Albert Gallatin birthday

When my hometown was laid out in 1819, several of the streets were named after statesmen of the time: John Randolph, Arthur St. Clair, Richard M. Johnson, Ninian Edwards, and Albert Gallatin. Although there is a Main Street, Gallatin St has always been Vandalia's primary thoroughfare and business district. Albert Gallatin himself was a Swiss-born politician and diplomat who was secretary of the treasury in 1801-1814 (Jefferson's and Madison's administration). He also represented Pennsylvania in the US House and Senate, and was US minister to the UK and to France. In 1794, he calmed the protesters in the Whiskey Rebellion because the army could intervene. Gallatin also studied Native American languages and has been called "the father of American ethnology." He also founded New York University. ALSO, he had the idea for a National Road. When he died in 1849, he was the last surviving member of Jefferson's cabinet and the last surviving senator from the 18th century. Since photography was new in the 1840s, he lived long enough to sit for a picture. He was born January 29, 1761. There will be no quiz on all this, LOL.

Holocaust Remembrance

On January 27, 1945, Allied forces liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. The United Nations designed January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to remember the Jewish victims of the Shoah and the millions of other victims of the Nazis. 

I had heard of this book and recently purchased it. "And Every Single One Was Someone," by Phil Chernofsky. Except for the introduction, the book contains only the word Jew, 4800 times on each page for 1250 pages, thus repeating the word 6 million times. The cover depicts a Jewish prayer shawl.

Bingham Family in Louisville

When we lived in Louisville, KY in the '90s, we lived on the short Bingham Drive in our little neighborhood out Westport Road. 

Born January 22, 1937, Sallie Bingham is an author, playwright, poet, feminist activist, and philanthropist who has written several novels, collections of short stories, poems, plays, and a family memoir. Her father Barry Bingham, Sr. was head of the family that owned The (Louisville) Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times newspapers, the Standard Gravure printing company, WHAS Radio, WHAS Television. He sold the entire media empire in 1986: https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../1ea01026-800c-4d0f.../

 

Happy birthday, John Hancock

John Hancock was the first and third governor of the Commonweath of Massachusetts and president of the Second Continental Congress, well as a signer of the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. His large, elegant signature on the Declaration is so famous that "to sign one's John Hancock" is a synonym for one's signature. He was born January 23, 1737. The John Hancock Life Insurance Co was named in his honor during the 1860s.

Happy birthday, Manet

 It's a nice experience to visit an art museum and see a famous painting that you didn't realize was there. In 2019, we visited the Musée d'Orsay. I wandered into another room--and there was Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe." Oh, hi, nude lady!  It's a huge painting--maybe 9' x 7'. I always liked the art of Édouard Manet, who was born January 23, 1832.

Clement Greenberg

Art critic and essayist Clement Greenberg was born January 16, 1909. I found this quote about him:

"Greenberg’s writings mostly dealt with non-objective art, Abstract Expressionism, and other forms of formalist and abstract styles, such as color field painting. The crucial importance in a painting for him was in lines, shape and color, while emotional content was considered secondary. Throughout his writings his focus is on a formal purity and dissolution of a subject as the necessary qualities of modernism. ...He ..‘discovered’ Jackson Pollock, and was the first critic who mentioned the most famous figure of action painting in print. It was in his essay for the Nation in 1943. Greenberg described Pollock as 'the first painter I know of to have got something positive from the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting.' Flatness of the picture plane came from the evolution of modernism which started with Manet, and was of utmost importance to Greenberg, who observed it as the unique and exclusive pictorial trait." https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/clement-greenberg 

Istanbul

Beth was invited to do two presentations at a Nov. 2-3 conference of the European Women Rectors Association (EWORA), which met at Kadir Has University in Istanbul this past week. Webster U has four European campuses---plus she's done so much over these years to get Webster U's name out there worldwide as an amazing university. The conference theme was “Global Female Leadership and the Future of Universities”. There also was a very nice program honoring several women in science and research. Neither Beth nor I had been to Istanbul so I tagged along. It was a very full three days, plus the 12 or 13 hour flight to and from. We definitely want to return someday!