Latest news with #BridgemanImages
National Geographic
2 days ago
- General
- National Geographic
Sinful. Poisonous. Stinky? How tomatoes overcame their wicked reputation
Tomatoes were reviled for centuries—so how did we come to embrace them? This small New Jersey town claims to have played a major role. Once called the "poison apple," tomatoes were thought to be supernatural and sinful—especially because of their red color. Photograph by The Maas Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images While Salem, Massachusetts gets all the hype for its infamous 1692 witch trials, there's another city called Salem—this time in New Jersey—that's tied to a rather legendary tale where tomatoes were the enemy. (Witch hunts were common in the 17th century. Here's what made Salem infamous.) There are many myths and legends about how the tomato was once seen as the so-called 'poison apple,' but how it lost its evil reputation and became a beloved piece of produce is a complicated story. According to historian Andrew F. Smith, author of The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery, the tale involves a farmer and horticulturist who went to brazen lengths to prove the tomato was safe to eat. Aristocrats would fall ill or die when they consumed tomatoes—but it was the plates they were eating on that posed the problem. Photograph by O. F. Cook, Nat Geo Image Collection In 1544, Italian herbalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli classified the tomato as both a nightshade and a mandrake—a category of food known as an aphrodisiac. The tomato was often referred to as a 'love apple' and kept at arm's length. Later in 1597, prominent English herbalist and botanist John Gerard called tomatoes 'corrupt' and 'of rank and stinking savor' in his book, Herbal. This statement essentially sealed the tomato's fate in Great Britain and later the American colonies. By the 18th century, the tomato was nicknamed the 'poison apple' because aristocrats would fall ill or die after consuming them. But it wasn't the consumption of the tomato that triggered their illness or death. Instead, it was the plates the wealthy used to dine on—specifically the pewter plate. These plates contained high levels of lead that, when mixed with the natural acidity of the tomato, caused lead poisoning. (How the simple fork almost tore apart the fabric of society.) In his book, Smith notes that some of the earliest references of tomatoes in American colonies were in the late 18th century, but people were growing the fruit out of curiosity, not eating them. 'For those who came to America in the colonial period, it just wasn't on their agenda,' says Smith. The rise in tomatoes with myth and folklore According to Smith, large-scale immigration to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—particularly from Italians, who brought with them the invention of pizza—contributed to the eventual consumption of tomatoes. (Think you know who invented pizza? These foods have surprising global origins.) But it was Robert Gibbon Johnson, a farmer and horticulturist from Salem, New Jersey, who had a lasting impression on the general public's opinion of tomatoes. According to legend, Johnson stood on the Salem's courthouse steps in 1820, eating a basket full of tomatoes for all the public to see. When he didn't die of poison, word spread that tomatoes were safe to eat. Despite there being no record of Johnson's actions on the courthouse steps in Salem, that didn't stop this New Jersey town from playing along with the tale. Photograph by Justin Locke, Nat Geo Image Collection Smith did find evidence that Johnson actually grew tomatoes, so 'it's certainly possible that his work encouraged others to consume,' he says. But Smith notes that a lot of other folks were growing tomatoes at the time, so this isn't the sole reason the fruit became popular. By the 1830s, an array of tomato cookbooks and recipes were being published in America. Rich Guido, executive director and librarian of the Salem County Historical Society, believes this tall tale is typical of a small rural town that's passionate about their local history, even if the story may have a lot of half-truths. 'We've always had a connection with history and being a rural agricultural community—that's why the tomato story really comes into play,' says Guido. How the tomato lives on in Salem Although there is no physical evidence or documentation of Johnson's tomato trial, that hasn't stopped people from embracing this tale. Sickler eventually recounted the story to Harry Emerson Wildes, an American sociologist and historian, who wrote about it in his 1940 book, The Delaware. Stewart Holbrook added further embellishment to the event in his 1946 book, Lost Men of American History. On January 30, 1949, CBS radio gave the narrative even more notoriety when it broadcast a reenactment of Johnson famously eating a tomato on the show, You Are There; Sickler acted as a historical consultant for the show. In New Jersey's Salem, from 1989 till 2022, the town held the Salem Tomato Festival, where locals and visitors would watch reenactments of Johnson's event, wear costumes, and, of course, eat tomatoes. However, according to Guido, the festival was put on hold when it was revealed that Johnson was a slaveholder to Amy Hester Reckless. As to why Salem and New Jersey embraced this legendary tale as the obscure history of the Garden State, Curtis Harker, records manager at the County of Salem, thinks it's the love of the Salem tomato—which also involved a certain ketchup company at one point. (How Henry Heinz used ketchup to improve food safety.) 'It's a combination of the love of the huge flavorful Salem tomato plopped on a hamburger, Heinz Company's citywide aroma making ketchup in Salem City for 100 years until 1977, and the amusing story of Johnson bravely eating a tomato on the courthouse steps,' he says. Although the lore around Johnson has been tarnished by his slaveholding, the tomato continues to maintain its grip on this small New Jersey town.
New Statesman
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Mark Twain and the limits of biography
Photo by Circa Images / Bridgeman Images What makes a person who they are? This is the greatest and simplest mystery of all our lives; it is a ceaseless puzzle, tormenting, and intriguing, one that we'll never solve for ourselves, nor for those closest to us. But for those we'll never meet, there is biography, that form that purports to offer a method by which to puzzle out motive and character, to reveal the soul of the subject. But there are a couple of problems with this method, with this whole idea, which can make even thinking about the genre uncomfortable. First, the issue of evidence. In his life of Mark Twain, Ron Chernow – best known now, perhaps, for the biography of Alexander Hamilton that led to Hamilton the musical – lists the vast amount of material available to anyone interested in the most famous and influential writer in the history of the United States. To trace the adventures of the man born in Missouri as Samuel Clemens in 1835, one may read of course his 30 books and 'several thousand' magazine articles; then, in the archive housed at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, there are 30,000 letters (from Twain and his family and written to them), 46 notebooks and no fewer than 600 manuscripts left unpublished at his death. 'Perhaps no other American author can boast such a richly documented record,' Chernow notes. If you've ever written a letter or kept a notebook yourself, you'll know how little of our lives makes it into what might be called a record. We are heartbeats and breath, and most of what builds us vanishes forever, whoever we are. And fame casts a long shadow. As Chernow writes, when Jane Clemens was asked what distinguished her brilliant son Sam from other children, she said that 'when he had gone anywhere, if only downtown, when he came home all the children would gather around to hear what he had to tell. He knew even then how to make things interesting. She also said that when she saw a crowd running, she didn't ask what was the matter, but 'What has Sam done now?'.' This is taken, the notes tell us, from 'More Twain Recollections', in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 June 1944. Twain died in 1910. Here is a yarn that shows the boy who would become Twain as we (and his mother, and those readers in 1944) would wish to see him. This is not a criticism of Chernow or his method; it's just unavoidable when you apply any method in attempting to piece together a life. And Twain's was an extraordinary life. Born into a loveless marriage and precarious respectability – and into a family with a history of slaveholding – Clemens's determination to create himself has become, for good or ill, a measure of what it means to be an American. With his life as much as his writing, he 'impressed himself upon the world as a personality as much as an author, a singular, salty, colourful figure who was instantly recognisable, defining a new form of celebrity. He had elevated himself into a character superior to any of his creations.' Chernow shows us a boy addicted to narrative from an early age. As a printer's apprentice, or 'devil', at a local newspaper, he ('supposedly', the author qualifies) caught hold of a scrap of paper on the street, a fragment of a life of Joan of Arc. This 'betrayed his first spark of literary interest', Chernow writes, but his understanding of the power of the voice came from summers spent listening to tales spun by 'Old Uncle Dan'l', an enslaved man kept in bondage at his uncle's home. 'We would huddle close about the old man, & begin to shudder with the first familiar words; & under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight sprang at us with a shout,' Twain wrote in a letter decades later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would base the character of Jim in part on Old Uncle Dan'l, and Chernow traces thoughtfully the evolution of Twain in the matter of race. As a youth, during the Civil War, he briefly enlisted in a Confederate militia, but later in life would become a powerful advocate for the rights of black Americans. In the 1880s he put a young black man, Warner T McGuinn, through Yale Law School; McGuinn would go on to mentor a young lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would argue Brown vs Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954, and who would become the high court's first African-American justice. Is it fair to call Twain an enlightened man? It would seem so, in Chernow's telling. He resisted the prejudices that could have sprung from his upbringing; in the early years of the 20th century, he deplored the imperialist tendencies of President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet Chernow's biography makes it challenging, at times, to consider the question, because it is so focused on Twain that the historical context in which he lived can recede into the background. Can a biography be too closely focused on its subject? But Twain is so much a part of the history of the United States, the 74 years of his life spanning the era in which the country became itself. I am willing to allow, certainly, that this may be a matter of personal taste. Chernow dives minutely into Twain's marriage to his beloved Livy, assesses his struggles as a parent and provides heart-rending detail, for instance, on the suffering of his youngest daughter, Jean, incapacitated by seizures. But when it comes to the wider framework around Twain's life, the deeper context of the political and financial standing and crises of the United States – a country nearly catastrophically divided in his lifetime, the legacy of which we all live with still – one wishes for more. It's eye-popping to read of Twain's almost comic inability to resist any huckster with a gleam in his eye; he married well, and made plenty of money from his writing, but he lost astonishing sums in speculation. A fiendishly complex typesetting machine, a contraption for printing carpets, a patent digestive nostrum: the very same fellow who wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg fell for them all. Yet I would have read less about Jean's affliction and more about other chumps, great and small, who lost fortunes at the time, and what that said about Twain's native land. Twain was the publisher of the memoirs of General (later President) Ulysses S Grant: but most of what we hear about Grant is Twain's opinion of him. (Chernow is also the biographer of Grant. Maybe he'd had enough of him.) Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so. At the end of his life, his (apparently non-sexual) obsession with very young girls springs disturbingly to the fore: he called them his 'angelfish', and once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them (there really was a 'school' of angelfish) with stunning abruptness. Chernow doesn't excuse Twain but notes that his subject's apparent thirst for a kind of pure, uncorrupted adoration was bottomless. Despite his love for his wife, he never recovered from his boyhood crushes; and, as Chernow notes, his greatest works are marked by a distinct lack of rounded, adult female characters. And yet those works are not the lesser. They are the wellspring from which the American literary voice – colloquial, powerful, uninhibited, adventurous – sprang, and finally no biography can do that voice justice. Best, finally, to hear it for yourself. Mark Twain Ron Chernow Allen Lane, 1,200pp, £40 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
National Geographic
06-05-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
The best evidence yet that Roman gladiators fought lions: a bite mark
For the first time, bite marks made by a large cat, possibly an African lion, have been identified on the bones of what is believed to be an ancient Roman gladiator. Artists have long depicted Roman gladiators battling it out against big cats as you can see in this mosaic created in A.D. 320 in Rome. However, there has never been any physical evidence to suggest that this actually happened—until now. Photograph by Alinari, Bridgeman Images Gladiators fighting lions is among the more enduring images of the arenas of ancient Rome. But other than depictions in mosaics and carvings, along with a few mentions in ancient texts, there is virtually no physical evidence that it actually occurred. Until now. For the first time, bite marks made by a large cat, possibly an African lion, have been identified on the bones of what is believed to be a gladiator who died nearly 1,800 years ago. The remains found 20 years ago in a Roman-era graveyard in York, England, were recently reexamined by British researchers to determine the cause of the puncture wounds. (What Hollywood gets wrong—and right—about Roman gladiators.) The individual is 'the only person in the Roman world' to be found with bite marks made by an apex predator such as a lion, says archaeologist John Pearce of King's College London, a member of the team behind the study that published in the journal PLOS One. It's also the first physical evidence that big cats were brought into this far-flung corner of the Roman Empire for arena games. Was the hole in this human bone made by the jaws of a lion? Researchers compared the specimen found in a Roman-era cemetery to bite marks made by modern-day big cats—and discovered it was clearly made by either a lion or a leopard. Photograph courtesy Thompson TJU, Errickson D, McDonnell C, Holst M, Caffell A, Pearce J, et al. (2025) The researchers compared high-resolution 3D scans of the bite marks to those made by modern-day big cats after they were fed meat on a bone. 'Through a process of elimination, [the bites] are clearly either a lion or a leopard,' Pearce says. Tim Thompson, a forensic anthropologist at Maynooth University in Ireland who led the study team, believes the bite marks were caused around the time of death—meaning that this isn't a case of a lion gnawing on the bones of someone who had long been dead. 'There is no evidence of healing, which would indicate [the bite happened before death],' he says in an email. 'If they were postmortem we would expect to see a different color on the edge of the fractures caused by the biting as well as the loss of the small pieces of bone within the punctures.' What's less clear is whether the deceased was actually a gladiator or someone else who died fighting a lion in a Roman arena. But experts say it does reveal a richer picture of how these violent spectacles unfolded. The skeleton was discovered 20 years ago in Eboracum, or present-day York. Eboracum was an important Roman fortress and city in the Roman province of Britannia from A.D. 71 to 400. This individual likely died and was buried in the middle to late third century A.D., according to researchers who examined the soil strata. (How Roman gladiators got ready to rumble.) Though no headstones or other signage was discovered at the cemetery, the study team believes it was the burial site of gladiators. Most of the nearly 70 remains discovered there show signs of 'violent encounters' that would have been typical of gladiators. Many were also decapitated—a common ritual for those badly wounded during gladiatorial combat in England. 'We found decapitation to be the case for so many other skeletons in the cemetery, it seems to be a coup de grâce thing for the loser,' Pearce says. However, some experts have questioned the assertation. 'Technically, gladiators fought against gladiators,' says Michael Carter, a professor in Greek and Roman history and Latin at Brock University in Ontario. 'It could be a venatore, a beast hunter or beast fighter, someone who specialized in fighting against large cats and bears. More likely, I think it was a criminal condemned to death in the arena.' In ancient Rome, damnatio ad bestias—Latin for 'condemnation to beasts'—was a common form of punishment for criminals, Christians, and others at arenas before gladiatorial games. It may also have been used as a form of religious sacrifice, as University of Arizona historian Alison Futrell wrote in her book The Roman Games. The remains were most likely that of a venatore, agrees author and historian Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. However, as he noted in an email, Eboracum would have been at the edge of the Roman empire. (How to see the remains of ancient Rome in modern-day Britain.) 'The rules they followed in Rome were not necessarily applied in godforsaken Eboracum. So, although the man was probably not a gladiator, he may indeed have been one. Burial in the gladiator cemetery is certainly an argument in favor of that theory.' 'Whatever the case, we can confidently say that a violent encounter between human and big cat in York is only ever going to happen in an arena,' Pearce says. Big cats in England So how did an African lion or any other big cat end up in England in the first place? It's not as farfetched as it may seem. Eboracum was home to the 6th Legion of the Roman Empire, which had several soldiers who came from North Africa. In fact, Pearce notes Roman-era pottery discovered in York features design elements associated with that region, suggesting that African craftsmen accompanied the legion when it occupied Brittania. 'Occasionally, the emperor shows up,' he says. 'We know Septimus Severus visited there about this time. It is conceivable that a lion could have been sent to York for a major spectacle or even just to entertain the troops.' Lions weren't cheap, though. An edict by Emperor Diocletian in A.D. 301 capped the cost of a lion from North Africa at 150,000 denarii, a common Roman silver coin. Dominic Rathbone, a professor of ancient history at King's College London, writes in an email that this sum is 'somewhere in the £250-500K ($330,000 to $600,000) range as the modern equivalent cost for a lion.' A high price to pay—but worth it in a world that highly valued such spectacles as a form of entertainment. Ultimately the new findings are of immense value to archaeologists and historians studying the legends surrounding gladiatorial games and animal hunts at amphitheaters across the Roman Empire. Researchers hope this discovery will provide impetus for locating the Eboracum amphitheater, which still lies buried somewhere under York. 'To me, it's totally fascinating,' Carter says. 'It's kind of confirming what we knew, but it's super interesting to find one that we can now talk about.'
Associated Press
25-03-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
ElmonX x Bridgeman Images: A Historic First for Frida Kahlo NFTs
London, United Kingdom - March 25, 2025 - In an exclusive collaboration with Bridgeman Images, ElmonX is teasing what could be the first-ever officially licensed Frida Kahlo NFTs. This groundbreaking partnership brings Kahlo's legacy into the digital age, merging iconic art with blockchain innovation. Stay tuned….history is in the making. ElmonX is a pioneering platform at the forefront of digital collectibles, bringing iconic art and cultural masterpieces into the world of NFTs through cutting-edge technology and blockchain innovation. Bridgeman Images is the world's leading specialist in licensing fine art, cultural, and historical images, working with prestigious museums, galleries, and artists' estates to make timeless works accessible in new and innovative ways. Frida Kahlo is one of the most celebrated artists of all time, known for her deeply personal and surreal self-portraits that explore identity, pain, and resilience. Her works continue to inspire millions worldwide, making any digital adaptation a historic moment for the NFT space. This collaboration marks a major milestone in digital art history, as it is expected to feature 'Self-Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States', a masterpiece rumored to be the focus based on ElmonX's recent hints on Twitter/X. By bringing Kahlo's art to the blockchain for the first time under an official license, ElmonX is redefining how collectors engage with fine art — blending tradition with digital ownership in an entirely new way. Media Contact
