The Sinking of the Lusitania is a
silent animated short film by American cartoonist and animator
Winsor McCay that depicts the
1915 disaster in which a
German submarine killed 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. McCay's employer,
William Randolph Hearst, who was opposed to
sending US troops to fight in World War I, downplayed the tragedy in his newspapers. In 1916 McCay grew tired of drawing anti-war cartoons for Hearst and started working on this
propaganda film. He and his assistants spent twenty-two months in their off hours working on the production, using the new
cel technology that was more efficient than the
rice paper he had used previously. Released in 1918, The Sinking of the Lusitania is the earliest
animated documentary and serious, dramatic work of animation to survive. It had little commercial success compared to McCay's earlier films, Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), and his later animation went largely unnoticed. The artist spent the rest of his life making editorial drawings. (
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... that archaeologist Harold St George Gray discovered that the 11 m (36 ft) deep ditch surrounding
Avebury was dug from solid chalk using
red deer antlers as picks?
1697 –
Stockholm's royal castle, dating back to the 13th century, was destroyed in a huge fire; the
blueprint for the current royal palace(pictured) was presented only a couple of weeks later.
A juvenile European shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis), photographed in the south of
Cres, Croatia. This species of
cormorant, first described by
Carl Linnaeus in 1761, lives along the rocky coasts of western and southern
Europe, southwest
Asia, and north
Africa. These birds eat a wide variety of fish, diving to depths of 45 m (148 ft) to find their prey.
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