TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
Building on Campaign board member Joseph Amster's recent "rediscovery" of am 1865 newspaper item pointing to an 1818 birth date for Emperor Norton, Campaign founder John Lumea examines Robert Ernest Cowan's influential 1923 essay about the Emperor and finds that Cowan manipulated the same news item to make it appear to support his own theory that Emperor Norton was born in 1819.
Read MoreIn 1820, 2-year-old Joshua Norton emigrated with his parents and older brother from England to South Africa. They and the 4,000 others who participated in this colonization scheme came to be known as the 1820 Settlers. This week, in response to Board member Joseph Amster's recent "rediscovery" of an 1865 newspaper item pointing to an 1818 birth date for Joshua Norton, the leading historical and genealogical Web site documenting the story of the 1820 Settlers movement updated its birth date for Emperor Norton.
Read MoreCombing through microfiche of old San Francisco newspapers at the San Francisco Public Library yesterday, Emperor's Bridge Campaign board member Joseph Amster stumbled across an item on the front page of the 4 February 1865 edition of the Daily Alta California. The item invites us to take a much closer look at a possible birth date for Emperor Norton that was dismissed by earlier biographers.
Read MoreYesterday afternoon, at Comstock Saloon in San Francisco, six supporters of the Campaign — plus another, who found the nearest highway exit and joined us via cellphone from the road — gathered beneath the watchful gaze of the casting of Peter Macchiarini's sculpture of Emperor Norton that presides over Comstock's historic 1907 bar. In a joyful ceremony lubricated by Sazeracs, Manhattans, Bloody Marys, absinthes and beers — and punctuated by a lot of laughs — here's what we did.
Read MoreThe First Annual Tannenbaum Toast was a smashing success!
Read MoreThe official drink for The Tannenbaum Toast is The House of Shields's version of the classic Boothby cocktail — created in 1908 by legendary San Francisco bartender William T. "Cocktail" Boothby, during his tenure at the Palace Hotel, just across the street from The House of Shields.
Read MoreTravel writer and urban explorer Stuart Schuffman, a.k.a. Broke-Ass Stuart — a longtime friend of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign — is up with a new post giving props to our holiday drinks party at The House of Shields this Sunday afternoon.
Read MoreThe San Francisco-focused magazine 7x7 featured us yesterday with a generous and well-placed dozen lines of original copy on its Web site.
Read MoreThe widely read San Francisco-focused Web site The Bold Italic is spotlighting our upcoming holiday drinks party in its curated events listings for this week. The site lists The First Annual Tannenbaum Toast as one of 40 things to do in San Francisco this week — and one of 24 to do in the city this coming weekend.
Read MoreOur friend, Julian Lozos, flags a recent at San Francisco-focused online magazine The Bold Italic, in which writer Sara Brody cites our movement, specifically, as one healthy indicator that — despite the doomsday predictions of some who are wringing their hands the hardest over San Francisco's latest gentrification wave — San Francisco is not on the verge of losing its soul.
Read MoreSome of the earliest photographs of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were taken in 1936 by James Kenneth Piggott, a commercial photographer who made his living, in part, as a printer and publisher of postcards. More on Piggott — including an intriguing biographical overlap with Emperor Norton — plus three of his 1936 bridge photographs, after the jump.
Read MoreThrough the magic of television, Emperor Norton paid a memorable visit to the Ponderosa ranch on 27 February 1966. That's the date that the episode "The Emperor Norton" originally aired on the popular television series, Bonanza. Watch the full episode here.
Read MoreThe Emperor's Bridge Campaign invites you to join us for a holiday drinks party on Sunday 8 December at The House of Shields. Read on, for details.
Read MoreOur friend, Katie Haverkamp, did her nails. Click for the fabulous reveal!
Read MoreIn his new review of Emperor Norton's Boozeland for 7x7, Stuart Schuffman a.k.a. Broke-Ass Stuart explains why Emperor Norton matters now more than ever.
Read MoreOur friend, Joseph Amster, discovered this fabulous little Monty Python-esue video that tells the story of what happened when an overzealous local policeman, Armand Barbier, tried to throw Emperor Norton in jail.
Read MoreWritten in 1944 by Lu Watters, "Emperor Norton's Hunch" became a signature song for Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band. In this video, a recording of the song by the band is the musical setting for a quick look at answers to the two questions raised by the song's title: Who was Emperor Norton? and What was his hunch?
Read MoreIn the opening episode of Alistair Cooke's classic 1973 13-episode television documentary series, America: A Personal History of the United States, Cooke visits San Francisco, where he offers a brief 3-minute reflection on Emperor Norton starting at 8:25.
The episode, titled “First Impact,” originally aired on 12 November 1972, and much of the information now is dated and incorrect. But, Cooke is a charming storyteller, and this may be one of the earliest “documentary” segments on the Emperor to appear on film
Video on the flip.
Read MoreThe fact that there seems to be a continuing stream of folk who feel compelled to write — and who write lovingly and well — about Emperor Norton is a testament to the Emperor's ongoing power to fascinate and to inspire.
Read MorePlease follow >>> @EmperorsBridge. And spread the word!
Read More