history

Specific eras: Antiquity, Middle Ages, 16th Century, 17th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century …

Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)

by

I came across this by quite the circuitous route, but it’s very cool and I think exactly fits the bill of what I was looking for as a way to index—and increase discoverability of—and present audio and video content like interviews and first-person narratives—whether “oral histories” or not. OHMS is a two-piece system for, first … Read more

Before 97X, There Was WOXR

by

Before 97X, There Was WOXR An interesting look at the history of WOXR, the 3,000 Watt radio station in Oxford, Ohio that preceded WOXY 97X at 97.7 on the FM dial. Of particular interest are Chuck Cowdery’s personal recollections from the period of approximately 1972 to 1974, including details about who was at the station, … Read more

Justices Wrestled With Court’s Power in Landmark Abortion Case, Papers Show

by

Private papers of Justice John Paul Stevens released by the Library of Congress give “look at the justices at work on thousands of cases, including Bush v. Gore and the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”

Las Vegas, 1953: “Guests at the Last Frontier pool watched as a mushroom cloud rose from the Simon Test … ”

by

Guests at the Last Frontier pool watched as a mushroom cloud rose from the Simon Test, part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site outside of Las Vegas on April 25, 1953. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar for tourists, listing the scheduled times of the bomb detonations and the best places to view them.

When I saw this photo shared on Facebook by the National Atomic Testing Museum (Atomic Museum), I was thinking what a contrast from just eight years earlier when Enrico Fermi was taking bets ahead of the Trinity test about whether a nuclear detonation would ignite the atmosphere and possibly destroy the world. That’s an episode recounted in John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic which I saw at Lyric Opera in the 2007/8 season.

I knew Fermi wasn’tserious, but hadn’t understood that by that time that particular catastrophe had already been ruled out by scientists as even a remote possibility, but the idea that it at least might have been possible lived on in the more popular imagination for some time.