The Eiffel Tower served as the entrance arch to the Exposition Universelle, an 1889 world’s fair. The exposition opened on the sixth of May, though the tower was not yet complete (it required an additional nine days). It was an immediate success with the public. By the exposition’s end, the tower attracted two million visitors. One hundred and twenty-four years later, the Eiffel Tower is a cultural icon.

Pictured: Paris Exposition Grand March, a collection of sheet music from 1905. It can be found in the Newberry’s Driscoll Collection. Beneath the central image is a caption that reads, “The Eiffel Tower. 985 feet high… highest in existence.” This is partially inaccurate: the tower (including its antenna) originally stood at 1023 feet. It now stands at 1063 feet. It was, at the time of the sheet music’s composition, the world’s tallest man-made structure. After forty-one years, New York’s Chrysler Building would surpass it.

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Happy International Workers’ Day!

Albert R. Parsons, an Alabama-born newspaperman, was one of four Haymarket martyrs—labor and anarchist leaders, who, as we explained in our earlier post, were unfairly hanged for involvement in the Haymarket Square riot and bombing. Anarchismus, pictured above, is the German translation of Parsons’s memoir and ideological manifesto, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, as Defined by Some of Its Apostles. Parsons penned his manifesto while awaiting execution; it’s been said that he scribbled its final lines en route to the gallows. On the bottom right, there is a cheeky illustration of a scaffold, towering above three lines of text: “unter dem zeichen des neuen kreuzzugs,” or “under the sign of the new crusade.” “Crusade” refers to the harsh policing of the radical left.

Parsons’s manuscript would be posthumously published by his wife Lucy, a powerful orator and a leader in her own right. (In the 1920s, the Chicago Police Department would say she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”). Only 300 English-language copies were circulated; police actively confiscated the others. This German-language edition managed to escape police attention. It traveled freely—and quickly—among Chicago’s German-speaking population, which had strong ties to the anarchist, socialist, and labor movements.

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benvanloon:

Newberry Library. Designed by Henry Ives Cobb and built in 1887.

Happy May Day!

This bilingual broadside, written by labor activist Adolph Fischer, calls on “workingmen” to attend a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In the demonstration’s aftermath, eight anarchists (including Fischer) were unfairly accused of slaying police officers. An openly biased judge would sentence seven of these defendants—now regarded as the Haymarket martyrs—to death. In 1887, four were executed after one committed suicide.

Two years later, the first congress of the Second International, an organization of socialist and labor parties, proposed an annual holiday to commemorate the Chicago protests and consequent executions. The holiday was dubbed International Workers’ Day, or May Day.

In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants, citing trial irregularities. He was concurrently praised and censured for this decision, which cost him a re-election bid. Today, the Newberry’s Bughouse Square Debates, an annual free-speech forum, begin with the presentation of the John Peter Altgeld Freedom of Speech Award, which is given to an individual or group that has staunchly defended civil liberties.

Fischer’s broadside and unwarranted fate are a potent reminder: Chicago occupies a central position in the movement for workers’ fair treatment. Its nineteenth-century denizens marched for and resolutely demanded their rights—and in turn, the rights of the international laborer.

To conclude National Poetry Month, here are some images from an 1881 edition of Alfred Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. In the first (page 32), the eponymous lady is seated at her loom. In the second (page 42), Sir Lancelot rides on horseback.

Today (April 25) in 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor—the sixteenth and final emperor of the Ming Dynasty—was overthrown. Three centuries earlier, the Ming was in its early throes; the Hongwu Emperor, or Zhu Yuanzhang, established the dynasty in 1368. Above are images of Chinese paper money, printed during the Hongwu Emperor’s reign (c. 1375). Printed in black and stamped with red, it has a floriated border and a dragon on each side. The inscription reads, “precious money for general use during the great Ming dynasty.”

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Crown of Noble and Virtuous Women, page 21, Book 3.

Cesare Vecellio, a Venetian engraver, first published this pattern-making book in 1591. (The Newberry owns a slightly later edition, printed in 1616). It contains an improbable number of sewing and lace designs, which depict the jewels of royal crowns. Pages were frequently ripped out and re-appropriated as decorative accents on clothing.

Crown of Noble and Virtuous Women was continually printed into the nineteenth century.

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Happy 449th birthday, Willy Shakes!

Pictured: The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, printed in 1930. Issued by Cranach Press, this edition of Hamlet sports contributions from four famed British artists: Edward Johnston, Eric Gill, Edward Gordon Craig, and Roger Powell.

Today is Talk Like Shakespeare Day! →

http://www.talklikeshakespeare.org/

Hear ye, hear ye! ‘Tis Shakespeare’s 449th birthday and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has officially proclaimed April 23, 2013 as Talk Like Shakespeare Day—a day on which everyone is encouraged to express themselves through the incorporation of Shakespearean language and dialect. Get some tips about Shakespeare’s style, listen to the hip-hop birthday anthem, and discover the many ways the Bard is alive and well at 449 years old, right here!

Happy (supposed) 449^th birthday, William Shakespeare!

Shakespeare (or the man we believe to be the famed playwright) was baptized on April 26, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birthday remains unknown, but is traditionally celebrated on April 23. This date, which is attributed to an 18th-century scholar’s mistake, has proved appealing to biographers (presumably because Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616).

We’ve already posted an image of our first folio and this tragic typo. So, in honor of Ol’ Will’s big day, we thought we’d try something different.  The above image, entitled “Life and Death Contrasted, or an Essay on Woman,” appears in a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English caricatures. It is an illustration of a half-woman/half-skeleton, clutching an arrow in her left hand and a fan in her right. At her feet are a set of playing cards, a book entitled Romance and Novels, and a skull. On her left (or the viewer’s right) is a rather large grave stone, engraved with a Shakespearean quotation. It is Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet, in which the Danish Prince addresses Yorick’s skull: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this complexion she must come at last.”

(Or, no matter how much makeup a woman puts on, she’ll still be reduced to a skull.)