MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD AND DAVID PECK TODD
Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd co-edited the 1st volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The Queen Anne style house at 90 Spring Street on Amherst Common was constructed during 1886-1887, across the street from its present location, for Mabel and her husband David Peck Todd, a professor of astronomy with syphilis. They had acquired land from Austin Dickinson but would need to sell the house in 1898 following a legal wrangle with Lavinia Dickinson over the contents of her brother’s will. None of this, of course, had anything at all to do with who was in bed with who. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1855
March 19, Monday: David Peck Todd was born in Lake Ridge, New York.
The temporary vehicular suspension bridge which had been thrown across the chasm of the Niagara River in 1848, which had had to be removed, was replaced in a form strengthened by wooden trusses for the passage of railway trains. (These wooden trusses would be replaced with steel trusses in 1880.)
A little more detail on this: The chasm of the Niagara River had for many years prevented connection of New York Central tracks with the Great Western Railway of Canada. The solution had to be a railway suspension structure, but of a magnitude never previously attempted. A company had formed for that purpose with Ellet as their engineer. When the main effort began, there were disagreements and Ellet left the project. In 1851 John Augustus Roebling had been invited to submit plans and estimates.
(While all this was going on, another railway suspension bridge had been being constructed by the Roebling firm, across the Kentucky River on the line of the Southern Railroad leading from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. The gorge of that river in that region is deeper and wider than the gorge of the Niagara, necessitating a clear span of no less than 1,224 feet. The anchorage and stone towers had rapidly been completed, the necessary plates and saddles hoisted up the towers; most of the cable wire delivered, as also the material for the superstructure, the girder principle adopted there being essentially different from that carried out in the Niagara Bridge since no floor for vehicles was required in that case; suddenly, however, the finances of the railway company had collapsed and the building of that stupendous bridge, already well advanced, had immediately stopped, as well as work on the railroad — and has never since been renewed.)
Construction of the Niagara span, however, had been uninterrupted even during the coldest Canada winters and in this month the 1st locomotive and train crossed the new 825-foot span. A railroad train hanging from wires! This clear span was not merely longer than the Britannia rail bridge over the Menai Strait in North 1 Wales, it was twice as long, and it was very light, using only /6th the weight of materials in proportion to its length. Its 4 wire cables were each 10 inches in diameter and hung from the cliffs in such as manner as to resist deck uplift from the winds. The bridge had two decks, a lower one devoted to vehicles and an upper one for HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD trains. The decks were connected by struts and diagonal tension rods so as to create a continuous, hollow suspended1 girder stiff enough to support rolling load. Inclined cable stays above its top deck further stiffened the bridge. John Augustus Roebling had positioned the bridge over the rapids of the river rather than above the falls themselves, slightly downstream, which were then being touted to America by George William Curtis – he claimed to be able to hear Niagara roar “FORWARD!”– as a natural USer symbol of our “irresistible progress.”2
“No one is afraid to cross.”
We may speculate that John Augustus Roebling’s claim “No one is afraid to cross” needed to be issued simply because hundreds of people had fallen to their deaths five years earlier when a suspension bridge had collapsed in France. Of all the people who would pass over this bridge, it would be Mark Twain (of course) who would have the most apposite remark:
You drive over the Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomfiting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.
March 19. A fine clear and warm day for the season. Launched my boat. P. M. — Paddled to Fair Haven Pond. Very pleasant and warm, when the wind lulls and the water is perfectly smooth. I make the voyage 1. The structure would be referred to as a suspension structure, although it was not like the Golden Gate bridge and really classifies instead as a cable-stayed span, similar to the one over a ship canal east of Houston TX. 2. For some reason this is reminiscent of the concluding scene in the movie “Doctor Zhivago.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD without gloves. The snow of March 14th is about gone, and the landscape is once more russet. The thick ice of the meadows lies rotting on each side of the stream, white and almost soft as snow. In many places it extends still over the shallower parts of the river. As I paddle or pole up the side of the stream, the muddy bottom looks dark and dead, and no greenness is observed but on a close scrutiny. The unsightly dead leaf-stalks of the pontederia cover it in irregular whorls covered with filth. The black stems of the polygonums here and there still rise above the surface. But on a closer scrutiny you detect here and there bits of the evergreen ranunculus (commonly floating), the cress, some reddish pads of nuphar expanded close to the bottom, and a few points of its closely rolled, unexpanded leaves, also some radical greenness in the pontederia. And what is that fresh green oblong, perhaps spatulate, leaf one and a half inches long, making little rosettes on a running root, in one place just this side the ash above the railroad [It is forget-me-not.]? There is this radical greenness to correspond with that on the land. The muskrat-houses are for the most part flatted down, even below the present level of the water (at least five feet and more below the truss), probably by the water and ice a month ago. I see but three or four well repaired. One new one at least, however, on a piece of meadow lately lodged. It is to be inferred that they have not the same need of them as in the fall. Already Farrar is out with his boat looking for spring cranberries, and here comes, slowly paddling, the dark-faced trapper Melvin with his dog and gun. [See him out here the first boating day next year also.]. I see a poor drowned gray rabbit floating, back up as in life, but three quarters submerged. I see a hawk circling over a small maple grove through this calm air, ready to pounce on the first migrating sparrow that may have arrived. As I paddle or push along by the edge of the thick ice which lines the shore, sometimes pushing against it, I observe that it is curiously worn by the water into this form: the dotted
line being the water's edge. The water has eaten into the edge of the ice just where its surface meets it (which may be one and a half inches beneath the top), four or five inches or more, leaving a sharp projecting eave above, while the lower part, five or six inches thick, being preserved hard by the water, slopes off to a very sharp edge from one to even four feet from the upper. The undulations made by my boat and paddle, striking under this eave, make a constant sound as I pass. I am surprised to find that the river has not yet worn through Fair Haven Pond. Getting up a weed with the paddle close to the shore under water, where five or six inches deep, I found a fishworm in the mud. Here and there, floating or on the edge of the ice, I see small pieces of nuphar root, with a few rolled, pointed leaf-buds, probably gnawed off by the muskrats. The greater part of the Wood meadow this side Clamshell has been lifted up and settled again, and it now sounds hollow and sinks under my steps. The wind has got round more to the east now, at 5 P. M., and is raw and disagreeable, and produces a bluish haze or mist at once in the air. It is early for such a phenomenon. Smelled muskrats in two places, and saw two. Saw, by their white droppings on the bottom, where ducks had fed. I hear at last the tchuck tchuck of a blackbird and, looking up, see him flying high over the river southwesterly, — the wrong way, — in great haste to reach somewhere; and when I reach my landing I hear my first bluebird, somewhere about Cheney's trees by the river. I hear him out of the blue deeps, but do not yet see his blue body. He comes with a warble. Now first generally heard in the village. Not a duck do I see. It is perhaps too bright and serene a day for them.
November: The Dickinsons moved back into their home at 280 Main Street. Soon Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson would begin construction of his home “The Evergreens” at 214 Main Street, which would be connected with Emily Dickinson’s home by a board fence and a 300-foot path.
Louisa Whitman, Walt’s mother, sold the house she had purchased in May at 99 Ryerson Street on the outskirts of Brooklyn, where the family had lived while Walt Whitman, unemployed, had been putting the finishing touches to the first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS.
During this month and the following one, some 2,000 pro-slavery men, self-proclaimed “Border Ruffians,” would come to camp around the fledgling town of Lawrence on the Wakarusa River (really a creek) in the Kansas Territory. After an anti-slavery man had been gunned down while attempting to cross the sentry line of the Border Ruffians, several Free State women, Mrs. Lois Brown (helpmate of the editor of the Kansas Herald of Freedom) and Mrs. Margaret Wood (helpmate of an organizer of anti-slavery immigration) would conceal sacks of gunpowder under the fronts and bustles of their dresses, and insert bars of lead into their stockings, and –pretending to be heavily gravid– ride in wagons into the town in order to arm its defenders. This was the so-called Wakarusa War, which some regard as the 1st military engagement of the Civil War. The engagement would end when the governor of the territory formally recognized the militia that was being organized by the Free State settlers. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1856
November 10, Monday: Mabel Loomis was born to Mr. and Mrs. Eben J. Loomis. Per her account in “The Thoreau Family Two Generations Ago,” Thoreau Society Booklet XIII (1958), page 14: My memory goes back a long way, but it does not quite reach that day in Cambridge when my mother invited Henry Thoreau to come to the house to see her wonderful new baby. He came in, boldly enough, and so remained until, with mistaken zeal, the nurse placed me in his arms, doubtless thinking it would be an especial treat to the shy recluse. Far from it — he did not know which end was which! My terrified mother caught sight of two wildly waving little pink feet sticking out at the top, poor little head quite lost in the lower invisible end of the bundle. After one agonized moment the bewildered man, with a groan of relief, relinquished me to the giver. Apparently babies bore no large part in Henry’s scheme of life. Henry Thoreau was an especial friend of my father and mother. They spent the first two or three summers after their marriage in 1853 at his mother’s house in Concord. One afternoon the three were taking a quiet rowing trip on the placid Concord River, a diversion to which they were greatly devoted when, as they were approaching a fine old oak on the river bank, Henry ceased rowing, stood up suddenly in the tiny skiff, looked upon into the huge tree with sometime akin to adoration and said, as one inspired, “Why, there is enough in that tree alone to keep one man happily busy all his life!” His face was alight with fervour as he went on to tell of the rich reward awaiting him who would take the oak-tree for his lifework. “The whole story of creation and all of natural history is in that one tree! Why does anyone want to take long journeys to study anything? It is all here.” My mother was deeply impressed by his shining face turned upward, and often spoke of that rare evening when she had caught an instant glimpse of all futurity.... He and my father were both interested in Indian relics still to be found all over the country. My father once said to him as they walked along a country road, that it was unfortunate these reminders of the past were being gathered up by the general run of persons neither interested in them nor properly instructed. “Oh, well, there are always plenty left,” said Henry, stooping over at the moment to pick up a perfect stone arrow-head. During one of their happy and prolific summers with him, my parents became acquainted with Rowse [Samuel Worcester Rowse], who was also spending some weeks at the Thoreaus’, drawing in crayon the portrait of Henry, although to “sit for a portrait” was as much outside his plan as holding a friend’s baby right end up. Sometimes the artist would leave the table abruptly in the midst of a meal, excusing himself afterward by explaining to his hostess small, vivid, and alert Mrs. Thoreau — that a sudden turn of Henry’s head had given him new insight. He had just seen an expression cross his face which must be recorded else one aspect of his mind and changing thought would be lost. Rowse would rush to his easel to put on paper at once the glimpse into Henry’s real personality. That portrait, many times reproduced, was the only one which his intimate old friends cared to keep as the permanent representation of the shy HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD naturalist, and it became the one most liked by his family, until all had died and there is no one left to judge.... Mrs. Thoreau —a noteworthy housekeeper— used to tell us gleefully that Henry was by no means so utterly indifferent to the good things of life as he liked to believe himself, and that regularly every week of his self-enforced retirement he came home to eat a deliciously prepared dinner which their old family cook took pains to have as perfect as she knew how, and which he very evidently enjoyed to the full after his abstemious days at Walden. My mother’s humourous account of Henry’s intense satisfaction in coming home for those wonderful dinners during the “hermitage” was a new angle of the naturalist’s life and likings. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1881
The poet Emily Dickinson, who had never bothered to read the poetry of Walt Whitman, at this point wrote to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, anent a recent series of structure fires, in such manner as to indicate to us that very likely she had been reading WALDEN: The fire-bells are oftener now, almost, than the church-bells. Thoreau would wonder which did the most harm. This incidental appeal to the image of the ringing of the parish bells in the 2d chapter,
WALDEN: If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, –or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself.
has been used, by Thomas W. Ford, to legitimate the idea that the author of the convention-mocking deathbed poem “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died” had been taking Henry Thoreau’s “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” very seriously indeed, and in real earnest had been seeking “to determine for herself whether the Transcendental harmony would be revealed if she held an undiverted gaze on the fact.” I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,—and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
It was in about this year that Emily’s lawyer brother Austin Dickinson, who was in his early 50s, began his torrid adulterous affair with Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, the much younger wife of Amherst College astronomy professor David Peck Todd.
This affair would destroy Austin’s marriage with Mrs. Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and transform his home “Evergreens” into a house of scandal in the town. Refer to AUSTIN AND MABEL, by Polly Longsworth (1984). HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD Incidentally, here is the above image, which was exposed in early 1848, unretouched and uncropped: HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1883
Kahlil Gibran (Jubran Kahleel Jubran) was born in Bsharri- — a town in what is now northern Lebanon that once upon a time had been surrounded by the famed “Cedars of Lebanon,” near the “Holy Valley” of the Maronite Christians that has since become so productive of the very highest quality hashish and opium. His father Kahlil Gibran was a clerk in his uncle’s apothecary shop until on account of gambling debts he needed to become an enforcer for Raji Bey, a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. As a child he would sustain an injury to his left shoulder, which would leave it weak and semi-paralyzed.
Mabel Loomis Todd’s FOOTPRINTS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1890
Thomas Wentworth Higginson found a publisher for, and became a co-editor with Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd of, the 1st volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Then in the same year, a 2d volume of her poems was published. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1894
A STORY OF COURAGE, an account, written by Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop with her husband, of the Visitation convent at Georgetown.
Mabel Loomis Todd’s TOTAL ECLIPSES OF THE SUN and LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON 1830-1886. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1898
Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy’s CHTO TAKOYE ISKUSSTVO (WHAT IS ART?).
Mabel Loomis Todd’s CORONA AND CORONET. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1903
Percival Lowell insisted that through his telescope he had been able to make out that there were canals on Mars. We now know that he actually did see something: from the sketches he provided, and from his observation records, we can now conclude that he wasn’t deluding himself, he actually was seeing something. His telescope had been set up on such a manner that he was able to observe, in what he took to be the face of the remote planet, reflections of the blood vessels in the retina of his own observing eye.3 ASTRONOMY
3. In other words, if the man had had the wit to make one of his sketches while looking through his telescope with his head to one side, this whole episode would have been unnecessary — as he would have been able to notice that this rotation of his head rotated also the image that he was perceiving. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1904
Henry Adams’s MONT SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES.
Professor David Peck Todd supervised the establishment of the Amherst College Observatory.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1905
Percival Lowell published his 1st photographs of the famous canals of Mars.
Albert Einstein became able to explain the photoelectric effect on the basis of an assumption that light is a quantized phenomenon, occurring in packets. This was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, during which he would be authoring pioneering articles not only on the concept of the quantum of light but also on special relativity and on Brownian motion. His quanta of light would subsequently receive the name “photons.” HISTORY OF OPTICS
In Germany, Alfred Ploetz founded the Gesellschaft fuer Rassenhygiene. The high aptitude of the Jews and their outstanding role in the progress of mankind considering men like Jesus, Spinoza, Marx has to be kindly acknowledged without hesitation... All this Antisemitism is a flop which will vanish slowly in the light of scientific knowledge and a humane democracy.
„Die hohe Befähigung der Juden und ihre hervorragende Rolle in dem Entwicklungsprocess der Menschheit muss angesichts der Namen Jesus, Spinoza, Marx ohne Weiteres mit Freude anerkannt werden... Der ganze Antisemitismus ist ein Schlag in’s Wasser, dessen Wellenkreise in der Fluth der naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntniss und der humanen Demokratie langsam vergehen werden.“ (DIE TÜCHTIGKEIT UNSERER RASSE UND DER SCHUTZ DER SCHWACHEN: EIN VERSUCH ÜBER RASSENHYGIENE UND IHR VERHÄLTNIS ZU DEN HUMANEN IDEALEN, BESONDERS ZUM SOCIALISMUS, pages 141-2) EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1906
Kahlil Gibran’s SPIRIT BRIDES (`ARÁ’IS AL-MURÚJ) was published in New York in Arabic. Its realist approach to social problems such as oppression of women and religious hypocrisy creates a stir among the expatriate Arab intellectuals. He had an affair with the pianist Gertrude Barrie. Mabel Loomis Todd’s WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND. WITCHCRAFT HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1907
The Lowell Mars expedition to the Andes, organized by Professor David Peck Todd of Amherst College.
Alfred Russel Wallace’s IS MARS HABITABLE? debunked Percival Lowell’s conceit that Mars was inhabited by living beings who irrigated their crops by means of canals, by pointing out among other things that the polar caps of Mars probably consisted of frozen CO2 rather than of H2O. ASTRONOMY
P. Raymond described a Neolithic deposit in Saône-et-Loire in France, containing an axe and three fossil sea urchins. PALEONTOLOGY
The Mauer jaw was discovered in Germany. This would become the type specimen for Homo heidelbergensis (archaic Homo sapiens precursor to neanderthalensis).
By measuring the ratio of isotopes of uranium and lead in a mineral from Connecticut, Bertram Boltwood established that the mineral had formed 410,000,000 years ago (the estimate would later change to 265,000,000 years, but this experiment had laid the groundwork for our radiometric dating techniques). THE SCIENCE OF 1907 HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1909
Little John von Neumann was becoming fascinated with the nature of numbers and logic at an extraordinarily early age. Even at the age of 6, when he saw his mother staring aimlessly in front of her, the prodigy inquired “What are you calculating?”
Professor David Peck Todd had such an intense interest in life on Mars –on the surface of which he had persuaded himself that he could perceive canals created by living beings– that he planned a trip in a balloon to an altitude sufficient to intercept “Hertzian waves” being transmitted by the technological civilization on the red planet. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1909
May 2, Sunday: The New York Times reported that the plan of Professor David Peck Todd of Amherst College was to ascend to the highest possible altitude that could be reached in a balloon, carrying with him radio reception equipment, in order to detect faint radio signals emanating from Mars at a point at which the orbit of that planet was at its closest approach to the orbit of Earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1910
John S. Harrison detected, in THE TEACHERS OF EMERSON (New York), that there was a continuity between Ralph Cudworth’s “plastic nature” and Waldo Emerson’s definition of art.
Mabel Loomis Todd’s A CYCLE OF SUNSETS and POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1912
Mabel Loomis Todd’s TRIPOLI THE MYSTERIOUS.
At the age of 31, John Gneisenau Neihardt began work on his A CYCLE OF THE WEST: THE SONG OF THREE FRIENDS, THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS, THE SONG OF JED SMITH, THE SONG OF THE INDIAN WARS, THE SONG OF THE MESSIAH. He would not complete this massive project until 1941. (Eventually, A CYCLE OF THE WEST would be described by Men and Women of Letters as “one of the 3,000 best books in the 3,000 years from Homer to Hemingway.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1917
University of Washington anatomist Victor Emmel developed an “in vitro” test for the sickle cell trait. MALARIA
In “The Structure and Development of the Plant Association,” Henry Gleason abandoned the ecological effort to describing vegetation in terms of associations and instead offered an understanding according to which the phenomena of vegetation depend upon each species considered severally.
D’Arcy Thompson suggested that shapes of different animals might result from changes to a common underlying body plan.
At the age of 62 Professor David Peck Todd of the Amherst department of astronomy was obliged to accept emeritus status. He would, however, continue his attempts to achieve radio contact with the Martians.
Stone tools discovered at Bir el Ater in eastern Algeria included triangular objects that might have been arrowheads or spear points. The tools would be dubbed Aterian but their age would be underestimated for decades. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1920
April 15, Thursday: A payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts resulted in Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick A. Parmenter being killed.
The New York Times reported that after “five years of planning” Emeritus Professor David Peck Todd of the Amherst department of astronomy would, during the forthcoming week, be carrying out his plan to make radio contact with the Martians. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1922
Emeritus Professor David Peck Todd of the Amherst department of astronomy was institutionalized as a victim of the final stage of syphilis, known as paresis. During his institutionalization he would attempt to alert us that the sun was about to split in two.
At its Newport Torpedo Station on what little of Goat Island4 in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island still remained above water level, the US Navy began work on its Mark 14 proximity torpedo, the brainchild of Ralph Waldo Christie. MARY DYER
4. The native name of Goat Island had been Nomsussmuc, and it had been purchased from its local occupiers as early as 1658. The 26 pirates hanged at Gravelly Point in Newport in 1723, between high and low water mark, had been buried on the beach here between high and low water mark. Fort Anne (name to be changed several times) had been built in 1700 and had been still the only fort in Rhode Island at outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Fort Wolcott had been constructed here in 1794. The navy had taken over the island in 1869 and the Naval Torpedo Station begun. The city of Newport would purchase what was left of the island in the 1960s. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1932
October 14, Friday: Mabel Loomis Todd died on the family’s Hog Island estate, in Maine. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1936
Annie Russell Marble, Richard Alsop, Joel Barlow, and Theodore Dwight. HARTFORD WITS I.E. JOHN TRUMBULL, LEMUEL HOPKINS, THEODORE DWIGHT, RICHARD ALSOP, DAVID HUMPHREYS, JOEL BARLOW AND OTHERS (Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut. Committee on Historical Publications. Publications. No. 59) and her EXCERPTS FROM THE LIFE OF ISAIAH THOMAS, EDUCATOR, HISTORIAN, PRINTER & PATRIOT; TAKEN FROM THE BOOK “FROM ’PRENTICE TO PATRON” (William Bradford).
All 333 acres of Hog Island in Muscongus Bay, Maine had been purchased by David and Mabel Loomis Todd over a period of decades during the early 1900s. Their daughter Dr. Millicent Todd Bingham, childless, in her will had offered the island as the Todd Wildlife Sanctuary, which in this year opened under the auspices of the National Audubon Society. Note that the towering coastal spruce stands of Hog Island and along the mouth of the Goose River are presumably artifacts of grazing: when these areas had begun to revert from cleared land to forest 100 to 150 years ago, they probably continued in use as pastureland. Sheep and cows, therefore, had preferentially browsed hardwood sprouts and seedlings, which has resulted in the pure conifer stands we see today. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1939
June 1, Thursday: When the submarine Thetis sank in Liverpool Bay, England, 99 perished. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS WORLD WAR II
LOST AT SEA
A brand-new Douglas DC-4 flew 40 passengers from Chicago to New York City, inaugurating service by that airframe between these population centers.
David Peck Todd died at the age of 84. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1958
Some materials prepared by Mabel Loomis Todd were printed by the Thoreau Society as a 23-page booklet THE THOREAU FAMILY TWO GENERATIONS AGO.
J. Golden Taylor’s NEIGHBOR THOREAU’S CRITICAL HUMOR (Logan UT: Utah State U Monograph Series) “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Taylor’s main purpose is “to identify Thoreau’s pervasive, serious humor and to show how it is the chief vehicle of his social criticism. Only in high-keyed figurative, hyperbolical humor could he achieve the intensity which would adequately convey the tragic irony he saw between man’s performance and potentiality” (5). Thoreau’s humor arises out of the unavoidable incongruity between what is and what ought to be. Humor is an indispensable tool for the sort of cultural work that Thoreau, the social critic, wants to do. This work is accomplished through the use of devices like understatement, whimsicality, irony, paradox, surprise, exaggeration, and “audacious indictment.” Taylor locates Thoreau in the Hebraic core of Puritan tradition, a style of humor much different from the Down East brand of humor so popular in Thoreau’s day. Taylor criticizes Lowell for the comparative insignificance and irrelevance of his rustic humor, and declares that Thoreau’s humor was “superior to any other humor being written during his lifetime in America.” Taylor compares Thoreau to Lincoln (an odd choice considering that Taylor wants to distance Thoreau from popular humor) in the sense that both are never more serious than when they are humorous. Part and parcel of Taylor’s argument is his conviction that Thoreau, contrary to popular conception, was no hermit or misanthropist, but took great pleasure in people. (Lane Stiles, Winter 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD
1982
MABEL LOOMIS TODD PAPERS.
John P. Demos’s ENTERTAINING SATAN: WITCHCRAFT AND THE CULTURE OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND (NY: Oxford UP) WITCHCRAFT
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: June 23, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD MRS. MABEL LOOMIS TODD the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with