Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” to raise money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal fund in 1883 and soon after embarked on a ship to London to promote the cause for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Her poem was only placed on a plaque at the foot of the “Mother of Exiles” in 1903, six years after her death.
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“Bomb the shit out of them!” was reportedly a drunken President Richard Nixon’s conclusion as to what should be done about Cambodia. Henry Kissinger recalled in an interview in 1999 that “two glasses of wine were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech.”
Kobe beef, black truffles, seared foie gras, aged Gruyère cheese, wild mushrooms, and flakes of gold leaf, are most of the components that comprise the hamburger served at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe. Price: $175.
For publishing an editorial critical of John Adams’ Federalist administration in 1798, Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon became the first U.S. citizen tried under the Sedition Act. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in federal jail. He ran his reelection campaign from prison, winning by a two-to-one margin. He resumed his post upon release.
A UK fashion student announced plans to harvest the DNA of late couturier Alexander McQueen—extracted from hair used in his 1992 collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims”—to develop epidermal material for a line of leather jackets and bags. The lab-grown skin will feature McQueen’s freckles, moles, and tattoos, and be susceptible to sunburn.
The year 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” because the previous year’s weeklong eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, clouded the sky with volcanic ash and sulphate aerosols, lowering the earth’s surface temperature for years to come. After thousands of horses either starved to death or were slaughtered for food, transportation and industry across much of Europe began to fail. Around 1817, Karl von Drais, a German nobleman, experimented with wheel arrangements and came up with his two-wheel Laufmaschine (“running machine”), an early precursor to the bicycle.
A hen near Leeds, England, caused a panic in 1806 when she began laying eggs inscribed with the words Christ is Coming. Terror of Judgment Day swept the population until it was observed that the hen’s owner, Mary Bateman, who had been charging a penny per visitor, was writing the message on eggs and forcibly reinserting them into the hen to be laid again.
“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.
In Moscow in 1921, a group of actors formed the Blue Blouses, a theater company that acted out scenarios from the news. Their success inspired the creation of many similar amateur troupes. One joke that emerged from the movement went: Bim and Bom were the most popular clowns in revolutionary Moscow. Bim came out with a picture of Lenin and one of Trotsky. “I’ve got two beautiful portraits,” he announced, “I’m going to take them home with me!” Bom asked, “What will you do with them when you get home?” “Oh, I’ll hang Lenin and put Trotsky against the wall.”
Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern married Julia Hoyt, the novelist and actress Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment, highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one, ‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I received no acknowledgment.”
In 1783 an English rector named John Michell wrote to the physicist Henry Cavendish of his belief in the possibility of “dark stars,” entities so dense and with such a strong gravitational pull that they could prevent light from escaping them and render them invisible. The Royal Society published his theory the following year, but it would be nearly two hundred years before the term black hole was used to refer to such a phenomenon.
Georges Cuvier, founder of the field of paleontology, wrote in 1812 that examination of the strata of the earth revealed “traces of revolutions.” He surmised, “Innumerable living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races have become extinct and have left no memorial of them, except some small fragment which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”
According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.
Economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parodic open letter to French parliament in 1845 that imagined the national lighting industry lobbying for a law to black out all windows in response to the “ruinous competition” of the sun, which was “flooding the domestic market.” “Be logical,” the letter concludes, “for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!”
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.