Hi and welcome to ‘a handful of history’, my fortnightly sharing of real-life stories from around the world. All the narratives I pick are rooted in history one way or another, yet I feel that most of them carry themes and happenings that seem very present day-like. I create this blog out of love and curiosity for the field of human history and culture, and I’m happy that you find it interesting too. My blog and newsletters are free; if you want to help me keep it going, please join my newsletter. THANK YOU. Thanks for being here - let's dive in. Enjoy! Majken xx
Daughter of the ‘Mad Monk’
We’ve heard quite a lot about the ‘Mad Monk’ Grigori Rasputin, who was born a peasant but ended up mingling with the Russian Imperial Romanov family - and was assassinated because of it.
However, this article tells that Rasputin had a daughter, Maria Rasputin, who also had a remarkable life. She played with the Romanov daughters as a little girl, but when imperial Russia fell, she fled the country and went into showbiz. She did a bit of cabaret dancing and also she had a career in lion taming. Eventually, she ended up in L.A., where she lived, working as a babysitter and teaching Russian. But although Maria Rasputin used her last name to create her career, some people were not convinced she was telling the truth about her kinship. As the article puts it:
“When Maria Rasputin died, The New York Times published her obituary, calling her a “dancer and circus performer who contended that she was a daughter of the ‘Mad Monk’ Grigori Rasputin,” leaving many to wonder if maybe her name had been her greatest performance of all.”
Futuredays
Around 1900, a series of futuristic pictures by the French drawer Jean-Marc Côté and other artists were issued in France. They were being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, and they portrayed the world as the artists imagined it to be in the year 2000.
Many of the illustrations are relatively inaccurate - obviously - but it is still interesting (as well as entertaining) to see what “craziness” these people imagined that 100-years-from-now would look like.
There are - at least - 87 illustrations, and they were all printed on cards. Due to financial difficulties, they were never distributed, though. And they almost were lost too. It was not until years later they occurred - in the 1980s when the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov stumbled upon them by accident. He later published them in the book “Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000”.
The Feather Heist
One evening in June 2009, the twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist took a train out of London in northwest direction. He was heading to the Natural History Museum at Tring, an outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Inside the Tring museum was one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, rare bird specimens whose feathers were worth loads and loads of money to people who shared Rist’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
Rist needed money. He wanted to buy a golden flute - flute as in: the instrument he was playing - and he had a plan. Armed with a pair of gloves and a glass cutter, he entered the museum…and got away with hundreds of bird skin.
To give you an idea of just how valuable these birds are, here’s an insight.
The birds were collected in the mid-1800s by one of the greatest scientific explorers of his time: Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace spent nearly a decade in the Malay Archipelago, where he collected animal specimens that he sent back to England. The birds are the early evidence of evolution theory and are just as crucial as Darwins collected species (also stored at the Ting museum). Species like these, it is said, can inform scientists about everything from climate change to the way we perceive colour, and scientists are still using them today. Back in his days, Alfred Russel Wallace noted that “each species, each bird is an individual letter building the words and sentences that describe the deep history of our planet. If we allow these letters to disappear, that history disappears with them.”
The flautist and feather thief Edwin Rist was eventually caught, but he only got a minor punishment. A couple of years later, the author Kirk Wallace Johnson heard the story about the unusual feather thief, and he wanted to investigate the crime on his own. This lead him to write his book “The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century”. Also, he is co-hosting the podcast “The Feather Heist”, which I’ve just been listening to. What a strange story and yet captivating as well.
Photo: "A Jock Scott salmon fly, tied by Spencer Seim. Instead of using expensive feathers from exotic species as outlined in the classic instructions, Seim substitutes feathers made from dyeing plumes from game birds like turkeys and pheasants."
A Little Bird Blown off Course
Margaret Fay Shaw (1903-2004) came from a wealthy steel-making family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the US. She was brought up in a grand house with servants, and in her young days, she studied classical music in New York and Paris. Her biggest dream was to become a professional concert pianist; however, she had to give up this ambition because of arthritis in her hands. Luckily there was something else that caught her attention. During a year at a boarding school in Helensburgh, near Glasgow in Scotland, Shaw and the other students watched the performance of Marjory Kennedy Fraser, a singer and musician who is famous for her arrangements of "Songs from the Hebrides”. This was Gaelic music, and Shaw was thrilled.
Eight years later, she travelled to the Hebrides. She wanted to learn everything she could about the islanders' lives and - not least - study their songs. During her stay, she met her future husband, the Gaelic folklorist John Lorne Campbell. The two settled down on one of the small Inner Hebrides islands, and they spent many years travelling around the islands together, recording songs and collecting stories.
Margaret Fay Shaw died in 2004. She was buried in the Hebrides, her grave overlooking the Atlantic. Her outstanding work - 1000s of photographs, field recordings, books, letters and manuscripts - is stored in what used to be her and Campbell’s house on the Canna island of the Inner Hebrides. The material is used by scholars, musicians and historians around the world. What a mark she left on the world this woman who, in her own words, described her life story as "a little bird blown off course".
Video: Photos and recordings of Halloween costumes and songs on South Uist island of the Outer Hebrides in 1932 by Margaret Fay Shaw + article + radio program on Margaret Fay Shaw.
The Mother as a Creator
Since 2001 the artist Annie Wang has taken a photo of her and her son once a year. Each new image is created in front of the photo from the previous year, and so, different layers of their lives emerge on the same surface.
The photo project is a memory capsule of Wang’s life with her son. But even more so, it is a statement, a protest, against the “inflexible stereotypes which have traditionally been held towards Motherhood.”
“Motherhood is a long-term process with a complex weaving of experiences”, Wang explains. “This wholeness and complexity cannot be expressed solely by the generally accepted saccharine image of Mother and Child, nor by the other extreme.”
'The Mother as a Creator' by Annie Wang, 2001-2020 and going on.
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