Culture

†1170 Thomas Becket murdered

Thomas Becket, also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket, served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his death in 1170.  He engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of England, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the King in Canterbury Cathedral. Soon after his death, he was canonised by Pope Alexander III. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. Becket’s assassins fled north to de Morville’s Knaresborough Castle for about a year. They were not arrested and seeking forgiveness, the assassins travelled to Rome, […]

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1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Grimms’ Fairy Tales, originally known as the Children’s and Household Tales, is a German collection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, first published on 20 December 1812.  The first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1815. For the second edition, two volumes containing the Kinder- und Hausmärchen texts were issued in 1819 and the appendix was removed and published separately in the third volume in 1822, totaling 170 tales. Stories were added, and also removed, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 210 tales. Some later editions […]

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Culture 1900s – Early Recordings (pre-1910)

Pre-2010 Early Recordings    1900s in Literature 1901 in literature – Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud; Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters; Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; August Strindberg’s A Dream Play; Stanislaw Wyspianski’s The Wedding. Death of Kate Greenaway, Charlotte Mary Yonge 1902 in literature – André Gide’s The Immoralist; Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths; Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles; Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit; J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird; Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Death of Émile Zola, Bret Harte 1903 in literature – Henry James’s The Ambassadors; Jack London’s The Call of the Wild; W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk; […]

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Culture 1910s – Hits Archive

Movies 1910s Moonpub Theatre Playlist Hits 1910 – 1917  Popular culture The first U.S. feature film, Oliver Twist, was released in 1912. The first mob film, D. W. Griffith‘s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, was released in 1912. Hollywood, California, replaces the East Coast as the center of the movie industry. The first crossword puzzle was published 21 December 1913 appearing in The New York World newspaper. The comic strip Krazy Kat begins. Charlie Chaplin débuts his trademark mustached, baggy-pants “Little Tramp” character in Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. The four Warner brothers, (from older to younger) Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack opened their first major film studio in Burbank in 1918. Tarzan of the Apes starring Elmo Lincoln is released in 1918, the first Tarzan film. […]

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Culture 1930s – Hits Archive

Hits Playlist 1930s  Music “Swing” music starts becoming popular from 1933, the dawn of the Swing era. It gradually replaces the sweet form of Jazz that had been popular for the first half of the decade. “Delta Blues” music, the first recorded in the late 1920s, was expanded by Robert Johnson and Skip James, two of the most important and influential acts of “Blues” genre. Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli led the development of Gypsy jazz. Sergei Rachmaninoff composed Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934. Charlie Christian becomes the first electric guitarist to be in a multiracial band with Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton in 1939. 1930s in Literature 1930 in literature – William Faulkner’s As I Lay […]

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Culture 1920s – Paul Whiteman

Playlist Paul Whiteman Recordings Music The period from the end of the First World War until the start of the Depression in 1929 is known as the “Jazz Age“. The “Jazz Age” – jazz and jazz-influenced dance music became widely popular throughout the decade. Paul Whiteman recordings: As the leader of one of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s, Whiteman produced recordings that were immensely successful, and press notices often referred to him as the “King of Jazz”.  George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti were the first musicians to incorporate […]

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1968 Earthrise picture

Apollo 8 (December 21–27, 1968) was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence, and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing and then returned to Earth. The three astronauts—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to see and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise.  Apollo 8 took 68 hours to travel to the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times over the course of twenty hours, during which they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast where they read the first ten verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV […]

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1709 First piano is built

The invention of the piano is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy, who was employed by Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, as the Keeper of the Instruments. Cristofori was an expert harpsichord maker and was well acquainted with the body of knowledge on stringed keyboard instruments. This knowledge of keyboard mechanisms and actions helped him to develop the first pianos. It is not known when Cristofori first built a piano. An inventory made by his employers, the Medici family, indicates the existence of a piano by 1700.  The three Cristofori pianos that survive today date from the 1720s (see picture above). Cristofori named […]

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1843 First commercial christmas card

The first known Christmas card was sent by Michael Maier to James I of England and his son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1611. It was hand-made and incorporated Rosicrucian imagery, with the words of the greeting – “A greeting on the birthday of the Sacred King, to the most worshipful and energetic lord and most eminent James, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and Defender of the true faith, with a gesture of joyful celebration of the Birthday of the Lord, in most joyand fortune, we enter into the new auspicious year 1612” – being laid out to form a rose.  The first commercially […]

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