Good morning.
It’s a lovely Mother’s Day ahead for Whitewater, with sunny skies, a high of fifty-one, and moderate winds at 10 to 15 mph. We’ll have 14h 32m of sunlight, 15h 36m of daylight, and a Waxing crescent moon.
On this day in 1903, Pres. Roosevelt becomes the first president recorded on film:
A cameraman named H.J. Miles filmed the president while riding in a parade in his honor. The resulting short move was titled The President’s Carriage and was later played on “nickelodeons” in arcades across America. The film showed Roosevelt riding in a carriage and escorted by the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, which was unusual for the time, according to the Library of Congress and contemporary newspapers, because it was an all-black company.
Roosevelt was the first president to take advantage of the impact motion pictures could have on the presidency. The photogenic president encouraged filmmakers to document his official duties and post-presidential personal activities until his death in 1919. He purposely played directly to the camera with huge gestures and thundering speeches. The Library of Congress holds much of the original film footage, including that of his second inaugural ceremony in 1905, a visit to Panama in 1906 and an African safari in 1909….
Here’s that film, that the Library of Congress placed on YouTube:
Also available online from the Library of Congress on its own YouTube Channel channel are over one-thousand other videos.
Google-a-Day asks about an editor: “Who was the editor who worked with the author to polish the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961?”