In 1933, the quiet, scholarly history professor William E. Dodd accepted his first (and last) diplomatic post and became the United States Ambassador to Germany. His wife Mattie, son Bill, Jr. and daughter Martha accompanied him to Berlin. Dodd and his wife were ill-suited for the diplomatic lifestyle, leaving dinner parties early to go home so Dodd could have stewed peaches and a glass of milk and retire early. Dodd was essentially an academic, unaccustomed to social and political wranglings his new post retired, but as a student of history he saw the true danger that Hitler and his followers posed earlier than most of his colleagues, including his friend President Roosevelt. His daughter Martha, meanwhile, threw herself into the social life of Berlin, made many friends and even more lovers, including a high-ranking Nazi official and a Soviet spy.

It’s a fascinating story by a master of narrative nonfiction, but I found this book depressing and am relieved I finished it. It’s so hard to look at the actions of people in the early 1930s and not judge them too harshly with the wisdom of hindsight. I finished this book without much sympathy for any of the main characters. Martha was just awful. I rather liked her father for a while, but I lost all respect for him toward the end of the book when I read about his involvement in an automobile accident in his later years back in the United States.

It’s a great book and I’m glad I read it, but I’m also glad I borrowed the ebook from the library instead of buying it. I’m done with those people and never want to reread the book, discuss it in a book group, see the movie, or have anything more to do with them.

I love this Smithsonian photograph of Elizabeth Lee Hazen (1888-1975) and Rachel Brown (1898-1980.) It was taken in 1955 when they won the first Squibb Award for Achievements in Chemotherapy.

Women like this were my role models when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. I knew they were out there. I wanted to be a microbiologist. I dreamed of curing cancer. I wanted to wear a crisp white lab coat and pour mysterious substances from a beaker into a test tube. I got a little toy microscope when I was around five years old and a real one a few years later. I had a Bunsen burner and I feel bad about lighting the curtains on fire. No serious damage done, though, and I continued dreaming of my future career in science.

About halfway through high school, I sadly came to the conclusion that science required a level of focus that is just not the way my brain works. But when I look at a photograph like this, I can’t help but think, “Well, maybe if I had just made a little more effort…”

Links

• Elizabeth Lee Hazen and Rachel Fuller Brown — “E. R. Squibb bought the rights to the patent, conducted clinical trials, and licensed the production and marketing to a wide variety of drug companies. Royalties from these activities were funneled back into the scientific world by the Research Corporation via the Brown-Hazen Research Fund, which gave grants to scientists in the life sciences during the life of the patent.”
  [From the Chemical Heritage Foundation website]
• Inventor Profile: Elizabeth Lee Hazen — National Inventors Hall of Fame
• Inventor Profile: Rachel Fuller Brown — National Inventors Hall of Fame

The Flickr Commons is a program that encourages museums, archives and libraries to share collections of historical images on Flickr where the active community of members can not only enjoy them, but add comments, notes and tags to help make them more searchable. Flickr members often identify people, places and events, and add other interesting information about the images.

You might recognize a photograph of a relative here, pr a photograph of the town where your great grandfather was born. Even if you don’t find anything that relates so directly to your own relatives, it’s interesting to look through these photographs just to see the faces, the clothes, the toys and tools and houses and landscapes.

Links

• National Library of Ireland — Flickr Commons
• National Library of Ireland — Website
• Commenting the Commons — My 2009 post about the Flickr Commons

Music

Just in case the title of this post made you want to hear the song, here’s the late, great Gracie Fields (1898–1979) :

On September 19, 1783, the Montgolfier Brothers launched the first hot air balloon carrying passengers: a sheep, a duck and a rooster. The balloon was launched from the gardens of the Palace of Versailles and witnessed by King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The flight lasted eight minutes and the balloon traveled nearly three miles before landing safely. The three animals were unharmed.

Hot Air: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Hot-Air Balloon Ride by Marjorie Priceman, tells the story of this flight with a few pages of text followed by a series of glorious, nearly wordless illustrations of the flight itself, from the perspective of ballooning’s “first brave passengers.” The adventures of the animals in flight include encounters with a flock of birds, a boy with a bow and arrow, laundry and a church steeple — these incidents are not part of the historical record but the author claims she “heard this part of the story from a duck, who heard it from a sheep, who heard it from a rooster a long, long time ago.”

In Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

When I was a child, my parents had an old recording of this song and I loved it’s rousing, patriotic cheerfulness, sending the boys off to the War to End All Wars. But in school my teacher recited In Flanders Field to the class, and I found the middle verse chilling: “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…” I still do, and think of it every time I read more young men and women going off to war and dying.

Over There, by George M. Cohan, sung by Enrico Caruso, from the 78RPM Collection on the Internet Archive

I especially love the News in the 1910s set, black-and-white news photographs from the Bain News Service. The Commons has an active community of fans and volunteers. People add notes directly on the photographs, identifying particular objects in the picture, calling attention to details or transcribing text from signs and packages, and they add tags to improve the findability of the photographs.

But my main interest is adding comments that provide more information about the person or event shown in the picture. The Bain collection is perfect for this — one of the reasons the Library of Congress selected this collection for Flickr is that they had minimal information for most of these pictures, and I’m not the only person who likes working on these. I often have to look through several pictures that other people have identified and described to find one to work on. (I almost wrote “to find one that needs me,” which is really how I think of this.)

And I wonder, sometimes, why we do this. I’m a librarian, and I do this kind of work for a living. Why are so many people jumping in to help research and catalog these photographs for free? If this were my job, it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. I can’t speak for the whole Commons community, of course, but I know why I like participating in this. It’s satisfying to add that first comment to a photograph, providing basic information. It’s like being a kid at school raising my hand to answer a question: “I know! I know!” It feels good to be helpful, and to be part of a project. There’s often some back-and-forth discussion among the people leaving comments, as we do our detective work to identify some of these pictures.

But in addition to community spirit, we also have access to resources that make it pretty easy to get the information we need. This work wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun back in the old days, working with printed indexes and microfilm readers.

Here are some of the resources that I have found especially useful in working with the Library of Congress Flickr collection:

• Wikipedia — Wikipedia links are often the first to appear on Commons photographs, identifying a person or event. It’s amazing how many articles there are, even on fairly obscure people, places and events, and how good most of the articles are. And as a free and open resource, it’s so very linkable.
• New York Times Archive — The archives from 1951-1922 are available online as scanned images in PDF format, free and linkable. This is an incredible resource for all kinds of historical research, but it’s especially useful for the Bain photographs because of the date range.
• Time — Time makes their complete archives available from 1923 on. For the Bain collection, Time articles can provide additional information on the life of people shown in the photographs. The obituaries are especially helpful in providing biographical information for political figures.
• Google Books — These searchable books can be a great resource. For this photograph of actress Irene Bordoni, Flickr user swanq provides a link to a directly to biographical information in a book called Vaudeville, Old and New. For this photograph of Dr. Anna Shaw, I added a link to her autobiography on Google Books.

Government websites are useful for biographical information on political figures: for example, see this photograph of Morris Sheppard with a link to the Senate website. Even YouTube can be a useful source in certain instances — for example, I added links to YouTube videos to a photograph of Titta Ruffo, an opera singer.

There are many other useful sites — I nearly always start with Google and see where it leads me.

Flickr Commons Links

• Flickr: The Commons — “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”
• Flickr Commons group — “A place for the Commons Community to share and discuss the truly awesome collections being made available in the Flickr Commons”
• Indicommons — “The Indicommons blog represents outreach from the Flickr Commons group beyond Flickr, to broaden knowledge of The Commons among the public and civic institutions around the world and to increase participation by the public in the Commons.”

Here’s a great photograph of suffragists to kick off Women’s History Month. It’s from the Library of Congress collection on Flickr. The Library of Congress was the first participant in The Commons on Flickr, a project where cultural institutions share historical images that are free of copyright restrictions, and encourage members of the Flickr community to add notes, tags and comments.

Suffrage Pageant Flower Girls — Photo page on Flickr

Hempstead Aglow in Suffrage Hues — Here’s a 1913 article from the New York Times about the event shown in this photograph, a Suffrage Pageant on Long Island organized by “General” Rosalie Jones.

• Any Bonds Today? — The 1942 cartoon version, starring Bugs Bunny with Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd. This is the original version, which includes an unfortunate blackface parody of Al Jolson. Because of this possibly-offensive segment, this is one of the so-called Censored 11 cartoons not included in the Cartoon Network’s 2001 June Bugs marathon.
• Any Bonds Today Sheet Music — From Smithsonian’s The Price of Freedom: Americans at War website.
  

  “When the ‘tall man with the high hat’ came knocking, as Berlin referred to Uncle Sam, 8 out of every 13 Americans scraped together a total of $185.7 billion to invest in victory.”

The graves here seem to be mostly from the early 1800s, and as with all old cemeteries, you can’t help but notice how many babies and young children there are, often two or three from the same family.

Perhaps this cemetery has received so little attention and care because by Salem standards, it’s not old enough. No Mayflower passengers here, no Salem Witch Trial judges here. And its location is unfortunate, sharing a long border with the old Salem Jail Complex, a historically significant site that has been empty for more than fifteen years, has become derelict and damaged by fires. The jail site and cemetery are included in tours of Salem’s haunted places, since supposedly people see ghosts here. The Jail Complex is scheduled for development, so perhaps the Howard Street Cemetery will get cleaned up as part of that effort. I haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere.

But as it is now, the Howard Street Cemetery is a disgrace to the City of Salem.

Salem Jail and Howard Street Cemetery — More of my photographs