On October 17, 2024, a rare privately owned copy of
the U.S. Constitution was sold at auction by Brunks Auctions of Asheville,
North Carolina for $9 million.The final
bid far outstripped the reserve price of $1 million.The bidding lasted seven minutes and bids
came in at $500,000 intervals.
This rare artifact is
one of the 100 official copies printed in 1787 that were sent to state leaders
for review before being formally adopted, and is among only eight copies known
to exist today, and is the only one still in private hands.The document was sold to an anonymous bidder.
The almost 237 year old
document was found inside a battered filing cabinet in a long neglected storage
room on a property in Edenton, North Carolina once owned by the state’s first
governor Samuel Johnston.Johnston was
governor from 1787 to 1789, and oversaw the state convention that ratified the
Constitution.Also found with the copy
of the Constitution was an original letter from George Washington asking for
ratification!
Gregory
Maguire's
1995 novel Wicked: The Life
and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West creates a backstory for Elphaba, the future
Wicked Witch of the West, and explores the world of The Wizard of Oz from
her perspective. Elphaba is modeled after Margaret Hamilton's portrayal in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz: green-skinned,
clad entirely in black and wearing a tall, peaked hat.
The
novel Wicked explains that the ruby slippers a pair of magical shoes which play
a pivotal role in The Wizard of Oz, were given to Nessarose, the future Wicked Witch of
the East, by her father. In the musical Wicked, it is Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who enchants the
shoes, giving her crippled sister Nessarose the ability to walk.
The ruby slippers worn by Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, in
the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz have achieved iconic stature and are among the
most valuable items of film memorabilia.
In L. Frank
Baum's original 1900 novel, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wears silver shoes but the color of the
shoes was changed to take advantage of the introduction of Technicolor to the
movies.
The wardrobe woman who worked on the
film claimed "six identical pairs" had been made. Four pairs used in
the movie have been accounted for. Is it
possible that the other two pair are tucked away in someone’s garage or attic?
Let’s look at the big four:
One pair
is on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
Another
pair was initially owned by one Roberta Bauman who won them in a contest. In 1988, these shoes were sold at auction
to Anthony Landini for $150,000. Landini auctioned this pair of slippers, at
Christie's auction house in 2000, for $666,000. They now belong to a collector
who owns memorabilia shops in Hollywood.
A
third pair were the highlight of the 2011 “Icons of Hollywood auction”. They were offered with a starting reserve price of two million
dollars, but did not sell. Leonardo DiCaprio,Steven Spielberg, and other benefactors
made it possible for the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to acquire the pair for an
undisclosed price in February 2012 for the Academy’s new Museum in Los Angeles.
Michael Shaw acquired the fourth pair in
1970. These were stolen from an exhibit at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand
Rapids, Minnesota, in August, 2005. On
September 4, 2018, the FBI announced the stolen pair had been recovered after
13 years. Five year later, one Terry
Martin was indicted for the crime and pleaded guilty, saying that he thought
the slippers were made from real rubies because they were insured for one
million dollars.
Another iconic piece of Oz memorabilia,
the Wicked Witch’s hat from the 1939 movie, has recently come up for auction
with a whopping price tag of $140,000.
Major General William Elphinstone is considered by some
military historians to be “the most
incompetent soldier who ever became a general”, possessed of “the
leadership qualities of a sheep.”Elphinstone’s road to disaster, however, was well paved and made broad
by others.
In 1838, Afghanistan
was a buffer state between British India and
the expanding Russian Empire. Energized
by real or imagined Russian plots in the country, the British rallied support behind
a prince favorable to British interests, marched into the country, and after a
short campaign installed a puppet king in Kabul
on August 6, 1839.
Many in British India now
felt that the mission had been accomplished.
It was time to bring the troops home.
Most of the victorious army marched home, but a permanent British
garrison was established in Kabul
to prop up the new regime. It needed
propping up. The British had replaced a
relatively popular ruler with a weak puppet. Scattered fighting erupted in the
surrounding countryside.
Increasingly frustrated with the costs of maintaining a
large garrison in Kabul, the British government eliminated the subsidies being
paid to the various tribes in the area around Kabul to keep the peace. Once the
subsidies ended, hostile activity increased even more.
Into this rapidly
deteriorating situation stepped Major General William Elphinstone, who
was assured by all, “You will have nothing to do here; all is peace.”
When Elphinstone arrived in Kabul his command consisted of
some 4,500 troops (British troops and Indian sepoys). Additionally, there were 12,000 army
dependents such as wives, children, and servants, living in the British
cantonment just outside of Kabul.
The military situation on the ground when Elphinstone
arrived was a tragedy waiting to happen.
The British had abandoned the city’s fortified citadel, the Bala Hissar,
to the puppet king and built the British cantonment some 1.5 miles outside of
the city in a low area surrounded by Afghan forts occupying the high
ground. These forts had been neither occupied
nor destroyed.
The cantonment itself was indefensible. According to
contemporary witnesses there had been, “a pretense of rendering the cantonments
defensible by surrounding the great parallelogram with the caricature of an
obstacle in the shape of a shallow ditch and feeble earthwork over which an
active cow could scramble.”
Elphinstone now nearly sixty was racked by gout and
rheumatism. He was soon unable to mount his horse un-aided. He was incapable of
reaching clear cut decisions and vacillated depending on the opinion of the
latest person with whom he spoke. One
officer wrote, that Elphinstone was “fit only for the invalid establishment on
the day of his arrival.”
On 2 November 1841 a revolt broke out in Kabul. A mob of insurgents stormed the house of one
of the senior British civilian officers and murdered him and his staff. Elphinstone took no action, which encouraged
the insurgents to press the British further.
The Afghans next stormed the poorly defended supply fort where the
British garrison’s provisions were housed.
After furious fighting around the small fort and repeated
calls for help, Elphinstone finally realized that he should do something. The relief force was surprised, however, to
find the survivors of the supply fort, having abandoned all hope of relief,
making a hasty retreat toward the cantonment.
Elphinstone’s inaction had resulted in the loss of most of the army’s
food and supplies.
A council of war proposed, as the winter was coming on,
either to retreat to the British stronghold of Jalalabad some ninety miles
away, or to move to the Bala Hissar, Kabul’s strong bastion. Elphinstone overruled the move to the Bala
Hissar and settled on retreat.
On the Afghan promise of a safe retreat, Elphinstone
capitulated on January 1, 1842, handing over the army’s gunpowder reserves,
most of the cannon, and all of the newest muskets.
The troops and twelve thousand civilians began the march to
Jalalabad on January 6. The sick and
wounded were left behind with a guarantee of their safety. They were murdered as soon as the last of
Elphinstone’s soldiers left the cantonment.
The retreat of
the column was an unmitigated horror.
Weather conditions were extreme, and the column was continually harassed
by the fire of Afghan tribesmen. The
first night, the column halted six miles from the city. The road was already strewn with the dead and
dying.
By the evening of January 9, some 3,000 of Elphinstone's
column had died due to enemy action, the freezing weather, or even
suicide. Elphinstone had ceased giving
any orders.
On the evening of January 11th, the wives of the British
officers accepted being taken hostage by the Afghans who anticipated a large
ransom for their release. The wives and
children of the Indian troops were all to die since they would not bring a
ransom.
Elphinstone and his
second in command also allowed themselves to become hostages, while the column
struggled on against certain death.
Elphinstone died of dysentery on April 23, 1842, while in captivity.
Only one British officer managed to reach Jalalabad.On 13 January, Assistant Surgeon William
Brydonrode through the gates of Jalalabad on an exhausted horse. Part of his
skull was sheared off by a sword.When
asked what happened to the army, he answered “I am the army.”
Shortly before his murder in 1890, Sitting Bull said
to his biographer:
“When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world.The sun rose and set on their land; they sent
ten thousand men to battle.Where are
the warriors today?Who slew them?Where are our lands?Who owns them? …. Is it wrong for me to love
my own?Is it wicked for me because my
skin is red?Because I am Sioux.Because I was born where my fathers
lived?Because I would die for my people
and my country?I wish it to be
remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”
James Barroll Washington was born in
Baltinore, Maryland in 1839.His father,
Colonel Lewis Washignton was a grandson of General George Washington’s brother,
John Augustine Washington.James entered
West Point in 1859 and was a classmate of George Armstrong Custer.
When the Civil War broke out, young
Washington left West Point and joined the staff of Confederate General Joseph
E. Johnston.On May 21, 1862 at the
Battle of Seven Pines, while delivering orders from General Johnston to General
Longstreet, Lieutenant Washington was
captured by a company under the command of Captain George Armstrong
Custer.Custer took the opportunity to
have a picture taken with his old classmate before sending him the rear as a
prisoner of war.Washington was
subsequently exchanged and continued to serve in the Confederate army until the
end of the war.
“I went over
the battlefield carefully with a view to determine how the fight was
fought. I arrived at the conclusion I
have right now-that it was a rout, a panic, till the last man was killed; that
there was no line formed.
“There was no line on the battlefield.You can take a handful of corn and scatter it
over a floor and make just such lines.There were none. The only approach to a line was where five or six
horses were found equal distances like skirmishers.Ahead of them were five or six men about the
same distances….That was the only approach to a line on the field. (This was on
Calhoun Hill).
“There were more than twenty killed there to the
right; there were four or more all within a space of twenty to thirty
yards.That was the condition all over
the field.Only where General Custer was
found was there any evidence of a stand.
“ I counted seventy dead horses and two Indian
ponies.I think, in all probability,
that the men turned their horses loose without any orders to do so.Many orders might have been given, but few
obeyed.I think they were panic stricken;
it was a rout….”
“The battalion
organization was made after we had marched about four hours. I think at the first halt an orderly came to
me with instructions for the officers to assemble. General Custer told us that he had just come
down from the mountain; that he had been told by the scouts that they could see
a village, ponies, tepees and smoke. He
gave it to us as his belief that there were no Indians there; that he had
looked through the glasses and could not see any, and did not think there were
any there.
“Now, in 1875, I had a
very similar experience with Indians in Dakota, and as the statements of the
Indians then were absolutely confirmed by what was afterward proved, I was
strong in the belief that the Crow Indians only reported what was shown them by their superior keenness
of vision, and that the hostile village was where they located it; but as no
opinions were asked for, none were given.”
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