Monthly Archives: June 2022

This week in Bozeman, librarians, historians, scientists and the public gathered to share ideas for how to preserve the history of Yellowstone National Park. This year is the park's 150th anniversary. Dayton Duncan, an award winning author and a collaborator on Ken Burns documentaries for over 30 years, gave the keynote address at the Conversations on Collecting Yellowstone Conference. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with Duncan and asked him about the title of his talk, "Happenstance and History."

Dayton Duncan: If you look back at history, you think that it was supposed to be this way. It was always going to be this way, it was preordained, or it was inevitable. Nothing in history is inevitable, I believe. And at 150 years old, I think it's important to remember that Yellowstone is one of the great best ideas America ever had to quote Wallace Stegner on the National Park idea. When it was created as a national park in 1872, no one there said, 'Oh, we're changing the arc of history here. We're doing something no one had ever thought of doing,' even though that was true. That was not the motivation and the foresight that they had.

Melodie Edwards: The first superintendent ended up misleading people about the idea that Indigenous people hadn't used the park before, as a way to make sure that tourists felt safe to go there. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the truth about the role of Indigenous people in Yellowstone?

DD: Well, I mean, the Mountain Shoshone lived there for time immemorial, and dozens of other Native tribes who would travel through to gather obsidian for their arrowheads, to hunt, to fish, to take advantage of the hot springs for variety reasons, the health or for religious rights. They all knew about the place. So in the film that Ken and I made about the National Parks, we tried to make that point, that the "discovery" of the National Parks was new to some people, but it wasn't new to the people who called the place home. There were all these myths for sometimes self serving reasons. People propagated that Indians, of course, were superstitious, and so these geysers and the other things would probably scare them, or they thought that they were evil spirits or whatever, all of its balderdash.

So it's a troubled history, both in terms of overlooking the deeper history that Native people have had with this very special place, and it was sometimes used against them. On the better side of that is that starting, I think, around the mid-1990s, the Park Service began making steady and now accelerated efforts to involve Native people with both the management of the park but also just to make sure that their story and their relationship to it are not forgotten.

ME: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, just how that rocky beginning set the park on a certain trajectory in terms of its mission and how maybe that mission has kind of zig zagged along the course of history?

DD: The future of wildlife was really hardly discussed at all. And it was with a changing mission evolving with the National Park Service, partly due to a young biologist named George Melendez Wright and other people who said, "Well, this is not the Park Service's mission, just to cater to tourists. Giving them a show of bears eating at garbage dumps is really not what we're supposed to be doing." And over time, they realize that predators shouldn't be shot. And over time, Yellowstone became the place where the bison teetering on the brink of extinction were saved. That wasn't why it was set aside. It just was a happenstance. And luckily for us that occurred. The trumpeter swan was on the verge of extinction. And George Melendez Wright did studies of them in Yellowstone in the surrounding area. The result of that were efforts that were made to give them sanctuary and preserve that magnificent bird from also going extinct.

So history not only is it not inevitable, it doesn't travel in a straight line, it evolves. It's more biological than it is mathematical. It also means that we can't take it for granted that everything's going to be fine. It takes the efforts of people who champion the park idea and what we think are the better principles of it. And it's a constant battle. I mean, who are we as Americans? Are we the kind of people and nation that could take a magnificent species like the bison that once existed in uncountable numbers and drive them to the brink of extinction? Oh, yes, we are - for a buck. Yeah, that's us. Or could we lay waste to the magnificent continent in our hurry to get to the Pacific Ocean? Yeah, that's us. But are we also people who could, in certain instances, at least say, 'No, we're not doing that here' or 'No, we're not doing that anymore.''

ME: To just build on that, there are arguments being made to actually privatize or put into local control our public lands. And so it does seem like there might be a need for a recommitment to this idea of national parks and public lands.

DD: I guess my point is, there is always a need for a recommitment. Because you can never take it for granted, just as we cannot take democracy for granted. That it's always, this experiment - an experiment in democracy. I just wrote and made a Ken Burns film on Benjamin Franklin. He understood this perfectly. Nothing's necessarily going to work out. It relies on the people and their leaders - but principally the people demanding of their leaders - to make it all work well. And that's true of democracy. And that's true of our public lands.

ME: Can you tell me the story about your relationship to National Parks and Yellowstone in particular?

DD: Yeah, well, I'm an old man and I grew up in a little town in Iowa. I was nine years old about to turn 10 when my family took its first and almost only real extended vacation of my youth. We borrowed my grandmother's car. We borrowed camping equipment from neighbors. She thought we'd go to a lot of these National Parks out in the West, for two reasons: One is they're important. And secondly, we could afford them. So we headed West and went through the Badlands of South Dakota into Mount Rushmore, went to what was then called Custer National Battlefield, now Little Bighorn National Battlefield Historic Site, came to Yellowstone. This was right after the '59 earthquake, half of the park was closed. So I lived through aftershock tremors at the bottom of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone. Saw my first bear. saw my first moose, saw, obviously, my first geyser. A lot of the geysers were going off at odd times because of the tremendous earthquake that just occurred. We went to Grand Teton National Park, went to Dinosaur National Monument, camped there and headed back through Rocky Mountain.

And it was in retrospect, I think, a formative moment. And it was made possible because [the parks] existed, and because we could afford to go see them. And then as, you know, later in my life, I started writing books and then I started working on documentary films, and one of the persistent things that I've always been interested in is the connection of the American story and the American landscape. And I think that the National Park idea is the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape. In other words, the National Park idea is as radical as the Declaration of Independence. In all of recorded history, prior to this, the most majestic and sacred places of a nation were preserved for the Kings nobility, the rich, the well connected. And for the first time, we as a nation, founded on the idea of the Declaration of Independence, said 'No, some of our most spectacular majestic and sacred places are there for everyone, and for all time,' and that was new under the sun.

It's a wonderland. And it's become the last refuge for the American buffalo, which Ken and I are doing a film on right now. Which themselves could easily have gone extinct, were it not for the efforts of a diverse group of individuals in different parts of the United States at a critical moment in time, but Yellowstone figures very prominently in that story. And now it's a place where you can go see bison, and you can see wolves. At least at the moment, assuming they're not all shot the same moment they get out of the park boundaries. It's a very special place. And it needs to be protected. And it also faces all these challenges in which last year almost 5 million people decided to come. And God bless them for that. But that presents challenges that have to be addressed somehow.

ME: One of the ways in which they can maybe control the influx of people is by making the cost of getting in more expensive. And then there's going to be families like yours that maybe can't visit Yellowstone.

DD: No, I mean, it is an inherent tension in the National Park idea. And when the National Park Service was created, inherent in the law that created them is that it served two critical elements. The first is that these places are for everyone, not just exclusively set aside for, as I say, the rich and the royalty and the well connected. It's for everybody. We all are co-owners of it. And that is key to that idea.

The second and equally important thing is, they need to be there for Americans and people not yet born. They're there for all time, and therefore have to be protected and preserved, which require regulations and management practices that will make it possible for people you and I will never know and so generations we'll never see can have the same experience that we did.

That's a tremendous challenge. But I like to think that the more people that come to the National Park, the more people become potential champions of the National Park idea. And so the problem that we've got too many people coming here is a management problem. The other problem would be nobody gives a damn about them, and that would be an existential problem.

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On Yellowstone's 150th anniversary, documentarian looks at the happenstance of history - Wyoming Public Media

LONDON Explorers and historians are telling the world about the discovery of the wreck of a royal warship that sank in 1682 while carrying a future king of England, Ireland and Scotland.

The HMS Gloucester, traveling from southern England to Scotland, ran aground while navigating sandbanks off the town of Great Yarmouth on the eastern English coast. It sank within an hour, killing an estimated 130 to 250 crew and passengers.

James Stuart, the son of King Charles I, survived. He went on to reign as King James II of England and Ireland, and as James VII of Scotland from 1685 to 1688, when he was deposed by the Glorious Revolution.

The wreck of the Gloucester was found in 2007 by brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell and others after a four-year search. It was firmly identified in 2012 with discovery of the ships bell.

The discovery was only made public Friday because of the time it took to confirm the identity of the ship and the need to protect the historical site.

Claire Jowitt, an expert in maritime history at the University of East Anglia, said the wreck was one of the important almost moments in English history. The Gloucesters sinking almost caused the death of the Catholic heir to the Protestant throne at a time of great political and religious tension in Britain.

If he had died, we would have had a very different British and European history as a result, Jowitt said.

I think this is a time capsule that offers the opportunity to find it out so much about life on a 17th-century ship. The royal nature of the ship is absolutely incredible and unique, she added.

She believes the wreck is the most important maritime discovery since the Mary Rose, the warship from the Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. The Mary Rose capsized with a crew of around 500 in 1545 in the Solent, a strait between the Isle of Wight and the British mainland. A huge salvage operation brought it back to the surface in 1982.

There are no current plans to raise the wreck of the Gloucester because much of it is buried under sand.

Weve only just touched the tip of an iceberg, Julian Barnwell said.

Artifacts rescued from the wreck include clothes, shoes, navigational equipment and many wine bottles. One bottle bears a seal with the crest of the Legge family the ancestors of George Washington, the first U.S president. The crest was a forerunner to the Stars and Stripes flag.

An exhibition is planned next spring at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery to display finds from the wreck and share ongoing research.

--The Associated Press

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'One of the important 'almost' moments in English history:' Wreck of warship found off UK coast - OregonLive

The smile is the most easily recognised facial expression at a distance in human interactions. It is also an easier expression to make than most others. Other facial expressions denoting emotion such as fear, anger or distress require up to four muscles. The smile needs only a single muscle to produce: the zygomaticus major at the corner of the mouth (though a simultaneous twitching of the eyelids orbicularis oculi muscle is required for a sincere and joyful smile). As well as being easy to make and to recognise, the smile is also highly versatile. It may denote sensory pleasure and delight, gaiety and amusement, satisfaction, contentment, affection, seduction, relief, stress, nervousness, annoyance, anger, shame, aggression, fear and contempt. You name it, the smile does it.

The smile comes easy to human beings. The facial muscles required to smile are in fact present in the womb, ready for early deployment to anxious parents. The smile may even predate the human species. Many great apes are known to produce them, suggesting that the smile first appeared on the face of a common ancestor well before the existence of Homo sapiens. It was Charles Darwin, in his classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), who gave the first scientific demonstration of a great ape smiling. He also showed that the great apes smile has something of the gestures polyvalence among humans: it can denote pleasure (notably under tickling) but also aggressive self-defence.

The smile has always been with us then, and it would appear its always been the same. It seems only one step further to claim that the smile has no history. But this would be far from the truth. In fact, the smile has a fascinating, if much-neglected past. In order to access it, we need first to take on board more general cultural factors. The ubiquity and polyvalence of the smile means that, in social circumstances, for example, it is not enough to see someone smiling. One has to know what the smile intends. The expression needs untangling, deciphering, decoding. In this, it resembles the wink. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out in 1973, the wink is physiologically identical to the involuntary eyelid twitch we call a blink. For a wink to be understood as a wink rather than a blink, winker and winked-at need to understand the cultural codes in play. And these, of course, can differ very markedly.

In the West, we tend to acknowledge the variability of codes in terms of space and diversity: there is a sense that Western smiling culture differs from that to be found, for example, in Japanese and Chinese societies. Yet the smile shows chronological as well as spatial differentiation. In the archaic smile that is seen in certain ancient Greek sculptures, for example, the lips are formed into a smile. Yet classicists are sceptical that this does in fact represent the expression as we know it. It may just be intended to evoke general health and contentment. In other words, the smile existed, but we dont know what it meant.

Ancient Romans showed another variant. If we take their vocabulary at face value, they did not distinguish between a smile and a laugh, contenting themselves with a single Latin verb ridere for both. Only towards the end of the Roman Empire did a diminutive subridere enter the language. This came with the derived noun sub-risus (later, surrisus) a sub-laugh a little or low laugh associated with mockery. It retained this lesser status and this diminutive form, distinguishing it from the laugh as it entered the Romance languages in the High Middle Ages. Around 1300, for example, French contained words for laughing (rire) and laughter (le rire or le ris) and smile (sourire, from sous-rire).

At roughly the same times and in a similar manner, Italian adopted ridere and sorridere, Spanish reir and sonreir, Portuguese rir and sorrir, and Provenal rire and sobsrire. A specific word for smile emerged in Celtic and Slavic languages around then too, but using a non-Latinate term: the Danes got smile and the Swedes, smila. English finally got its smile from a High German or Scandinavian source. Revealingly, it was at much the same moment that the smile entered the Western art tradition, in the form of the famous smiling angel, created between 1236 and 1246, that adorns the west front of the great cathedral in Reims in northeastern France. Historians have hailed this delightful and very modern-looking expression as marking the advent of new civilisational values in Western culture.

There are certainly examples of open mouths and teeth, but they are invariably negative in their associations

The smile as we know it was thus out and about in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature demonstrates that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the range of feelings that we attach to it in our own culture. Petrarch dreamed of the brightness of the angelic smile of his lover, and while this kind of gentle lyricism can also be found in William Shakespeares sonnets, the Bard knew that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Renaissance painting welcomed and adopted the smile, too. Its meaning was not always, however, crystal clear: witness the legendary if infuriatingly ambiguous smile playing on the lips of Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa (1503-17).

Yet if the smile was alive and well in Western culture, it was not yet our own. In Western art, it differed in one highly significant respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in facial representations extremely rarely. One can scan drawings, paintings and sculptures from before the 19th century in art galleries and museums the world over without finding a single example of a tooth-baring smile of the kind that is so common in our own day. There are certainly examples of open mouths and teeth, but they are invariably negative in their associations.

It is tempting to ascribe this state of affairs to the unhygienic state of mouth. But, in fact, skeletal remains from late medieval cemeteries suggest that teeth were then less affected by cavities than they would become from the 18th century onwards, with the mass advent of sugar into Western diets. The reason for the tight-lipped primness of the smile in the period inaugurated by the smiling angel of Reims seems to have owed everything to cultural values rather than biological deficiencies.

Three factors operated to minimise representation of the expression. First, there was a close association between the open mouth and the lower orders. Opening the mouth invariably to reveal inner horrors was something only plebeians did. This artistic convention reflected social norms current in polite or patrician society that were set out in the early 16th century by two highly influential writings: the Mantuan diplomat Baldassare Castigliones The Book of the Courtier (1528) and the Dutch humanist Erasmuss On Civility in Children (1530). Both strongly advised against opening the mouth for all but fulfilling the basic biological needs: to do so in any other way marked one down. Laugh if one must, was the message, but do so silently and with ones mouth buttoned up in a seemly, decorous and polite way. Frans Halss Laughing Cavalier (1624), for example, may have a broad grin, as the title suggests: but his lips are sealed. Were they not, he would be as good as denying his status as a gentleman.

The two seminal texts were frequently re-edited over the next few centuries and translated into many languages. Erasmus first appeared in English in 1532 and Castiglione in 1561 (the version seemingly known to Shakespeare). Though addressed to courtiers and schoolchildren respectively, the texts reached far wider audiences, particularly through the Renaissance genre of the conduct book, which purported to show readers how polite people behaved in every facet of their lives. These texts formed part of what the German sociologist Norbert Elias in 1939 called the civilising process, a kind of behavioural revolution, one of whose key features was control of bodily orifices, particularly in public spaces. Mouths should be kept closed when eating, for example, spitting was taboo, noses should remain unpicked, ears were not to be probed in public, and eyes should not stare. And there should be no farting.

Doubtless, in real life, these were rules there to be broken. But breaking them revealed ones low character. Or and this was the second factor in play, in art as in life it betrayed a loss of reason. The mouth lolling open was an accepted way of depicting the insane, but it went further than that, and encompassed the representation of individuals whose rational faculties had been placed in abeyance, by passions or base appetites. This was one reason why some of the tiny number of portraits showing white-tooth smiles are of children William Hogarths The Shrimp Girl (c1740-45) is a good example. By definition, she had not reached the age of reason and learnt how to be polite. (Or maybe she was from the lower orders and would never know better.)

When the soul was calm and tranquil, the face was perfectly at rest

The third factor explaining the absence of positive depictions of open mouths in Western art related to what were known as history paintings depicting scenes from ancient history or scripture. Individuals in such scenes are often shown as in the grip of a strong emotion such as terror, fear, despair, rage or ecstasy (whether spiritual or fleshly). In the 17th century, Louis XIVs premier painter, Charles Le Brun, sought to codify conventions concerning the representation of the passions in history painting. He drew on implicit norms that he had detected within Western art dating back to antiquity, but also sought confirmation of his ideas in the cutting-edge physiology of the philosopher Ren Descartes.

Descartes argued that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, located within the head, between the eyes and behind the bridge of the nose. The gland was where thought and sensation were formed, and this influenced, Descartes argued, the flow of animal spirits to the muscles including, importantly, the muscles of the face. For Le Brun, it followed that, when the soul was calm and tranquil, the face was perfectly at rest. Conversely, when the soul was agitated, this expressed itself on the face particularly around the eyebrows, the facial feature located closest to the pineal gland. The more extreme the passion, the more contorted the muscles in the upper part of the face and the more the lower part of the face came to be affected, too. It needed very extreme emotions for the mouth to open widely.

Le Bruns theories were widely diffused in Europe from the late 17th century. Even though the Cartesian view of the soul subsequently declined, the facial drawings with which Le Brun had illustrated them remained highly popular. Indeed, throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, copying his gallery of expressions became a standard way that amateur artists learned how to draw and paint faces. The expressions also found themselves appearing in other types of paintings. Dutch genre painting showed inebriated figures lolling around in inns and taverns laughing uproariously or caught up in violent dispute. Teeth also appeared in some self-portraits by artists presenting themselves in a sardonic manner a tradition that went back to Rembrandt and beyond. But the regular portrait stayed loyal to the courtly shut-lipped tradition of Castiglione, the Mona Lisa and the Laughing Cavalier.

Until, that is, 1787. For it was in that year in Paris that Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun (related by marriage to Louis XIVs court painter) exhibited a self-portrait in the annual Salon in the Louvre (where the painting remains). With her daughter at her knee, she graciously looks out at the viewer and smiles with decorous charm, revealing her white teeth.

The art world went into a state of shock. One element of which artists, people of good taste and collectors all disapprove, wrote one critic, and of which there is no precedent stretching back to Antiquity, is that as she laughs she shows her teeth In late 18th-century Paris, a new phenomenon had marked its arrival in Western culture, transgressing all the norms and conventions of Western art. The modern smile was born.

Mme Vige Le Brun may have been initiating something of an artistic revolution on the cusp of the more famous political revolution of 1789. But there is evidence that her painted smile reflected changes already taking place within French society more generally. People were, it seems, smiling more and seeing new positivity about the gesture. Paris was in the vanguard of this development. The French capital had established itself as a kind of influencer avant la lettre, which set trends that the rest of Europe followed as regards fashionable behaviour and commodities. The kind of stiff gravitas, conventionality and facial immobility prized at the royal court at Versailles lost its attraction for the livelier, more dynamic metropolitan culture emerging in the French capital. In salons, coffee-houses, theatres, shops and the like, more relaxed and unstuffy behaviour was the norm.

The white-tooth smile, moreover, was invested with new prestige by the cult of sensibility that swept through Europe at mid-century, encouraged by the bestselling novels of Samuel Richardson (Pamela, Clarissa) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose, mile). Modern readers of these novels are usually struck by the huge amount of weeping and sobbing that goes on in them, as their protagonists virtue is placed under cruel assault. But the characters prevail, significantly, with a sublime smile on their lips.

This was important as these novels and others like them generated a wish among their readers to model their own behaviour on the fictional characters. This trend resembles the impact of Hollywood stars and social media influencers in more recent times. The virtuous and transcendent smile showcasing healthy white teeth in the novels became a model for the Parisian social elite in real life. It became not only acceptable but even desirable to manifest ones natural feelings among ones peers. English travellers expressed amazement at how frequently Parisians exchanged smiles in everyday encounters. The city had become the worlds smile capital.

If the cult of sensibility gave novel readers the wish to smile in this fashionable way, Parisians were also lucky enough to have technical assistance at hand. The French capital had become a renowned centre for dental hygiene. Across Europe and indeed the wider world prior to the early 18th century, mouth care had been a clumsy combination of strategic tooth-picking, pain-relieving opiates and indiscriminate tooth-pulling. Now, a new kind of mouth-care expert emerged in Paris, replacing the fairground tooth-pullers of yore: the dentist.

Under the Reign of Terror, smiles had to stay beneath the parapet for political reasons

The term was coined in Paris in the 1720s and entered the English language at mid-century. It denoted a specialist with surgical and anatomical training who deployed artful instrumentation on dental care. The new dentists could clean, whiten, align, fill, replace and even transplant teeth so as to produce a mouth that was cleaner, healthier and in smiling attractive. European gentlemen undertaking their Grand Tour would drop in to Paris to get their teeth fixed. Parisian newspapers were crammed full of publicity vaunting mouth cosmetics and instruments of every description. Alongside toothpicks, tongue-scrapers, breath-sweeteners, tooth-whiteners and lipsticks was found the toothbrush a sure harbinger of a smiling modernity, which was invented at this very moment. The perfection of the invention of porcelain dentures in the late 1780s by the Parisian entrepreneur Nicolas Dubois de Chmant presaged a booming new industry in false teeth. It meant that one could perform the new white-tooth smile without a tooth of ones own in ones head.

In this context, we can see the Vige Le Brun as a kind of high-art advertisement for Parisian preventive and cosmetic dentistry and fashion. The public showing of the portrait in the Salon ensured a widespread impact: viewers took the new smile with them to their homes across the world. A radiant future looked assured.

In the event, the triumph of the Parisian open-mouthed smile was both localised and short-lived. It would have to wait more than a century before it established its sway worldwide. Even and perhaps especially in Paris, the impact of the Vige Le Brun smile was short-circuited by the French Revolution two years later and the diffusion of a political culture that found this kind of smile problematic. Even before the Revolution, the cult of sensibility was being challenged by neo-classical taste. The epic paintings of Jacques-Louis David, for example, were all about jutting jaws, facial rigidity, stiff upper lips and quasi-operatic bodily gestures. This style of representation prevailed after 1789. Indeed, under the Reign of Terror (1793-94), smiles had to stay beneath the parapet for political reasons. To ardent revolutionaries, smiling seemed to hark back to the dolce vita scandalously enjoyed by pampered aristocrats under the Ancien Rgime. True patriotism had no time for a gesture that seemed to mock republican seriousness.

Furthermore, the open mouth that people increasingly associated with the French revolutionaries had gothic, ghoulish and melodramatic associations. The facial mutilations of victims by angry mobs, for example, often focused on the mouth: the state official Joseph-Franois Foullon de Dou who in 1789 was held to have urged the people of Paris to eat grass if they could not afford the price of bread had his comeuppance when his severed head was paraded around the city on the end of a pike, with straw stuffed into its mouth. Goya depicted the revolutionaries as the god Saturn devouring his children, according to one interpretation of his haunting painting. English political cartoonists doubled down on this, presenting the Parisian popular classes as slavering cannibals. Even the porcelain dentures that Dubois de Chmant had bestowed on humanity became the object of the sarcastic mockery of the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Such images lingered in European imaginations, crowding out memories of more innocent times.

If in Paris the Vige Le Brun smile had lost its allure and been consigned to the dustbin of history, this owed something also to a crisis in medical services. Revolutionary legislation closed the niche within the medical system that dentists had occupied, and there was no provision for training in dental surgery. For a century, dentists had no institutional status, and soon found themselves back in a situation where they were competing for customers with the charlatan tooth-pullers of old.

The smile went into hibernation as a public gesture in the West for more than a century. It was only in the early 20th century that it re-emerged under the influence of a range of factors. Better dentistry was a significant part of the story, and the world leader was not Paris but the United States, which had been among the earliest countries to professionalise dental training from the early 19th century onwards. Yet, as in the 18th century, the triumph of the smile owed as much to cultural trends as to the supply of dental expertise and proficiency. Highly visual advertising practices, Hollywood star image-making and snapshot photography also played a role. As anyone with family photograph albums going back that far will discover, it was from the 1920s and 30s that smiles appear for the first time precisely the period when individuals began to say cheese when confronted with a camera. Portraiture had become democratised and smilified.

From the turn of the 21st century, iPhone photography and social media confirmed the preferred individual expression of social identity was through smiling. The technologies also worked to erode barriers with global smiling cultures that had formerly been less reflective of Western practices. One in every five of the more than 500 million Twitter messages sent each day, it has been calculated, contains an emoji. It is the lingua franca of the globalised mass culture of the electronic age. The most utilised of all the 3,000-plus available emojis is the smile with tears of joy, an upgraded version of the original smiley.

In 2019, the long march of the modern (Western) smile received a severe jolt, with the appearance of COVID-19. Suddenly, that expression retreated behind a surgical mask. It is true that the perceptive among us may have been aware that a genuine and sincere smile causes a detectable crinkling of muscles around the eyes. But then we are not all so perceptive. And who smiles only sincerely anyway? The emoji registered the hit. Though the smile with tears of joy maintained the top spot in global usage, another emoji surged dramatically: the surgically masked face. The popularity of the masked-face emoji became so intense that when, in November 2020, Apple released its annual additions to the range, it was thought wise to tweak the mask emoji, adding colour to the cheeks and a meaningful creasing around the eyes so as to give the appearance of smiling under the mask. The smile, it seemed, was fighting back. And indeed it looks unlikely to lose its iconic cultural value and global appeal. A receding pandemic status across the world gives everyone something to smile about.

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A history of the smile through art, culture and etiquette - Aeon

In 1951, mobster Frank Costello (seated, center) testified in front of the Kefauver Committee during a televised congressional hearing on organized crime that captivated the country. Bettmann / Getty Images

A year and a half after some 2,000 supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a series of televised congressional hearings are revealing new details of the unprecedented attack.

Broadcast on most of the major networks and cable news channels (Fox News opted out), the two-hour opening hearing featured live testimony from a Capitol Police officer who described the January 6, 2021, riot as a war scene; pre-recorded interviews with Trump aides and advisers; and visceral, never-before-seen footage from the day of the insurrection.

I saw officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up, said officer Caroline Edwards, who sustained a traumatic brain injury during the riot. I was slipping on peoples blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.

Perhaps the most expertly produced prime-time hearings broadcast to date, the January 6 proceedings are part of a lengthy American political tradition. From the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings to the 1973 Watergate hearings, televised hearings have transfixed the nation for decades, offering the public a rare glimpse behind the congressional curtain.

Television didnt invent the congressional hearing or [become] the first to take advantage of its essential theatricality, wrote broadcaster Reuven Frank in the 1997 book Covering Congress. But the medium opened up a new world where the theater was always open, the audience always receptive, the press always in attendance.

According to an online House of Representatives exhibition, the first live television broadcast of a congressional proceeding took place on January 3, 1947, during the opening of the 80th Congress. Due to costliness and an unwillingness by members of Congress to have their [discussions] recorded, wrote Jackie Mansky for Smithsonian magazine in 2017, the 1947 broadcast proved to be an anomaly, with regularly televised proceedings only becoming the norm in 1977.

Despite the legislative bodys overall resistance to television, individual congressional committees couldand didbroadcast their own hearings. The first to capture a broad swath of Americans attention took place in 1951, when the Kefauver Committee investigated organized crime. Embarking on a national tour of local courtrooms, Senator Estes T. Kefauver subpoenaed mobsters, corrupt law enforcement officers, gamblers and other witnesses. An estimated 30 million people watched the live proceedings, eagerly following the cinematic black-and-white footage of criminals under duress, per the Senate Historical Office.

Frank Costello, an Italian crime boss based in New York, initially refused to testify but agreed to speak if the camera focused on his hands rather than his face. Actually, reported the Newsday newspaper on March 14, 1951, they were more character-revealing than his expressionless face, twitching nervously as the mobster reached for a glass of water or mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Another star of the Kefauver hearings was Virginia Hill, the former girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel. According to the Mob Museum, she showed up at the courthouse in a $5,000 mink cape and silk gloves, denied all knowledge of criminal activity, and slapped a woman reporter in the face on her way out of the proceedings.

A similarly captivating set of hearings aired in the spring of 1954. Known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the proceedings pitted Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator known for his zealous hunt for communists, against the U.S. Army, which had accused the controversial politician of seeking preferential treatment for an aide. McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn, in turn charged the Army with harboring communists within its ranks.

Across 36 days of hearings, 188 hours of which were broadcast live, a boorish McCarthy and a bleary-eyed Cohn [faced off] against a coolly avuncular Joseph N. Welch, the Armys special counsel, notes Thomas Doherty for the Television Academy Foundation. In a June 9, 1954, exchange with McCarthy, Welch famously declared, Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Seen by some 27 million Americans, the hearings marked the beginning of McCarthys fall from grace. What happened was that television, whose coverage of McCarthys news conferences and addresses to the nation had earlier lent him legitimacy and power, had now precipitated his downfall, writes Doherty. Censured by the Senate and ostracized by his peers, McCarthy died of unknown causeslikely linked to alcoholismin 1957. (Cohn, meanwhile, would later mentor a young Donald Trump in the 1970s and 80s.)

Perhaps the most readily apparent counterpart to the January 6 investigation is the Watergate hearings of 1973, which unraveled the scandal surrounding a June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Though the proceedings got off to a slow start, the drama picked up as witnesses revealed the extent of President Richard M. Nixons involvement in the cover-up.

The Senate Watergate investigation is proving a television-viewing phenomenon, wrote columnist Jack Anderson in July 1973, following a former White House aides disclosure that Nixon had recorded secret tapes of his conversations with staff, government officials and family members. According to A.C. Nielsen, the company behind Nielsen TV ratings, an estimated three out of four American households tuned in to the hearings at one point or another.

The drama-filled inquiry outdrew popular daytime soap operas, writes Ronald G. Shafer for the Washington Post. One Chicago woman reportedly told a friend, Ive gotta hurry home and watch the Senate investigation on TV. Its more fun than an X-rated movie.

In 1974, the Houseanticipating an impeachment trial for Nixonauthorized broadcast coverage of floor debate for the first time. (Previously, live broadcasts had been limited to individual committee hearings.) Though Nixon resigned before an impeachment trial could take place, his actions inadvertently cemented televisions ascension as the go-to medium for political intrigue.

House Speaker Thomas Tip ONeill authorized a three-month testing period for closed-circuit television coverage in March 1977; C-SPAN, the nonprofit network that broadcasts live footage of many congressional proceedings, debuted soon thereafter, in March 1979, paving the way for such headline-making events as the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings and the January 6 ones taking place today.

What America and the world saw in 1974 was the most powerful man in the world lose his job, says historian Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in the CNN documentary series Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal. And for anyone who doubted the strength of the U.S. Constitution, what they witnessed [during the Watergate hearings] removed those doubts.

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A Brief History of Televised Congressional Hearings | Smart News - Smithsonian Magazine

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. With a $25,000 personal commitment, Penn State history alumna Liz Covart and her husband, Tim Wilde, have created the Liz Covart and Tim Wilde Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Fund in the College of the Liberal Arts. The gift has secured matching support from Wildes employer, Google.

Formed in 2017, the Humanities Institute at Penn State is dedicated to promoting the social value of the humanities through scholarship, research, lectures, conferences and public events. Covart and Wilde were particularly interested in the institutes newest student research initiative, Re-envisioning Undergraduate Research in the Humanities,which focuses on increasing humanities research engagement among undergraduate students. The Covart/Wilde research fund will make it easier for students to participate in humanities-based research projects by supplying research materials and supplies, underwriting travel expenses, and providing other forms of support.

It is inspiring to know that Liz and Tim understand the innumerable ways that humanities education and research contributes to the personal and professional development of our students, said John Christman, director of the Penn State Humanities Institute. By supporting students research projects in the humanities, their gift will substantially contribute to our efforts to bring work in humanities disciplines out into the world, so to speak. We know that students engagement with their own research projects multiplies their interest and enthusiasm in these disciplines, which are so important to confronting the challenging issues of our time.

Covart was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but spent most of her childhood in New Hampshire. Her parents instilled in her a love of history early on by taking her and her brother on weekend trips to historic sites and national parks. When it came to choosing a college, however, Covart said her parents wanted her to get a degree in something other than history something that would immediately lead to a job. Though Covart believed, and still believes, that a degree in history can lead to any number of professions, she honored her parents wishes by selecting labor and industrial relations as her college major. Penn State was one of only three schools in the country to offer the degree at the time.

Preferring to focus on her passion for history rather than labor and industrial relations, however, Covart did some research at Penn States career services office. I found out that I could get an internship with the National Park Service, which I knew my parents would love.

She landed a history department-sponsored summer internship with Boston National Historical Park, which led to a change in major with her parents blessing and five summers as an interpreter for the National Park Service.

In addition to enjoying her internships, Covart made the most of her Penn State experience. She played the trumpet for four years in the Penn State Blue Band and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society as well as Phi Alpha Theta, the honors society for history majors. She also led the history roundtable, a group of students who would invite visiting professors to speak with student groups.

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History alumna creates fund to support undergraduate research in the humanities - Pennsylvania State University

The history of Atlantas LGBTQ community can be hard to uncover, in large part due to the homophobia and transphobia of the time that caused people to keep a low profile for fear of losing their jobs, their families or their lives. That fear stubbornly persists to this day for far too many.

But that didnt stop LGBTQ people in Atlanta from finding any way and any place they could to go out, to dance, to march, to worship, to learn, and to find love together.

Youll find just some of those people and places documented here in our interactive LGBTQ Atlanta History Tour. Explore sites around the city that have been pivotal to LGBTQ life and history from the gay and lesbian bars of yesteryear to the theater where a police raid sparked Atlantas modern LGBTQ rights movement.

And head over to WABEs Pride Month hub to read or revisit stories about LGBTQ politics and activism, community life, arts and culture in Atlanta, plus get the details on Pride Month events happening near you!

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Take an interactive tour of Atlanta's LGBTQ history WABE - WABE 90.1 FM