, disease and pollution has caused the price of cocoa beans to rise by an eye-watering 40% since 2012—without having the slightest effect on global demand.

In the week leading up to Easter, estimates say Americans—who are no slouches when it comes to candy consumption—will have bought more than 70 million pounds of chocolate. The cocoa bean—like the coffee bean, the wine grape and the tea leaf—has become one of life’s indispensable indulgences—unnecessary for health but necessary (many would argue) for happiness.

Yet our passion for chocolate almost didn’t happen. The Aztecs brought cocoa beans as gifts to Christopher Columbus in 1502 during his fourth and final voyage to the New World. He was given chocolate in drink form under the name xocolatl, which in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, means “bitter water.” Despite its popularity and ancient pedigree in South America (the earliest traces of cocoa use date from 1400 B.C.), Columbus couldn’t see the sharp and spicy drink catching on in Spain. Continue reading…