It was one of Lenin’s more inspired insights that history always has the capacity to surprise. He was thinking mainly of political revolution, for as a revolutionary he had to be optimistic and hopeful in the darkest times in order to keep up the spirit of the faithful. Who could have forecast, in 1788, that within five years the French monarchy would be publicly obliterated and the destiny of France in the hands of Robespierre? No one.
But historians, and people who read history, quickly lose their capacity for surprise as, indeed,we all tend to in our private lives. We can be shocked and astonished by the breakup of the marriage of close friends, or an adolescent’s sudden flight and desertion of his family, and yet, within days, if not hours, we see incompatibilities we had not noticed or instabilities we had shrugged off as having little importance. We settle for causes, accept the event as inevitable, and forget completely the shock of surprise we initially felt.
—Sometime, during the 1590′s, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans started experimenting with these lenses. They put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery. The object near the end of the tube appeared to be greatly enlarged, much larger than any simple magnifying glass could achieve by itself!
Their first microscopes were more of a novelty than a scientific tool since maximum magnification was only around 9X and the images were somewhat blurry. Although no Jansen microscopes survived, an instrument made for Dutch royalty was described as being composed of “3 sliding tubes, measuring 18 inches long when fully extended, and two inches in diameter”. The microscope was said to have a magnification of 3x when fully closed, and 9x when fully extended.
It was Antony Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a Dutch draper and scientist, and one of the pioneers of microscopy who in the late 17th century became the first man to make and use a real microscope. —Read More:http://www.visioneng.com/history-of-the-microscope.php image:http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2008/08/21/vintage-microscopes/
For the historian, who never, or very rarely, experiences the events about which they write, there is no initial shock, no immediate sense of surprise. By their very training a hunter of causes, they prefer not only to reduce chance to a minimum, but to plot the tides that sweep people and societies to their destined ends, forgetful that tides can suddenly break old barriers in a matter of hours and sweep through to new channels. And yet, unless we grasp that the historical process can always take men and women and their societies by surprise, we shall fail to understand our own immediate dangers, or, indeed, our opportunities.
—Whack-a-doo-a-whack-a-doo! Bill Haley is one of the most influential figures in rock-n-roll history. But he doesn’t seem to make it onto the Mt. Rockmore carvings like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Perhaps it was his relatively senior age of 30 when he recorded Rock Around The Clock, or his tartan dinner jacket or his relatively tame demeanor. One thing is for sure: Bill Haley was the first white musician to consciously record a rock-n-roll record with his 1953 recording of his original tune, Crazy, Man, Crazy. 1953! His groundbreaking recording of Rock Around The Clock came out the next year in 1954—Read More:http://ontheflip-side.blogspot.ca/2010/02/song-of-week-razzle-dazzle-bill-haley.html
There are some movements that are strange, unpredictable, and even when they surge into social dominance, not- if one is an honest student of the situation- easy to interpret and explain. This perhaps is most profoundly true of religion. The success of both Christianity and Islam borders on the miraculous, but their victories have been so large and so lasting that it is hard to grasp just how extraordinary their successes were. A small, heretical Jewish sect- inner directed, not wishing for entanglement with political power- a cult that for several generations attracted the lower classes of society rather than the rich and powerful, is a strange beginning for one of the most institutionalized, authoritarian churches the world has known.
—Martha Rosler.—Her works, which include such pieces as Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-1972), and the Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975 are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum —-Read More:http://artonair.org/show/martha-rosler
Even stranger, perhaps, is the quick acceptance of martyrdom by the early Christians, for they lived in a society that was not only tolerant of belief but for centuries had placed intense value on the individual life in this world. No less surprising- indeed, more so- is that a world religion that could sweep to Indonesia in the East and to Spain in the West should flare up out of a tribal conflict in Arabia and, in an extraordinarily brief time, smash the polytheistic religions that had held communities together for centuries, replacing them with a simple, austere monotheism.
—Artist
Marten de Vos (1532–1603)
Title
English: The Marriage at Cana
Date between 1596 and 1597
Medium oil on panel—source:WIKI
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