Charles Darwin to Toni Morrison, Jeremy DeSilva Looks at Our Need to Move  Charles Darwin was an introvert.  Granted, he spent almost five years traveling the world on the Beagle recording observations that produced some of the most important scientific insights ever made.  But he was in his twenties then, embarking on a privileged 19th-century naturalist’s version of backpacking around Europe during a gap year.  After returning home in 1836, he never again stepped foot outside the British Isles.  He avoided conferences, parties, and large gatherings.  They made him anxious and exacerbated an illness that plagued much of his adult life.  Instead, he passed his days at Down House, his quiet home almost twenty miles southeast of London, doing most of his writing in the study.  He occasionally entertained a visitor or two but preferred to correspond with the world by letter.  He installed a mirror in his study so he could glance up from his work to see the mailman coming up the road—the 19th-century version of hitting the refresh button on email.  Darwin’s best thinking, however, was not done in his study.  It was done outside, on a lowercase d–shaped path on the edge of his property.  Darwin called it the Sandwalk.  Today, it is known as Darwin’s thinking path.  https://lithub.com/on-the-link-between-great-thinking-and-obsessive-walking/ 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz  is an American children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow, originally published by the George M. Hill Company in May 1900.  It has since seen several reprints, most often under the title The Wizard of Oz, which is the title of the popular 1902 Broadway musical adaptation as well as the iconic 1939 live-action film.  The story chronicles the adventures of a young farm girl named Dorothy Gale in the magical Land of Oz after she and her pet dog Toto are swept away from their home in Kansas by a cyclone.  The book is one of the best-known stories in American literature and has been widely translated.  The Library of Congress has declared it "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale."  Its groundbreaking success, and that of the Broadway musical adapted from the novel led Baum to write thirteen additional Oz books that serve as official sequels to the first story.  In January 1901, George M. Hill Company completed printing the first edition, a total of 10,000 copies, which quickly sold out.  It had sold three million copies by the time it entered the public domain in 1956.  Jocelyn Burdick, former Democratic U.S. Senator from North Dakota and daughter of Baum's niece, Magdalenda (Carpenter) Birch, has reported that her mother was likely the inspiration for Dorothy.  Baum spent "considerable time at the Сarpenter homestead [...] and became very attached to Magdalena."  Burdick has reported many similarities between her mother's homestead and the farm of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em.  Another story, which is better documented, is that the character was named after Baum's niece, who was also named Dorothy.  She died in Bloomington, Illinois at the age of 5 months.  She is buried at Evergreen Cemetery (Bloomington, Illinois).  Her gravestone has a statue of the character Dorothy placed next to it.  Local legend has it that Oz, also known as the Emerald City, was inspired by a prominent castle-like building in the community of Castle Park near Holland, Michigan, where Baum lived during the summer.  The yellow brick road was derived from a road at that time paved by yellow bricks, located in Peekskill, New York, where Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy.  Baum scholars often refer to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (the "White City") as an inspiration for the Emerald City.  Other legends suggest that the inspiration came from the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, California.  Baum was a frequent guest at the hotel and had written several of the Oz books there.  In a 1903 interview with The Publishers' Weekly, Baum said that the name "OZ" came from his file cabinet labeled "O–Z".  Some critics have suggested that Baum may have been inspired by Australia, a relatively new country at the time of the book's original publication.  Australia is often colloquially spelled or referred to as "Oz".  Furthermore, in Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy gets back to Oz as the result of a storm at sea while she and Uncle Henry are traveling by ship to Australia.  Like Australia, Oz is an island continent somewhere to the west of California with inhabited regions bordering on a great desert.  One might imagine that Baum intended Oz to be Australia, or perhaps a magical land in the center of the great Australian desert.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz 

"A tube, a car, a revolving fan!  Little more is required!"  Such was the proclamation made by Alfred Ely Beach in 1870 when considering how to efficiently transport New York City's burgeoning legion of commuters.  Beach was describing the components necessary to move people from point A to point B by putting them in underground tubes propelled by means of air pressure generated by huge fans.  Writing in Scientific American in 1849, Beach first proposed a horse-drawn subway to run under Broadway in Manhattan.  At the 1867 American Institute Fair, held at the Fourteenth Street Armory, Beach unveiled his findings in the form of a laminated wooden tube, six feet in diameter and one hundred feet in length, that could accommodate a car holding ten persons.  The car would in turn be shot through the tube by means of a fan making two hundred revolutions per minute.  Beach's real intention at the Fair was to generate excitement over his proposed cure for New York City's desperately strained transportation system:  a pneumatic subway capable of zipping passengers to various destinations beneath the metropolis.  In February, 1870, one year after the surreptitious construction project began, Alfred Ely Beach revealed his secret to a dumbfounded public.  Clean, quiet, brightly lit, and smooth riding, its station equipped with a grand piano, chandeliers and a goldfish-stocked fountain, Beach's subway created a sensation in New York.  In its first year of operation 400,000 visitors paid twenty-five cents to enjoy the block-long ride between Warren Street and Murray Street, and back again.  Beach responded to the public's adoration of his brainchild by submitting a bill to the New York State Legislature to extend his line all the way uptown to Central Park--a distance of some five miles.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/nyunderground-secret-subway/ 

Gavin MacLeod, a sitcom veteran who played seaman “Happy” Haines on “McHale’s Navy,” Murray on “Mary Tyler Moore” and the very different, vaguely patrician Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat,” died May 29, 2021 at the age of 90.  MacLeod played a relatively minor character on ABC hit “McHale’s Navy,” starring Ernest Borgnine, but as newswriter Murray Slaughter, he was certainly one of the stars of “Mary Tyler Moore,” appearing in every one of the classic comedy’s 168 episodes during its 1970-77 run on CBS.  Murray was married to Marie (Joyce Bulifant) but was in love with Moore’s Mary Richards.  His desk was right next to Mary’s in the WJM newsroom, so MacLeod was frequently in the shot during the sitcom, and Murray, like all the other characters, was richly developed—a hallmark of MTM shows.  Carmel Dagan  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/gavin-macleod-love-boat-captain-185739159.html 

Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in May 1885 was attended by some two million people.  This show of art and archival documents at the Panthéon--the site of the writer’s tomb--considers the importance of the event in the history of the Third Republic, which had been founded only 15 years before.  The display explores the writer’s life and the key themes in his work, and includes his own drawings; it runs until 26 September 2021. Find out more from the Panthéon’s website.  https://www.apollo-magazine.com/victor-hugo-liberty-at-the-pantheon/ 

Victor Hugo is France’s most published author to date, while internationally, he is known for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables, both set in Paris.  The enduring box-office success of Les Mis, both at the theatre and recently on the big screen, would not have displeased the man who, unabashed, had his furniture emblazoned with the self-created motto, Ego Hugo!  Hugo’s funeral, on May 31 1885, was the biggest ever organised in France, surpassing those of monarchs, attended by two million people.  Thirza Vallois  Read much more at https://www.francetoday.com/archives/the_paris_of_victor_hugo/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2371  May 31, 2021