Hail to the Friday Links

Happy Presidents' Day Weekend, everybody! In honor of getting Monday off from work, here's a special all-President edition. (Okay, fine, 90% of the content in this blog is president-related. I try to make a special effort not to have that happen, but what can I say? Childhood obsessions die hard.)

• Here are some Presidential screensavers and games to get you in an appropriately festive mood. (MSN)
• In honor of the man's 199th birthday, here are nine little-known facts about Lincoln. (Mental Floss)
• Hunter S. Thompson's scathing obituary of Richard Nixon. (Counterpunch)
• A Salute to Obscure Presidents (Michael5000) - Incidentally, you know that car commercial with the Millard Fillmore soap on a rope? I'll be the best friend of anybody who can ACTUALLY find me a Millard Fillmore soap on a rope. It will go very nicely with my tiny plastic Warren G. Harding.
• The comments to the above blog post led me to this very awesome website, which features one guy's quest to visit all of the Presidential burial sites.

And finally, here's some awesome video of eighth president Martin Van Buren playing Halo. Sort of.

Ungainly Mass of Friday Links

• 20 Things You Didn't Know About Science Fiction. (Discover Magazine) My favorite little factoid from this? Robert Heinlein's role in the conceptualization of the waterbed, which, if you have ever read Heinlein, should surprise you not at all.


• Presidential Elections and Height Differences (Mental Floss)


• 5 Places to Watch Movies Legally Online (PBS) This isn't directly history-related, except in the sense that there are some great historically-significant films available in the public domain that you can, and should, try to catch.


• The 5 Nastiest Presidential Elections in U.S. History (Neatorama) Thomas Jefferson actually pretty much called John Adams a hermaphrodite. True fax. Expect more on the topic of election mudslinging in the future. 'Tis the season and all.

Finally, speaking of John Adams, how psyched are you for the HBO John Adams miniseries?

Call Me Friday Links

Not much laugh-out-loud funny to be had this week, but plenty in the way of fascinating stories.

• Fortune Cookies' origins have been traced to Japan. (New York Times)


• Moby Dick's narrator tries his hand at stand-up comedy. (McSweeney's)


• The Library of Congress has just joined flickr. And it's pretty much the awesomest thing ever. A big chunk of what they've put up here is from their FSA/OWI collection, most of it from the 40s, most of it in glorious stylized 40s color. I could waste hours here. (And actually have done.)


• Speaking of the Library of Congress: A set of photo negatives labeled by the LOC as being pictures of Grant's inauguration turn out to be from Lincoln's. (LA Times via A. Lincoln Blog.)


• Again tangentially related to the Library of Congress: Historian Joe Manning has undertaken the project of finding out what happened to many of the children in Lewis Hine's famous photographs of child laborers.


• Vladimir Nabokov wanted his last unpublished manuscript destroyed after his death. It's currently sitting in a bank vault. Should his son respect Nabokov's wishes or those of his readers/scholars/fans/admirers? (Slate)

These Wonderful Things Are the Things We Remember All Through Our (Very Short) Lives

The only trouble with writing about Currier and Ives is that I will now be singing "Sleigh Ride" for the rest of the day. Oh well, 'tis the season.

Anyway. Currier and Ives. They were a nineteenth-century firm that specialized in mass-produced lithographs -- "Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures," they called themselves. People generally bought (or otherwise received) their hand-colored prints and framed them for decorative purposes. You probably know them best for their images of fruit bowls, horse races, or idyllic winter landscapes, but they really did all kinds of stuff -- and I do mean all kinds. Because in addition to their clip-arty lithographs suitable for hanging above the mantel, Currier and Ives also had a weird thing about deathbeds:

And okay, if it was just this one, I could see that being a big seller - it was a pretty major event in the lives of many Americans, and a good number of them adored Lincoln.

But it's not just this one. They are legion. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection is crawling with images of one famous guy or another languishing as he gasps out his last breath, surrounded by loved ones and colleagues (you may recognize then-vice president Andrew Johnson in Lincoln's picture above).

Here are a few others:

Here's Garfield.

Here's John Quincy Adams, who apparently had no female relatives.

And just so you know, it wasn't specific to presidents.
I'm somehow having a hard time picturing someone actually framing and hanging a deathbed photo like this. If you really loved the figure in question, you'd probably want to commemorate them in the prime of their life. Unless you hated them, I guess, which...maybe you'd want a picture of their death in that event, but Currier and Ives doesn't seem like the sort of agency that caters to the mean-spirited. I mean, they enjoy hunting dogs, and doe-eyed Miss Liberties, and fruit orchards, and sleighs. They don't seem like the sort of people to dance on graves. Even taking into account the Victorian (and earlier) obsession with all things death, it's weird.

My best guess has something to do with the fact that Currier and Ives had a deal with the New York Sun for awhile in which a hand-colored print came with the newspaper once a week. The weekly print was often something that had happened recently - hence the reason for all the Civil War battles and images of ships blowing up. The death of a major historical figure is news, and of course they'd commemorate it somehow.

Just as newswires today have pre-written obituary template stashed away for various notable people, I'm imagining Currier and Ives had a specific deathbed template, just to cut some corners - add the head of the recently deceased, add some appropriately gendered and aged loved ones, and voila.

Stephen Douglas was a great debater, but Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator

Back from vacation and ready to bring more history funny to you. Today's topic: presidential hair.

Now, of course there are some very obvious presidential 'dos that spring to mind, even above and beyond the conventions of the day (powdered wigs aren't funny if everyone's wearing them - if it were the 1790s, you'd be wearing one too, smart-ass). James K. Polk and his egregious mullet are clearly way up there, and of course there's also the glorious mane of Andrew Jackson. But those, to me, pale next to this photo I found on a stereoview in the Library of Congress, depicting Abraham Lincoln circa 1860 with some truly wacky hair.

I think I saw this guy drinking PBR at Barcade the other night.

Were he young and alive today, no doubt this Abe would be an avid fan of Sufjan Stevens, from whom I get the quote in this post's title.