Roundtable

The Rest Is History

The father of Central Park, a new kind of museum, and an interactive Melville story.

By Angela Serratore

Friday, October 23, 2015

Subway construction workers, c. 1910, New York City. Library of Congress.

• Why were subways constructed with more speed a hundred years ago? “For better and for worse, it was easier to launch a major construction project before there were labor and safety regulations in place. While newer tunnels may not seem dramatically different from their predecessors, the built environment and social conditions that make them possible have dramatically shifted.” (Atlas Obscura)

• A brief history of books bound in human skin. (Mental Floss)

• Who was that mysterious woman at the center of the Salem Witch Trials? “We know her only as Tituba. She belonged to Samuel Parris, the minister in whose household the witchcraft erupted; his daughter and niece were the first to convulse. Although she was officially charged with having practiced witchcraft on four Salem girls between January and March, we do not know precisely why Tituba was accused.” (Smithsonian)

• Stories from and about Orson Welles at the end of his career. (Bookforum)

• The accomplishments of Frederick Law Olmsted, founder of landscape architecture. “During the 1840s, New York City was flooded by somewhere between a million and a million and a half immigrants, mainly Irish and German, who were largely unaccustomed to living in a dense, heterogeneous urban setting. Olmsted grasped how a park like Birkenhead could serve New York as a vast outdoor classroom for mass acculturation, where uneducated newcomers would be on an equal footing with the established citizenry and observe modes of improving behavior—in dress, deportment, and leisure pursuits—that they otherwise might not encounter.” (New York Review of Books)

• Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, annotated for the Internet age. (Slate)

• A new book proposes a radical overhaul of the way curators and historians present historic house museums to the public. “‘House museums are a difficult issue,’ says Andrew Dolkart, a professor and the director of the historic preservation program at Columbia University. ‘Some house museums are moribund places.’ While some historic house museums still generate interest, Dolkart says that a lot of them have lost popularity, grown stale, or been neglected altogether.” (Curbed)