Search Results for: Telegraph

1859’s ‘Great Auroral Storm’—The Week the Sun Touched the Earth

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] Reliving the “Carrington Event,” a solar storm that disrupted the U.S. telegraph system and lit up the sky in late August 1859:

“The night of Carrington’s discovery, the electrical hurricane that had swept the globe peaked. The Great Auroral Storm had actually begun several days earlier with a similar incident on August 28, but it was Carrington and another astronomer, Richard Hodgson, who identified one of the solar flares that enveloped the earth in a week-long magnetic maelstrom. Because of their work, the episode was dubbed the ‘Carrington Event,’ and it consumed the world’s attention for the week.

“In New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, thousands of sky gazers wandered about the midnight streets, astounded at what they could see. ‘Crowds of people gathered at the street corners, admiring and commenting upon the singular spectacle,’ observed the New Orleans Daily Picayune. When the September 1 aurora ‘was at its greatest brilliancy, the northern heavens were perfectly illuminated,’ wrote a reporter for The New York Times.”

Source: Ars Technica
Published: May 4, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,334 words)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, Los Angeles Times, Sady Doyle, The Atlantic, The Telegraph, and a guest pick by our German friends, Gute Texte.

On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.

In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.

“Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan: the story behind the photograph that shamed America.” — David Margolick, The Telegraph

See also: “Transgender: America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle.” The New Republic, June 23, 2011

(Photo Credit: Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives)

The Real-Life Swedish Murder that Inspired Stieg Larsson

The Real-Life Swedish Murder that Inspired Stieg Larsson