Extremely Rare Technicolor Film Footage from the 1920s Discovered: Features Louise Brooks Dancing in Her First Feature Film

in Film | May 15th, 2018

In brief sur­veys of film his­to­ry, the eye-pop­ping process known as Tech­ni­col­or seems to emerge ful­ly-formed in the 1930s and 40s with clas­sics like Gone with the Wind and The Wiz­ard of Oz, movies so vivid they almost exem­pli­fy the phrase “eye can­dy” with a “rich­er, col­or-flood­ed ver­sion of the real world,” writes Adri­enne LaFrance at The Atlantic. This gold­en age of Tech­ni­col­or, with its “super­sat­u­rat­ed aes­thet­ic… cre­at­ed films punc­tu­at­ed by col­ors so elec­tric they were sur­re­al.”

But like any new tech­nol­o­gy, col­or film, and the Tech­ni­col­or process in par­tic­u­lar, fol­lowed a long tra­jec­to­ry of tri­al and error involv­ing many an ambi­tious fail­ure and many ear­ly attempts now lost to his­to­ry. One such film, 1917’s The Gulf Between, con­sid­ered the first Tech­ni­col­or film, employed one of the ear­li­est, two-col­or ver­sions of the process. Sur­viv­ing now only in very short frag­ments, the 58-minute pro­duc­tion was “expen­sive and hard on the eyes,” notes Richard Tren­holm at Cnet, “a crit­i­cal and artis­tic flop” and “a com­mer­cial one, too.”

Tech­ni­col­or sci­en­tists and film­mak­ers refused to give up on the process, labor­ing might­i­ly through­out the 1920s to fig­ure out the exact ele­ments need­ed to con­nect with movie­go­ers. Most prob­lem­at­i­cal­ly, the two-col­or process could not repro­duce believ­able blues, pur­ples, or yel­lows. As James Lay­ton, co-author of The Dawn of Tech­ni­col­or, tells The Atlantic, “skies would nev­er repro­duce accu­rate­ly, and water wouldn’t…. There are some great exam­ples. A beach scene… where the sky is this very vivid green, it’s very unnat­ur­al.”

One her­culean effort to make Tech­ni­col­or a hit came from Dou­glas Fair­banks, whose painstak­ing 1926 film The Black Pirate made artis­tic use of the process’s lim­i­ta­tions, tak­ing inspi­ra­tion from the Dutch mas­ters to achieve a sense of depth. In 1970, the British Nation­al Film Archive began a restora­tion (see some clips above, with a 70s-sound­ing sound­track over­laid).

Fair­banks’ film remains one of only a hand­ful of Tech­ni­col­or films from the peri­od that has sur­vived in full into the present, like­ly because it rep­re­sents one of the few com­mer­cial suc­cess­es. But just last month, Jane Fer­nan­des, a British Film Insti­tute (BFI) con­ser­va­tion­ist, dis­cov­ered sev­er­al snip­pets of many more 1920s Tech­ni­col­or films taped to the begin­nings and ends of reels from a copy of The Black Pirate donat­ed to BFI in 1959.

These frag­ments include a very brief shot of silent icon Louise Brooks in col­or (at the 1:11 mark), from the lost 1926 film The Amer­i­can Venus, her first fea­ture. Also includ­ed in the find are short clips from oth­er Tech­ni­col­or films made that same year, The Far Cry, The Fire Brigade, and Dance Mad­ness, as well as a test shot from the his­tor­i­cal dra­ma Mona Lisa, star­ring L.A. Times gos­sip colum­nist Hed­da Hop­per as Leonar­do da Vinci’s enig­mat­ic mod­el.

You can see these prized snip­pets in the video at the top of the post, with nar­ra­tion from BFI cura­tor Bry­ony Dixon. “Anoth­er batch of extracts,” reports Smithsonian.com, “was found taped to ads for a North Lon­don tele­vi­sion shop that ran before and between movies in the 1950s. They include scenes from ear­ly Tech­ni­col­or musi­cals that came out in 1929 includ­ing Sal­ly, Gold Dig­gers of Broad­way, Show of Shows and On with the Show!”

In BFI’s April 30 press release announc­ing these rare finds, Dixon com­pares them to “an Egypt­ian vase shat­tered into pieces and the shards scat­tered across muse­ums all over the world…. For now we have the shards but we can dream of see­ing Louise Brooks’s first film or a lost Hed­da Hop­per in colour.” Future dis­cov­er­ies, as well as the lat­est restora­tion tech­niques, may soon return an expand­ed his­to­ry of 1920s two-col­or Tech­ni­col­or to schol­ars and film fans of the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

The Col­or Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Roy­al Tenen­baums, Reser­voir Dogs, A Clock­work Orange, Blade Run­ner & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Groundbreaking Map from 1858 Colorfully Visualizes 6,000 Years of World History

in History, Maps | May 15th, 2018

We start to under­stand his­to­ry by lis­ten­ing to it told to us ver­bal­ly, which lets us visu­al­ize it in our imag­i­na­tion. But how much more might we under­stand his­to­ry if we could see it ren­dered visu­al­ly right before our eyes? That ques­tion seems to have occu­pied the minds of cer­tain of the car­tog­ra­phers of 19th-cen­tu­ry Europe, those who want­ed to take their craft beyond its tra­di­tion­al lim­its in order to do for chronol­o­gy what it had long done for geog­ra­phy. Here we have one of the most glo­ri­ous such attempts in exis­tence, Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle — or at least the half cov­er­ing the civ­i­liza­tions of the East­ern Hemi­sphere — as held in the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

At first glance, all of the infor­ma­tion on the map might appear over­whelm­ing. But zoom in (look­ing at the cen­ter first, ide­al­ly from top to bot­tom) and you’ll soon grasp how Pick has depict­ed the his­to­ry of the world, as a mid-19th-cen­tu­ry French­man would con­ceive of it it, by draw­ing a kind of net­work of rivers and trib­u­taries.

The “sources” of ancient civ­i­liza­tions, like those of the Greeks, the Phoeni­cians, the Egyp­tians, and the Chi­nese, flow down to those of var­i­ous descen­dants — the Gauls, the Nor­we­gians, the Rus­sians, the Turks — and the mighty empires in which they pool, and arrive at the nations of the Danes, the Swedes, the Bel­gians, the Span­ish, the Per­sians, and oth­ers besides. In total the map cov­ers 6,000 years of his­to­ry, mov­ing from 4004 B.C. to 1856.

This tech­nique of visu­al­iz­ing his­to­ry has its prece­dents, includ­ing Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeit­en oder bildliche Darstel­lung der Welt­geschichte, pic­tured just above (and lat­er updat­ed by Amer­i­can map­mak­er Joseph Hutchins Colton as The Stream of Time in the 1840s and 1860s.) The David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion notes that, unlike Strass’ map, Pick­’s also has “vignettes of peo­ple, build­ings, his­tor­i­cal scenes and impor­tant places in the his­to­ry of the world” lined up on either side of the main con­tent. It thus illu­mi­nates the abstract and con­tin­u­ous cen­tral ren­der­ing of his­to­ry with rep­re­sen­ta­tive, dis­crete ones, show­ing view­ers every­thing from the Bib­li­cal flood and the Tow­er of Babel to the Great Sphinx of Giza and Agrip­pa’s Pan­theon to Notre Dame and the Arc de Tri­om­phe. It has a cer­tain fran­co­cen­trism, to be sure, but con­sid­er how many in Pick­’s time con­sid­ered France the cen­ter of human­i­ty’s genius. Pro­duc­ing a map as com­pelling as this one could­n’t have dimin­ished that image.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Is Now Free Online

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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National Geographic Has Digitized Its Collection of 6,000+ Vintage Maps: See a Curated Selection of Maps Published Between 1888 and Today

in History, Magazines, Maps | May 14th, 2018

As some of the finest fic­tion­al world-builders have under­stood, few things excite the imag­i­na­tion like a map. And despite the geo­graph­i­cal lim­i­ta­tion implied by its title, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s maps have sur­veyed the entire globe and beyond. The magazine’s arti­cles have not always pre­sent­ed an enlight­ened point of view, but for all its his­tor­i­cal fail­ings, the rich­ly-illus­trat­ed month­ly has excelled as a show­case for car­tog­ra­phy, over which read­ers might spend hours, pro­ject­ing them­selves into unknown lands, jour­ney­ing through the care­ful­ly-drawn topogra­phies, cityscapes, and celes­tial charts.

Start­ed as the offi­cial jour­nal of the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety, the mag­a­zine has amassed a huge, 130-year archive of  “edi­to­r­i­al car­tog­ra­phy,” the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic site writes. “Now, for the first time,” that col­lec­tion is avail­able online, “every map ever pub­lished in the mag­a­zine since the first issue of Octo­ber 1888.”

The entire archive is only avail­able to sub­scribers (how­ev­er you can find curat­ed selec­tions on the Nat­Ge­oMaps Twit­ter, Insta­gram, and Face­book accounts), but we can still see an aston­ish­ing qual­i­ty and vari­ety on dis­play in dozens of maps on social media of every con­ceiv­able loca­tion, top­ic, and event, begin­ning with the very first pub­lished map, depict­ing the Great White Hur­ri­cane, “one of the most severe bliz­zards to ever hit the Unit­ed States” (above)—the “start of a long tra­di­tion… of enhanc­ing sto­ry­telling with maps.”

As long­time read­ers of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic well know, the maps—often sep­a­ra­ble from the mag­a­zine in fold-outs suit­able for hang­ing on the wall—function as more than visu­al aids. They tell their own sto­ries. “A map is able to con­nect with some­body in a dif­fer­ent way than a text will or a pho­to will,” notes the magazine’s direc­tor of car­tog­ra­phy Mar­tin Gamache. Maps “engage with a dif­fer­ent part of our psy­che or our brain.” From its ear­li­est artic­u­la­tion, geog­ra­phy has inclined toward the poet­ic. The ancient geo­g­ra­ph­er Stra­bo cred­it­ed Homer as “the founder of geo­graph­i­cal sci­ence,” who “reached the utmost lim­its of the earth, tra­vers­ing it in his imag­i­na­tion.” Maps present us with a visu­al poet­ry often Home­r­ic in its scope.

Though so many of these maps are detach­able, it often helps to under­stand the spe­cif­ic con­text in which they were cre­at­ed, which doesn’t always appear in a self-con­tained leg­end. The map above, for exam­ple, pub­lished in March 1966, shows the Krem­lin “in unprece­dent­ed detail,” as the magazine’s Twit­ter account points out: “Sovi­et reg­u­la­tions pro­hib­it­ed aer­i­al pho­tos, so artists col­lect­ed dia­grams and ground-lev­el pho­tos to draft a sketch that was brought to Moscow and cor­rect­ed on the spot.” Fur­ther up, we see a map of Mex­i­co from May 1914, “one of the first gen­er­al ref­er­ence maps of the coun­try” from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic archive. The map at the top, from the Decem­ber 1922 issue, is the magazine’s very first pub­lished gen­er­al ref­er­ence map of the world.

There are maps celes­tial, as above from 1957, and architectural—such as recent dig­i­tal recre­ations of King Tut’s tomb, late­ly revealed to have no hid­den cham­bers left to explore. Maps of plan­ets beyond the solar sys­tem and plan­ets (or “dwarf plan­ets”) with­in it, such as this first pub­lished map of Plu­to. Maps of rivers like the Rhine and spec­tac­u­lar nat­ur­al for­ma­tions like the Grand Canyon. There are even maps of flow­ers, like that pub­lished below in May 1968, show­ing “the ori­gins of 117 types of blooms.” Some maps are much less joy­ous, like this recent series show­ing what the world might look like if all of the ice melt­ed. Some are pure­ly for fun, like this series on the geog­ra­phy of Star Wars and oth­er fic­tion­al fran­chis­es.

If we can imag­ine it, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic sug­gests, we can map it, and con­verse­ly, when we see a map, our imag­i­na­tions are imme­di­ate­ly engaged. Learn more at the Nat­Geo blog All Over the Map, and con­nect with many more curat­ed maps from this huge col­lec­tion at the magazine’s Twit­ter, Insta­gram, and Face­book accounts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The 16,000 Artworks the Nazis Censored and Labeled “Degenerate Art”: The Complete Historic Inventory Is Now Online

in Art, History | May 14th, 2018

The Nazis may not have known art, but they knew what they liked, and much more so what they did­n’t. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture the “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937, put on by Hitler’s par­ty four years after it rose to pow­er. Fol­low­ing on a show of only Nazi-approved works — includ­ing many depic­tions of clas­si­cal­ly Ger­man­ic land­scapes, robust sol­diers in action, blonde nudes — it toured the coun­try with the intent of reveal­ing to the Ger­man peo­ple the “insult to Ger­man feel­ing” com­mit­ted by Entartete Kun­st (Degen­er­ate art), a Nazi-defined cat­e­go­ry of art cre­at­ed by the likes of Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Max Beck­mann, George Grosz, and oth­ers, a ros­ter heavy on the abstract, the expres­sion­is­tic, and the Jew­ish.

Now, thanks to the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, we know exact­ly which works of art the Nazis con­demned. “The V&A holds the only known copy of a com­plete inven­to­ry of ‘Entartete Kun­st’ con­fis­cat­ed by the Nazi regime from pub­lic insti­tu­tions in Ger­many, most­ly dur­ing 1937 and 1938,” says the muse­um’s site.

“The list of more than 16,000 art­works was pro­duced by the Reichsmin­is­teri­um für Volk­saufk­lärung und Pro­pa­gan­da (Reich Min­istry for Pub­lic Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da) in 1942 or there­abouts. It seems that the inven­to­ry was com­piled as a final record, after the sales and dis­pos­als of the con­fis­cat­ed art had been com­plet­ed in the sum­mer of 1941.”

You can read and down­load the entire doc­u­ment, which pro­vides “cru­cial infor­ma­tion about the prove­nance, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ry and fate of each art­work,” in PDF form at the V&A’s page about it.

Daunt­ing though the inven­to­ry itself may seem, Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Jil­lian Stein­hauer points out “a way to con­nect many of these pieces to the present day: an online data­base main­tained by the Freie Uni­ver­sität Berlin. You can plug an artwork’s inven­to­ry num­ber from the Nazi log books direct­ly into their search engine, and it will pull up a record.” Here you see Max Beck­man­n’s Zwei Auto-Offiziere, El Lis­sitzky’s Proun R.V.N. 2, and Paul Klee’s Garten der Lei­den­schaft, just three exam­ples of the thou­sands upon thou­sands of images that Hitler and com­pa­ny con­sid­ered a threat to their regime. Today, the artis­tic mer­its of work by these and oth­er artists once labeled Entartete Kun­st have drawn more admir­ers than ever — though the very fact that the Nazis did­n’t like it con­sti­tutes a decent rea­son for appre­ci­a­tion as well.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Mister Rogers Accepts a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Helps You Thank Everyone Who Has Made a Difference in Your Life

in K-12, Life, Religion, Television | May 14th, 2018

Tele­vi­sion host and children’s advo­cate Fred Rogers was also an ordained Pres­by­ter­ian min­is­ter, for whom spir­i­tu­al reflec­tion was as nat­ur­al and nec­es­sary a part of dai­ly life as his veg­e­tar­i­an­ism and morn­ing swims.

His qui­et per­son­al prac­tice could take a turn for the pub­lic and inter­ac­tive, as he demon­strat­ed from the podi­um at the Day­time Emmy Awards in 1997, above.

Accept­ing a Life­time Achieve­ment Award, he refrained from run­ning through the stan­dard laun­dry list of thanks. Instead he invit­ed the audi­ence to join him in spend­ing 10 sec­onds think­ing of the peo­ple who “have loved us into being.”

He then turned his atten­tion to his wrist­watch as hun­dreds of glam­orous­ly attired talk show hosts and soap stars thought of the teach­ers, rel­a­tives, and oth­er influ­en­tial adults whose ten­der care, and per­haps rig­or­ous expec­ta­tions, helped shape them.

(Play along from home at the 2:15 mark.)

Ten sec­onds may not seem like much, but con­sid­er how often we deploy emo­jis and “likes” in place of sit­ting with oth­ers’ feel­ings and our own.

Of all the things Fred Rogers was cel­e­brat­ed for, the time he allot­ted to mak­ing oth­ers feel heard and appre­ci­at­ed may be the great­est.

Fif­teen years after his death, the Inter­net ensures that he will con­tin­ue to inspire us to be kinder, try hard­er, lis­ten bet­ter.

That effect should quadru­ple when Mor­gan Neville’s Mis­ter Rogers doc­u­men­tary, Won’t You Be My Neigh­bor? is released next month.

Anoth­er sweet Emmy moment comes at the top, when the hon­oree smooches his wife, Joanne Rogers, before head­ing off to join pre­sen­ter Tim Rob­bins at the podi­um. Described in Esquire as “hearty and almost whoop­ing in (her) forth­right­ness,” the stal­wart Mrs. Rogers appeared in a hand­ful of episodes, but nev­er played the sort of high­ly vis­i­ble role Mrs. Claus inhab­it­ed with­in her husband’s pub­lic realm.

The full text of Mis­ter Rogers’ Life­time Achieve­ment Award award speech is below:

So many peo­ple have helped me to come here to this night.  Some of you are here, some are far away and some are even in Heav­en.  All of us have spe­cial ones who loved us into being.  Would you just take, along with me, 10 sec­onds to think of the peo­ple who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and want­ed what was best for you in life.  10 sec­onds, I’ll watch the time. Whomev­er you’ve been think­ing about, how pleased they must be to know the dif­fer­ence you feel they have made.  You know they’re kind of peo­ple tele­vi­sion does well to offer our world.  Spe­cial thanks to my fam­i­ly, my friends, and my co-work­ers in Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing and Fam­i­ly Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and to this Acad­e­my for encour­ag­ing me, allow­ing me, all these years to be your neigh­bor.  May God be with you.  Thank you very much.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Marathon Stream­ing of All 856 Episodes of Mis­ter Rogers Neigh­bor­hood, and the Mov­ing Trail­er for the New Doc­u­men­tary, Won’t You Be My Neigh­bor?

Mis­ter Rogers Turns Kids On to Jazz with Help of a Young Wyn­ton Marsalis and Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends (1986)

Mis­ter Rogers, Sesame Street & Jim Hen­son Intro­duce Kids to the Syn­the­siz­er with the Help of Her­bie Han­cock, Thomas Dol­by & Bruce Haack

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC this Wednes­day, May 16, for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Newly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Einstein Driving a Flying Car (1931)

in History, Physics, Random | May 14th, 2018

Dur­ing his life­time, Albert Ein­stein appar­ent­ly nev­er learned to dri­ve a car–some­thing that also held true for Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Brad­bury, Eliz­a­beth Bish­op, and Jack Ker­ouac. But he did man­age to expe­ri­ence the thrill of get­ting behind the wheel, at least once. Above, watch a new­ly-dis­cov­ered home movie of Ein­stein and his sec­ond wife, Elsa, vis­it­ing the Warn­er Bros. sound­stage on Feb­ru­ary 3, 1931. The fol­low­ing day, The New York Times pub­lished this report:

Pro­fes­sor Ein­stein was sur­prised tonight into loud and long laugh­ter.

Hol­ly­wood demon­strat­ed its prin­ci­ples of “rel­a­tiv­i­ty,” how it makes things seem what they are not, by use of a dilap­i­dat­ed motor car.

At the First Nation­al stu­dio, Ger­man tech­ni­cians per­suad­ed Pro­fes­sor Ein­stein to change his mind about not being pho­tographed and pho­tographed him in the old car with Frau Elsa, his wife. He can­not dri­ve a car.

Tonight the Ger­man tech­ni­cians brought the film to the Ein­stein bun­ga­low. The lights went out.

Then the ancient auto­mo­bile appeared on the screen with Ein­stein at the wheel, dri­ving Frau Elsa on a sight-see­ing tour.

Down Broad­way, Los Ange­les they drove, then to the beach­es. Sud­den­ly the car rose like an air­plane, and as Ein­stein took one hand from the wheel to point out the scenery, the Rocky Moun­tains appeared below. Then the car land­ed on famil­iar soil and the dri­ve con­tin­ued through Ger­many.

It was just a Hol­ly­wood trick of dou­ble expo­sure and a thrilling com­e­dy, but not for the pub­lic. The mas­ter film was destroyed, and the only copy was giv­en to the Ein­steins.

That one sur­viv­ing copy of the film even­tu­al­ly end­ed up in the archives at Lin­coln Cen­ter, where it sat unno­ticed for decades, until Bec­ca Ben­der, an archivist, stum­bled up on it last year. And for­tu­nate­ly now we can all enjoy that light moment shot so long ago.

To learn more about the dis­cov­ery of the 1931 film, watch the video below. Or read this arti­cle over at From the Grapevine.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the “Don’t Let the Bas­tards Get You Down” Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

Albert Ein­stein Impos­es on His First Wife a Cru­el List of Mar­i­tal Demands

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Albert Ein­stein on Indi­vid­ual Lib­er­ty, With­out Which There Would Be ‘No Shake­speare, No Goethe, No New­ton’

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

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Interactive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Billion Acres of Native American Land Between 1776 and 1887

in History, Maps | May 11th, 2018

From time to time, Amer­i­cans will talk about the mass killing, treaty-break­ing, impov­er­ish­ment, and forced removal or assim­i­la­tion of Native peo­ples in the U.S. as “a shame­ful peri­od in our his­to­ry.” While this may sound like the noble acknowl­edge­ment of a geno­ci­dal crime, it is far too half-heart­ed and disin­gen­u­ous, since these acts are cen­tral to the entire­ty of U.S. his­to­ry, from the first land­ing of Euro­pean ships on North Amer­i­can shores to the recent events at Stand­ing Rock and beyond. An enor­mous body of schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture tes­ti­fies to the facts.

For a thor­ough one-vol­ume sur­vey, see Rox­anne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indige­nous Peo­ples’ His­to­ry of the Unites States, a book that exhaus­tive­ly cites sev­er­al hun­dred years of well-doc­u­ment­ed events, like orders for exter­mi­na­tion and land theft under mil­i­tary lead­ers George Wash­ing­ton, Andrew Jack­son, and Army gen­er­al Thomas S. Jesup. Dun­bar-Ortiz shows how many U.S. mil­i­tary prac­tices and terms (such as the phrase “in coun­try”) came direct­ly from the so-called “Indi­an Wars.”

Take the prac­tice of “scalp hunt­ing,” encour­aged dur­ing the Pequot War and becom­ing rou­tine through­out the peri­od of New Eng­land set­tle­ment in the late 1600’s:

Boun­ties for Indige­nous scalps were hon­ored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indige­nous chil­dren became means of exchange, cur­ren­cy, and this devel­op­ment may even have cre­at­ed a black mar­ket. Scalp hunt­ing was not only a prof­itable pri­va­tized enter­prise but also a means to erad­i­cate or sub­ju­gate the Indige­nous pop­u­la­tion of the Anglo-Amer­i­can Atlantic seaboard. The set­tlers gave a name to the muti­lat­ed and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: red­skins.

The Amer­i­can foot­ball team cur­rent­ly bear­ing that name and rep­re­sent­ing the nation’s cap­i­tal, as Bax­ter Holmes shows at Esquire, pays trib­ute to the extreme bru­tal­i­ty of mur­der­ing Indige­nous peo­ple and using their scalps as cash. “This way of war,” writes Dun­bar-Ortiz, “became the basis for the wars against the Indige­nous across the con­ti­nent into the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.” 

In the GIF above, we see a dra­mat­i­cal­ly tele­scoped visu­al­iza­tion of the “vio­lent seiz­ing of Native Amer­i­cans’ land” after 1776, writes Dylan Matthews at Vox, doc­u­ment­ed by his­to­ri­ans like Dun­bar-Ortiz and Uni­ver­si­ty of Georgia’s Clau­dio Saunt, who, along with Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion, cre­at­ed the graph­ic as a sup­ple­ment for his book West of the Rev­o­lu­tion: An Uncom­mon His­to­ry of 1776. “The project’s source data,” write Saunt and Onion, “is a set of maps pro­duced in 1899 by the Bureau of Amer­i­can Eth­nol­o­gy,” a Smith­son­ian research unit that “pub­lished and col­lect­ed anthro­po­log­i­cal, archae­o­log­i­cal, and lin­guis­tic research… as the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry drew to a close.”

Blue areas show Indige­nous home­lands, red areas show reser­va­tions. The “time-lapse func­tion,” note the map’s cre­ators, “is the most visu­al­ly impres­sive aspect of this inter­ac­tive,” but you can access a “deep lev­el of detail” at the map’s site, such as the names of the hun­dreds of dis­pos­sessed and dis­placed nations and links to the his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion of their land “ces­sion.”

Many of the bound­aries are vague, write Saunt and Onion, “a broad approach that left a lot of room for cre­ative imple­men­ta­tion.” As Saunt puts it, “greater legal­i­ty and more pre­ci­sion would have made it impos­si­ble to seize so much land in so short a time,” just over 100 years shown here, from the 1776 found­ing to 1887, dur­ing which over 1.5 bil­lion acres were seized and occu­pied by fron­tier set­tlers and the U.S. army in what Saunt calls in the map’s title the “Inva­sion of Amer­i­ca.”

View the full map, search­able by place and Indige­nous nation, here. You can also select a sep­a­rate lay­er that shows cur­rent reser­va­tions. See above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

New Inter­ac­tive Map Visu­al­izes the Chill­ing His­to­ry of Lynch­ing in the U.S. (1835–1964)

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Listening: Learn the Keys to Understanding Other People from the Famed Psychologist

in Psychology | May 11th, 2018

Pho­to by Müller-May/Rain­er Funk, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The social psy­chol­o­gist and philoso­pher Erich Fromm lived through just about the first 80 years of the 20th cen­tu­ry, begin­ning in Ger­many, end­ing in Switzer­land, and spend­ing peri­ods in between in places like New York, Mex­i­co City, and Lans­ing, Michi­gan. But his intel­lec­tu­al expe­ri­ence exceed­ed even his clear­ly for­mi­da­ble his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al expe­ri­ence: he engaged in not just psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry and prac­tice but the­o­log­i­cal schol­ar­ship, polit­i­cal cri­tique, and what he called a kind of “mys­ti­cism.”

To the wider pub­lic, which first got to know him through his 1956 best­seller The Art of Lov­ing: An Enquiry into the Nature of Love, Fromm — who had already expe­ri­enced so much of human­i­ty — was an author­i­ty on human rela­tion­ships. Before one can love, one must, in a broad sense, be able to lis­ten, and he treats that sub­ject at length in The Art of Lis­ten­ing, a posthu­mous­ly pub­lished book adapt­ed from a 1974 sem­i­nar in Switzer­land.

Speak­ing in terms of psy­cho­analy­sis, Fromm objects to fram­ing lis­ten­ing as a “tech­nique,” since that word applies “to the mechan­i­cal, to that which is not alive, while the prop­er word for deal­ing with that which is alive is ‘art.’ ” And so if “psy­cho­analy­sis is a process of under­stand­ing man’s mind, par­tic­u­lar­ly that part which is con­scious… it is an art like the under­stand­ing of poet­ry.” He then pro­vides six basic rules for this art as fol­lows:

  1. The basic rule for prac­tic­ing this art is the com­plete con­cen­tra­tion of the lis­ten­er.
  2. Noth­ing of impor­tance must be on his mind, he must be opti­mal­ly free from anx­i­ety as well as from greed.
  3. He must pos­sess a freely-work­ing imag­i­na­tion which is suf­fi­cient­ly con­crete to be expressed in words.
  4. He must be endowed with a capac­i­ty for empa­thy with anoth­er per­son and strong enough to feel the expe­ri­ence of the oth­er as if it were his own.
  5. The con­di­tion for such empa­thy is a cru­cial facet of the capac­i­ty for love. To under­stand anoth­er means to love him — not in the erot­ic sense but in the sense of reach­ing out to him and of over­com­ing the fear of los­ing one­self.
  6. Under­stand­ing and lov­ing are insep­a­ra­ble. If they are sep­a­rate, it is a cere­bral process and the door to essen­tial under­stand­ing remains closed.

From­m’s rules apply not just out­side his pro­fes­sion but inde­pen­dent­ly of era or cul­ture: wher­ev­er you are or when­ev­er it hap­pens to be, you can always prac­tice free­ing your mind so as to con­cen­trate as com­plete­ly as pos­si­ble on the per­son talk­ing to you, hon­ing your imag­i­na­tion so as to vivid­ly expe­ri­ence in your mind what they have to ver­bal­ly com­mu­ni­cate. Of course, to love, in From­m’s sense, remains a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge in this process, and for humans may well stand as the chal­lenge of exis­tence. But whether or not you cred­it psy­cho­analy­sis itself, the fact remains that we all must, to the great­est extent pos­si­ble, under­stand one anoth­er’s minds as our own; the very sur­vival of human­i­ty has always depend­ed on it.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Empa­thy: A Quick Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

We Are Wired to Be Kind: How Evo­lu­tion Gave Us Empa­thy, Com­pas­sion & Grat­i­tude

How to Lis­ten to Music: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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