History

No Paint Tube, No Impressionism

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Photo: U.S. Patent Office, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Before the paint tube, paint came in a pig’s bladder. That is not a figure of speech. A painter, or more often his apprentice, ground dry pigment with oil on a slab, tied the mixture up in a small animal bladder, and when he wanted paint he pricked the bladder with a pin and squeezed. The hole could not really be sealed again. The paint skinned over, dried out, and went to waste, and bladders burst in luggage. Painting outdoors was possible — some painters did it — but everything about the materials argued for staying in the studio, where the grinding stone was.

In 1841, an American portrait painter working in London got tired of it and fixed it.

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The Rock Shelter That Pushed Oregon Back 18,000 Years

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Photo: Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Outside the little town of Riley, in Oregon’s high desert, there’s a shallow rock overhang called Rimrock Draw Rockshelter. It doesn’t look like the kind of place that rewrites timelines. But the University of Oregon’s archaeological field school, working with the Bureau of Land Management under archaeologist Patrick O’Grady, has been digging there since 2011 — and what came out of the ground suggests people were sheltering there more than 18,000 years ago, thousands of years before the Clovis culture that textbooks used to call the first Americans.

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If You Can’t Prove It, It’s Not History

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I wrote recently about a very popular mini-series that’s being shown on The History Channel leading up to the Easter holiday: Jesus: His Life . I received a little blowback from some people even though overall I praised the show for it’s production value but stated that this should not be considered history. This is simply a retelling of a story, written by several anonymous authors, that weren’t witnesses to any of what they wrote about at the time. The main problem I had with the series, was that it was presented on a channel called History. There really isn’t any way that this could even remotely be called history, because there’s no historical basis for it at all.

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Why Notre Dame is Important to All of Us

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Notre Dame cathedral fire

I thought I’d wait a few days to write about the devastating fire in Paris of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The reason is I wanted to see how many conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork, blaming of course, Muslims for the fire. I wasn’t disappointed. Of course, yes, there have been numerous Christian churches defaced in recent months, but to try and assign blame of this awful incident to Muslims, seems like a leap. Remember, it was being renovated and without any evidence of arson, it may easily be placed in the category of being an accident.

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Erasing History

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I recently viewed a a video by Tim Pool, who’s quickly becoming one of my favorites on YouTube, concerning the issue of how we, as a society, are trying to erase inconvenient history. I don’t think there’s a country, anywhere, that doesn’t have some historical missteps they’d like to forget, and have the rest of the world forget as well, but it is what it is and even though we today are not responsible for the misdeeds of our ancestors, we somehow have a need to try and wipe the slate clean. We need to disabuse ourselves of the past, to the point to deleting those from the historical record that have become too controversial for us, although they may have been dead for decades, or centuries.

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