history

When Will We Know?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Many of those who live in countries ruled by dictatorships―fascist, communist, inherited monarchy―are unaffected by the fact of the dictatorship. They are those who are members―by birth or achievement―of groups the government favors. The government gets to decide who it favors, and if one is a member of a favored group, life may feel like it is free, as long as one ignores that one’s neighbors are not free or, worse, are vanishing.

If one is a member of a preferred population, life under fascism will carry on and look much like a normal life. After all, many people in Nazi Germany fell in love and out of love and bought groceries and learned how to drive. They wrote poetry and crammed for exams and got hired and fired. Many people in Nazi Germany, though, they did not.
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January 19 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.”―Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

Patricia Highsmith (above) was born on this date in 1921. She wrote twenty-two novels and many short stories, most of which are psychological thrillers.

Many of these have since been made into films. One character, Tom Ripley, appears in five novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley being the first, in which he kills 10 people directly, causes the deaths of several others, and is charming company when he is not murdering: “Mr. Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.”
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January 18 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Thomas Davenport, inventor of the electric motor, published the first issue of a new periodical on this date in 1840 that carried a mouthful of a title: The Electro-Magnet, and Mechanics Intelligencer. It was the first technical journal, the first periodical that had electricity as its only topic, and it was the first publication on the planet that was printed on a press run on electricity.

It was also a failure as a publication: Davenport could not attract enough subscribers to sustain the journal and he folded it after only three issues.

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On this date in 1644, something strange was seen in the waters off what is now the North End of Boston. It qulifies as America’s first USO sighting: Unidentified Submerged Object.
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