history

Today in History: April 14

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise—if not exactly in its display—and did not hesitate to confess the pleasure thus derived. …—from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe

Graham’s Magazine, a periodical based in Philadelphia, published a story by its new assistant editor, Edgar Allan Poe, 175 years ago today. It was called, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and it was the first popular modern detective story. C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective in Paris who uses his powers of analysis—”ratiocination” is Poe’s term—to solve a brutal double murder. Readers follow Dupin and his sidekick (who narrates the tale) as they learn new clues and Dupin perceives their possible relationship to the crime. Every detective in literary history—Holmes, Poirot, Jessica Fletcher—is an offspring of Poe’s Dupin.
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Today in History: April 13

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Alfred Mosher Butts of Poughkeepsie, NY, was born on this date in 1899. An architect who could not find work during the Great Depression, he decided to design a new type of game. His first game was called “Lexiko,” which he then renamed “Criss Cross Words,” and then, simply, “It.” Finally he sold the rights to a businessman who gave the game the name it still carries: “Scrabble.”

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The finals of the first-ever International Tchaikovsky Competition was held in Moscow on this date on 1958. When the unexpected happened and a young pianist who was neither a Soviet national nor a citizen of an Eastern bloc nation but was an American won over the audience—which gave him an eight-minute long standing ovation—the judges were flummoxed. “Can we award first prize to the American?” they telegraphed the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev wrote back: “Is he the best? Then give him the prize!” Van Cliburn was awarded first prize and remains perhaps the best-known winner, although Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mikhail Pletnev won it in future years.

Cliburn performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 to win (video of the performance below the fold):
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Today in History: April 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The writer who gave the world young Ramona Quimby, her sister Beezus, Henry Huggins, Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, and a mouse on a motorcycle—Beverly Cleary—is 100 today. “People tell me I don’t look a day over 80,” she told the Washington Post last week.

She stopped writing several years ago and lives now in a retirement community, but one can see that she is enjoying the present moment and the attention this milestone birthday is bringing to her characters, her books, and herself. The TODAY show interviewed Cleary recently (the interviewer, Jenna Bush Hager, is the daughter of a former president and granddaughter of one, which is today’s trivia):
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