Today in History: July 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Bob Dylan injured his back when he crashed his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle 50 years ago today on Striebel Rd. in Bearsville, New York. The road is a mostly straight connection between Tinker St. and the Glasco Turnpike, but something took him out. Only he and his then-wife, Sara, who was driving behind him in the family car, saw the accident.

Dylan gave different stories to different friends about the incident over the years. He told his friend Sam Shepard that the sun blinded him and the bike threw him. To Robert Shelton, who wrote the Dylan biography No Direction Home, Dylan said that he had hit an oil slick. To another, he said his brakes had stuck. (In the photo above, Dylan is on his bike in the center of Woodstock, New York.)

Dylan cracked a vertebrae in the crash, and he decided to have a slow healing process. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles, he writes about the crash: “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.” He performed live only four times over the next eight years.
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Speculation About Saudi Plans

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Is Ali al-Nimr About to Be Executed?

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There are two things about Ali Mohammed al-Nimr that we know today (December 6, 2016), and they are the same two sad, maddening things that we know about Ali al-Nimr every day: He remains in prison and he is awaiting his fate. Anything else, everything else, is speculation. Today, speculation about Ali al-Nimr is drowning out the few things we actually know.

Ali al-Nimr is the young Saudi protester who faces a sentence of death by beheading followed by a posthumous crucifixion (the public display of his dead body), and we know one other solidly reported thing about him today: he phoned home this morning.
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Today in History: July 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On this date in photographic history, two firsts took place: in 1851, a total solar eclipse was photographed for the first time, and on this date in 1858, Gaspar-Felix Tournachon, a French photographer who was known as “Nadar” and who was probably the first-ever photojournalist among many other firsts in his photography career, took the first aerial photograph.

The newspaper cartoon above, made by the famous Honoré Daumier, captures some of the excitement that Nadar brought to the French public in his career. The photo or photos that he took that day over the village of Petit Bicêtre no longer exist, however.
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