Scots, wha hae - Happy Burns Day! Here's a bio of Scotland's "prince of poets" Robert Burns, plus Braveheart, Burns Supper instructions,and lots of haggis.
ICYMI, Thursday's links are here, and include kite-drawn carriages from 1822, the history of the master bathroom, milking scorpions by hand, and a Bill of Mortality showing the deaths in London for the week of Aug 15 - 22, 1665.
We're built, as a nation, on the grounds of a concentration camp. It's like saying, "OK, here's Auschwitz. Here's where we'll start our country.
~ Peter Carey (b.1943) (of Australia, City Limits, London, 1 April 1988)
An interesting change of heart in these next two quotes:
I have been disappointed in all my experiences of Australia, except as to its wickedness; for it is far more wicked than I have conceived it possible for any place to be, or than it is possible for me to describe to you in England.
~ Henry Parkes (wiki) (1815-1896) (letter, 1 May 1840, later published in An Emigrant's Home Letters)
With our splendid harbor, our beautifully situated city, our vast territories, all our varied and inexhaustible natural wealth, if we don't convert our colony into a great and prosperous nation, it will be a miracle of error for which we shall have to answer as for a gigantic sin.
~ Parkes* (speech, Melbourne, 16 March 1867)
In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain
The Yatala Wangary withers and dies,
And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain,
To the Woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies ...
~ Mark Twain (1835-1910) (Following the Equator, Ch. 36, "A Sweltering Din - Australia", stanza. 7**)
Governor Arthur Phillip hoists the British flag
over the new colony at Sydney in 1788.
Today is Australia Day (wiki), the anniversary of the date in 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip led a fleet of convict ships into Sydney Cove and initiated the establishment of New South Wales, Australia, as a penal colony.*** By the mid-19th century, free immigration had replaced the transportation of convicts in populating the country, and a half dozen other colonies were established there, leading to a final federation as the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. British involvement in Australian affairs was formally abolished in 1986, and in many ways, the modern nation more resembles the United States than any other in the world.
* N.B. Australian statesman Henry Parkes was instrumental in welding the independent colonies of that sub-continent into a single nation.
** Twain's poem, of which this is only one of about ten stanzas, was written in 1897 and is based entirely on real Australian place names.
*** It was the independence of the United States that forced the English to find an alternative destination for the "transportation" of criminals.
Here's a brief video on Australia Day:
Australia's well-known, but unofficial, national song:
This Bill of Mortality shows the death tally of all city parishes in London for the week of Aug 15 - 22, 1665. The Plague is the number 1 cause of death, followed by various fevers, consumption, and Griping in the Guts.
ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include Stonewall Jackson's birthday (and his left arm's separate grave), how duct tape is made, life in ancient Mongolia, Britain's worst ice skating accident,(which left 41 dead), and that time the doctors pumped 15 cans of beer into a patient's body.
Most early movie theaters had only one projector so “etiquette slides” were used to divert the audience while reels were being changed. These glass slides often featured lighthearted instructions for proper behavior while viewing a film.
In 16th- and 17th-century London, in response to recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague, authorities instituted the tradition of publishing a bill of mortality each week. This page represents the death tally of all city parishes for the week of Aug. 15-22, 1665, when the plague had infected 96 of the 130 parishes reporting.
The Wellcome Library in London has made more than 100,000 of its medical-history images available for hi-res download under a CC-BY license. Among the images now freely available are a handful of bills of mortality from 1664 and 1665. Visit their Images page and search “bills of mortality” to see. And historian Craig Spence runs a blog exploring violent deaths in the bills of mortality, which is a great browse.
ICYMI, Thursday's links are here, and include the science of mucus, how your brain creates dreams, why humans lost their fur, and Ben Franklin's birthday (including his 200+ synonyms for drunk and the bodies found in his basement,).
