Paris Olympics 2024
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History’s Greatest Hits
This weekend marks the beginning of two great museums. The Louvre opened its doors for the first time on August 10, 1793, on its way to becoming the world’s most-visited art museum. And on August 10, 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Congress with funds bequeathed by English scientist James Smithson. If you can’t visit them in person, here’s a look at these two repositories of the world’s treasures.
America’s Story: The Artifacts of the Smithsonian Museums
Great Museums Television; thumbnail © Sean Pavone/Dreamstime
The History and Masterpieces of the Louvre
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29 Paintings You Can See Only at the Louvre
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Hearing (Deadly) Voices
This weekend contains two anniversaries related to serial killers. From August 8 to August 10, 1969, seven people were murdered by followers of cult leader Charles Manson. And on August 10, 1977, David Berkowitz, known as the Son of Sam, was arrested. What do these serial killers have in common? They believed they received messages instructing them to kill.
The Tate murders
The murders of actress Sharon Tate and four other people at the Los Angeles house she was renting shocked the country. Written in Tate’s blood on the front door was the word “PIG.” The following day, Manson’s followers killed two people at another Los Angeles home, where they wrote “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood. The markings were references to songs on the Beatles White Album (technically titled The Beatles), “Helter Skelter,” and “Piggies.” Manson believed that, through the lyrics of the album, the Beatles were instructing him to start a race war.
Son of Sam
David Berkowitz, claiming he was driven by demons, murdered six people in New York City from July 29, 1976, to July 31, 1977. During his killing spree, he sent letters to New York newspapers, signing them “Son of Sam,” a reference to a demon that Berkowitz believed lived inside the black Labrador Retriever owned by his neighbor Sam Carr.
Great books, bad deeds
When Mark David Chapman was arrested after fatally shooting John Lennon, he had a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with him. He later wrote to The New York Times insisting that a reading of the novel “will also help many to understand what has happened.” Another literary-minded killer was Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a big fan of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, a story which revolves around an attempt to destroy, with dynamite, the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The parallels between Kaczynski’s life and The Secret Agent prompted the FBI to contact Conrad scholars to better understand his campaign of mail-bomb terror.
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