Today in History: Dec. 26

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, ceased to exist at midnight on this date in 1991. The constituent republics became independent nations. The Soviet Union existed for almost 69 years when it dissolved, an event that did not seem possible even a few months earlier. The moment ended the decades-long Cold War not with an exclamation point but a question mark.

The Cold War: Us versus them. On both sides, it was served with our breakfast cereal, our school lunches, and the nightly news watched during dinner. The Cold War was a fact, a background noise, a tinnitus-like hum heard 24/7, sometimes from far away and sometimes next door. Its removal seemed to make us aware that it had always been there, how loud it was, and that it had been driving us all insane.

As it ended (video after the jump):
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A Christmas Oratorio: ‘For the Time Being’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

During World War II, the poet W.H. Auden wrote a book-length poem entitled For the Time Being. It is subtitled, “A Christmas Oratorio,” and it is a retelling of the Christmas story, but with a 20th century sensibility. His Herod, for instance, is a technology-loving king who loves that he lives in an Age of Reason and is ever-perplexed by faith and irked that he must hunt down and exterminate the baby Jesus.

An oratorio is a type of composition that was popular in the Baroque period and in churches and has not had many comebacks as a poetic or theatrical form because it never had a period of dominance. It never went away but it was never the first choice of writing mode for many writers. (Paul McCartney produced a quite famous one, A Liverpool Oratorio, two decades ago.) Auden was a poet of structures and forms, though, and he produced an attempt at almost every style and poetic structure in his body of work (about 400 poems and several full-length verse plays).
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Today in History: Dec. 25

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is Christmas Day.

In a book that is known to have been compiled in the year 354 A.D., these words appear in an entry for the year 336: “25 Dec.: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae.” (Translated: December 25, Christ born in Bethlehem, Judea.) Thus, since some time in the 4th Century, Christians have celebrated the mass of Christ’s birth on December 25.

By the 6th Century, the December 25 date for the birth of Christ was common knowledge, so common that the monk who is credited with inventing the concept of the B.C./A.D. calendar, Dionysus Exiguus, wrote that “December 25 in the year 1” was the date of Christ’s birth.
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