The Dispatch Edition #2: Pittsburgh, Lord of the Flies & Drowned Villages

Welcome to Edition #2 of The Dispatch.

Hello,

Jordan here, the Creative Director at Unseen Histories.

Welcome to Edition #2 of The Dispatch, our free email roundup of long-form pieces, previews, interviews, pictures and more published on Unseen Histories; curated in one place for you to read at your leisure.

You can read previous editions in our archive.

For compliancy, if you don’t wish to hear from us again, you can find an unsubscribe link at the bottom every email, but I hope you’ll find The Dispatch a welcome addition to your inbox.

Many thanks for reading,

– Jordan Acosta, Creative Director, Unseen Histories

Headlines

The latest from Unseen Histories –

Travelling around Japan in olden times was complicated by the shoguns' prohibition of wheeled transport, excepting the carts that were used to carry goods.

This meant that ordinary people, like the seventeenth-century poet, Matsuo Basho, were obliged to walk or make use of palaquins or some other colourful contraption.

In this piece Lesley Downer, an expert of Japanese culture and history and the author of The Shortest History of Japan and On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, explains how an advanced society sought to move without wheels.

Jordan’s Pick –
The history of feudal Japan and its violent transition marking the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate into the Meiji era holds endless fascination for me, and Lesley Downer’s excellent piece on travel across the various domains during this long period of Japanese history is no exception.

Martha Dodd, the daughter of a history professor from Chicago, was living a frivolous life as the 1930s began. Two ambitions drove her. The first was to seek freedom, the second was to be recognised as a writer.

In 1933 she was wrenched out of this existence when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her father as the US Ambassador to Nazi Germany.

Professor Dodd asked for permission to bring his high spirited daughter to Berlin with him. And so began, as Brendan McNally describes in this feature, a 'traitor's odyssey'.

Ever since its publication in 1954, William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, has retained a powerful presence in English literature.

In his allegorical debut, Golding portrays a nightmarish vision of humanity gone astray. The story follows the experiences of a group of British children who find themselves stranded on a deserted island.

The inspiration for the troubling events that ensue, Dr Nicola Presley argues here, can be found in Golding's own wartime experiences.

Bookshelf

Previews, excerpts, and more from the very best published history books –

A deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past, Shadowlands tells the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate, animating the people who lived, dreamed and died there and uncovering how their disappearances explain why Britain looks the way it does today. 

From an Orkney settlement buried in sand five thousand years ago to a medieval city mouldering beneath the waves of the North Sea, Britain's landscape is scarred with the haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes. 

Jordan’s Pick –
It’s easy to think of the United Kingdom as just that: a unified legal and political entity with shared values. However, the reality of political rule of its many regions and peoples over the course of recorded history remains deeply complicated; and often brutal. Writer and historian Matthew Green shares a darker aspect of Britain's landscape, ‘scarred with the haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes.’ The Welsh village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley is yet another casualty of political force; a tragic erasure of Welsh heritage in the face of heavy resistance, still in living memory.

Back Page

Stories from the Unseen Histories’ archives –

Union Major General Burnside's failed invasion of the city of Fredericksburg, between the 11th and 15th of December, 1862, heralded a turning point in the American Civil War. Unseen Histories presents illustrated eyewitness accounts alongside remastered contemporaneous pictures taken in the era.

After the pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, Union morale slowly began to build. President Abraham Lincoln, having issued the Emancipation Proclamation just mere days following the Battle of Antietam, needed the Union Army to further take the fight to the rebels in Virginia.

Few things seem as settled and secure as our picture of Santa Claus. He is the jolly old man with the flowing white beard who sweeps the skies on Christmas Eve in his jingling sleigh.

Contrary to popular belief, Fred Mizen’s classic Red Santa Claus featured in Coca-Cola’s advertising from the 1930s continues a long tradition of portrayals of the modern day Father Christmas.

Snapshot

Our picks from the picture archives, remastered –

Jordan’s Pick–
One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of restoring and colorizing public domain photographs is an opportunity to uncover a lost piece of history; in this case, a street of houses which no longer exist, framed against the backdrop of a steelworks (which also no longer exists). I have never been to Pittsburgh, but I did live in England’s own steel city, Sheffield, for many years; the industrial backdrop and workers’ houses inhabiting the hills are a familiar sight.

Triangulating the exact location took a great deal of research, unravelled and contextualised by this brilliant piece of social history by our editor, Peter Moore. It is my hope that every piece I’ve worked on comes with a similar uncovering of its history – if you’ve enjoyed reading the piece, do consider buying a print. Each sale goes straight into producing more features for Unseen Histories, which is made available, for free.

You can support Unseen Histories by purchasing an Archival Giclée Art Print via our webstore. Thank you for your support.

Op-ed

More from around the web –

It was unfashionable, unsophisticated and, as non-British guests regularly complained, unwelcoming. Its dinners were boiled to within an inch of remaining solid (proper English style), its dance floor sagged and the overall atmosphere as stuffy and strait-laced as the colonials who formed the bulk of its boiled-potato clientele.
– Paul French

The Dyfi valley sits on the southernmost reach of Snowdonia. The valley straddles the River Dyfi, which starts high up on Aran Fawddwy, then weaves its way through the valley getting wider until it meets the Irish Sea in a large estuary at Aberdyfi. The valley is a Unesco biosphere, meaning it is an area where conservation protections and sustainable economic development policies are in place.
– David J Shaw

At the bottom of segment 445437_495437, there might be the beginning of διατροπή, a word found in other Herculaneum papyri that would mean something like “confusion, agitation, or disgust.” Similarly, in segment 20241108120732, the sequence τυγχαν may be the beginning of the verb τυγχάνω: “to happen,” or perhaps “not to happen.”
– Vesuvius Challenge

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
― Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning, January 1993

Thanks for reading The Dispatch by Unseen Histories. In the run-up to the holidays, an upcoming house move and a as-yet-unannounced interview. Edition #3 will be published week beginning January 6, 2025. You can read previous editions in our archive.