Spanish Flu: A Warning from History

Two years ago his­to­ri­ans marked the 100th anniver­sary of the Span­ish Flu, a world­wide pan­dem­ic that seemed to be dis­ap­pear­ing down the mem­o­ry hole. Not so fast, said his­to­ri­ans, we need to remem­ber the hor­ror. Hap­py belat­ed anniver­sary, said 2020, hold my beer. And so here we are. As I write this, the Pres­i­dent wheezed through an Address to the Nation which calmed no fears and sent Dow futures tum­bling. I scrolled down my news feed to see that Tom Han­ks and his wife both have it. Our god is an amoral one, and its nood­ly appendages touch all.

So let’s put our cur­rent moment into per­spec­tive with this 10+ minute his­to­ry on the Span­ish Flu from Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. Here are the num­bers: it killed 20 mil­lion peo­ple accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary accounts. Lat­er sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans revised that num­ber to some­where between 50 to 100 mil­lion.

“This virus killed more peo­ple in the first 25 weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in 25 years,” says histo­ri­an of med­i­cine Dr. Mary Dob­son. And unlike our cur­rent COVID-19 strain, this strain of flu went after 20 to 40 year olds with a vengeance. The symp­toms were graph­ic and unpleasant–people drown­ing in their own phlegm, blood shoot­ing out of noses and ears, peo­ple drop­ping down dead in the street.

Where did it start? Cer­tain­ly not in Spain–it gained that nick­name because the first cas­es were record­ed in the Span­ish press. One the­o­ry is that it start­ed in Kansas and found its way over­seas, from bar­racks to the front­lines. It might has come from birds or pigs, but sci­en­tists still don’t know how it jumps from species to species and how it quick­ly evolves with­in humans to infect each oth­er.

Right now, it seems like COVID-19 can sub­side if coun­tries can work quick­ly, like in Chi­na. But his­to­ry has a warn­ing too. As Europe and Amer­i­ca cel­e­brat­ed Armistice Day at the end of the war, the flu seemed to be going away too. Instead it came roar­ing back in a sec­ond wave, dead­lier than the first.

Some famous folks who got the virus but sur­vived includ­ed movie stars Lil­lian Gish and Mary Pick­ford, right at the height of their fame; Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son, who was so out of it (though recov­er­ing) that some his­to­ri­ans blame the weak­ness­es in the Treaty of Ver­sailles on him. Artist Edvard Munch con­tract­ed it (which seems fit­ting, con­sid­er­ing his obses­sions) and paint­ed sev­er­al self-por­traits dur­ing his ill­ness. Ray­mond Chan­dler, Walt Dis­ney, Gre­ta Gar­bo, Franz Kaf­ka, Geor­gia O’Keeffe, and Kather­ine Anne Porter all sur­vived.

Oth­ers weren’t so lucky: painter of sen­su­ous, gold leaf paint­ings Gus­tav Klimt died from it, as did poet and pro­to-sur­re­al­ist Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, and artist Egon Schiele. (And so did Don­ald Trump’s grand­pa).

The Span­ish Flu nev­er real­ly went away. There were still cas­es in the ‘50s, but we humans evolved with it and it became a sea­son­al type of flu like many oth­ers. Flu virus­es con­stant­ly evolve and mutate, and that’s why it is very dif­fi­cult to cre­ate vac­cines that can stop them.

If you’ve read this far, one last thing: GO WASH YOUR HANDS AND STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Wide­spread Epi­dem­ic Far Worse Than Ebo­la at Well Over 50 Per­cent” (2015)

Hear the Sounds of World War I: A Gas Attack Record­ed on the Front Line, and the Moment the Armistice End­ed the War

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Meaning of Life According to Simone de Beauvoir

When some­one pre­sumes to explain the mean­ing of life, they usu­al­ly draw, how­ev­er vague­ly, on reli­gion. Many a philoso­pher has ven­tured a sec­u­lar answer, but it’s hard to com­pete with the ancient sto­ries of the world’s major faiths. The rich­ness of their metaphors sur­pass­es his­tor­i­cal truth; humans, it seems, real­ly “can­not bear very much real­i­ty,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quar­tets. Maybe we need sto­ries to keep us going, which is why we love Pla­to, whose myth of the ori­gins of love in his novel­la, the Sym­po­sium, remains one of the most mov­ing in the West­ern philo­soph­i­cal canon.

Pla­to’s philo­soph­i­cal project was a sto­ry that exis­ten­tial­ists like Simone de Beau­voir were eager to be rid of, along with the hoary old myths of reli­gion. The Athe­ni­an’s pious ide­al­ism “dis­missed the phys­i­cal world as a flawed reflec­tion of high­er truth and unchang­ing ideals,” says Iseult Gille­spie in the TED-Ed video above. “But for de Beau­voir, ear­ly life was enthralling, sen­su­al, and any­thing but sta­t­ic.” Mate­r­i­al real­i­ty is not an imper­fect copy, but the medi­um into which we are thrown, to exer­cise free­dom and respon­si­bil­i­ty and deter­mine our own pur­pos­es, as de Beau­voir argued in The Ethics of Ambi­gu­i­ty.

For de Beau­voir, as for her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre, the “eth­i­cal imper­a­tive to cre­ate our own life’s mean­ing,” pre­cedes any pre-exist­ing mean­ing to which we might attach our­selves, and which might lead us to deny free­dom to oth­ers. “A free­dom which is inter­est­ed only in deny­ing free­dom,” she wrote, “must be denied.” We might think of such a state­ment in terms of Karl Popper’s para­dox of intol­er­ance, but the idea led de Beau­voir in a dif­fer­ent direction—away from the lib­er­al­ism Pop­per defend­ed and in a more rad­i­cal philo­soph­i­cal direc­tion.

De Beauvoir’s exis­ten­tial­ist fem­i­nism asked fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about the giv­en cat­e­gories of social iden­ti­ty that lock us into pre­fig­ured roles and shape our lives with­out our con­sent or con­trol. She real­ized that social con­struc­tions of womanhood—not a Pla­ton­ic ide­al but a his­tor­i­cal production—restricted her from ful­ly real­iz­ing her cho­sen life’s mean­ing. “Despite her pro­lif­ic writ­ing, teach­ing, and activism, de Beau­voir strug­gled to be tak­en seri­ous­ly by her male peers.” This was not only a polit­i­cal prob­lem, it was also an exis­ten­tial one.

As de Beau­voir would argue in The Sec­ond Sex, cat­e­gories of gen­der turned women into “others”—imperfect copies of men, who are con­strued as the ide­al. Lat­er the­o­rists took up the cri­tique to show how race, sex­u­al­i­ty, class, and oth­er sto­ries about human iden­ti­ty restrict the abil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als to deter­mine their lives’ mean­ing. Instead, we find our­selves pre­sent­ed with social nar­ra­tives that explain our exis­tence to us and tell us what we can hope to accom­plish and what we can­not.

De Beau­voir was also a sto­ry­teller. Her per­son­al expe­ri­ences fig­ured cen­tral­ly in her phi­los­o­phy; she pub­lished sev­er­al acclaimed nov­els, and along with Nobel-win­ning nov­el­ists and play­wrights Sartre and Albert Camus, made Exis­ten­tial­ism the most lit­er­ary of philo­soph­i­cal move­ments. But when it came to grand abstrac­tions like the “mean­ing of life,” the answer all of them gave in their philo­soph­i­cal work was that such things aren’t hov­er­ing above us like Pla­to’s ide­al forms. Each of us must fig­ure it out our­selves with­in our flawed, imper­fect, indi­vid­ual lives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Simone de Beau­voir Defends Exis­ten­tial­ism & Her Fem­i­nist Mas­ter­piece, The Sec­ond Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Inter­view

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and a Fem­i­nist (1960)

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

The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

All of us have tried to come to grips with the coro­n­avirus in dif­fer­ent ways. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured online cours­es to get you con­ver­sant in the sci­ence around the pan­dem­ic, but read­ers of this site will also have sought out the most per­ti­nent works of his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture. That goes espe­cial­ly for those in need of read­ing mate­r­i­al while in states of quar­an­tine or lock­down (self-imposed or oth­er­wise), and any list of rec­om­mend­ed books must include Daniel Defoe’s A Jour­nal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’ The Plague. (I recent­ly wrote about the expe­ri­ence of read­ing that last in Korea, where I live, for the Los Ange­les Review of Books.) Both fic­tion­al­ize local out­breaks of the bubon­ic plague, but how far and wide did that hor­rif­ic and much-mythol­o­gized dis­ease actu­al­ly spread?

You can see exact­ly how far and wide in the ani­mat­ed his­tor­i­cal map above, cre­at­ed by a Youtu­ber called Emper­or­Tiger­star. It main­ly cov­ers the peri­od of 431 BC to 1353 AD, dur­ing most of which the plague looks to have occurred in Europe, the Mid­dle East, and Africa with some reg­u­lar­i­ty. Up until the 1330s, the out­breaks stay small enough that you may have to view the map in fullscreen mode to ensure that you even see them.

But even the most casu­al stu­dents of his­to­ry know what hap­pened next: the best-known occur­rence of the Black Death, whose peak last­ed from 1347 to 1351 and which claimed some­where between 75 to 200 mil­lion lives (includ­ing rough­ly half of Europe’s entire pop­u­la­tion). Ren­dered, suit­ably, in black, the plague’s spread comes even­tu­al­ly to look on the map like a sea of ink splashed vio­lent­ly across mul­ti­ple con­ti­nents.

The plague hard­ly died with the 1350s, a fact this map acknowl­edges. It would, writes Emper­or­Tiger­star, “take years to go away, and even then there would be local out­breaks in indi­vid­ual cities for cen­turies.” These Black Death after­shocks, “big in their own right,” include the Great Plague of Milan in the 1630s, the Great Plague of Seville in the 1640s, and the Great Plague of Lon­don in the 1660s — the sub­ject of Defoe’s nov­el. When Camus wrote The Plague in 1947, the Alger­ian city of Oran in which he set its sto­ry had expe­ri­enced its last out­break of the dis­ease just three years before (at least the fifth such expe­ri­ence in its his­to­ry). Though har­row­ing sto­ries are even now com­ing out of places like mod­ern-day Milan, the coro­n­avirus has yet to match the grue­some dead­li­ness of the plagues fea­tured in either of these books. But unless we under­stand how epi­demics afflict­ed human­i­ty in the past, we can hard­ly han­dle them prop­er­ly in the present.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Wide­spread Epi­dem­ic Far Worse Than Ebo­la at Well Over 50 Per­cent” (2015)

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

The Strange Danc­ing Plague of 1518: When Hun­dreds of Peo­ple in France Could Not Stop Danc­ing for Months

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

How Schools Can Start Teaching Online in a Short Period of Time: Free Tutorials from the Stanford Online High School

Image by King of Hearts, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick note: The Stan­ford Online High School–an inde­pen­dent high school that oper­ates ful­ly online–has cre­at­ed video tuto­ri­als designed for schools that may need to close class­rooms and piv­ot online. “All guid­ance is plat­form-agnos­tic, focus­ing on the essen­tial steps for prepar­ing to teach online in a short peri­od of time.”

In addi­tion to this videos, the Online High School will host a free webi­nar today at 2pm Cal­i­for­nia time. You can reg­is­ter here and learn more about the tran­si­tion to online teach­ing.

Note: Zoom–which pro­vides a turnkey video con­fer­enc­ing solu­tion–has made its prod­uct free for K‑12 insti­tu­tions dur­ing the COVID-19 cri­sis. This can help schools spin up online cours­es quick­ly. More on that here.

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!

 

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Bill Gates Describes His Biggest Fear: “I Rate the Chance of a Widespread Epidemic Far Worse Than Ebola at Well Over 50 Percent” (2015)

What are bil­lion­aires afraid of? A wealth tax? Uni­ver­sal health­care? Immi­grants from sev­er­al spe­cif­ic places in the world? Prob­a­bly. But if you ask one bil­lion­aire, Bill Gates—who has spent the last sev­er­al years spend­ing mon­ey to com­bat dead­ly epidemics—he’ll answer with a very detailed descrip­tion of a glob­al threat to every­one, not just the hand­ful of peo­ple in his (un)tax(ed) brack­et: Pan­demics like the 1918 Span­ish flu, as he told Vox’s Ezra Klein in the 2015 video inter­view above. The dis­ease infect­ed around 27 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and killed tens of mil­lions of peo­ple from every social class.

Such events are high­ly prob­a­ble, and we should be pre­pared for them. “I rate the chance of a wide­spread epi­dem­ic far worse than Ebo­la in my life­time at well over 50 per­cent,” he says. In fact, Gates met with the pres­i­dent two years ago to urge fed­er­al action on pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness. He was heard and ignored.

Now, as the CDC faces the spread of coro­n­avirus in major cities around the coun­try, it finds itself woe­ful­ly unpre­pared for the task. “The truth is we’ve not invest­ed, we’ve under­in­vest­ed in the pub­lic health labs,” direc­tor Robert Red­field told Con­gress in recent hear­ings. “There’s not enough equip­ment, there’s not enough peo­ple, there’s not enough inter­nal capac­i­ty….”

The sit­u­a­tion looks bleak, but Gates was “opti­mistic” despite his pre­dic­tions. And why shouldn’t he be? Klein wrote: “He’s one of the rich­est men in the world,” and he also “runs a foun­da­tion immersed in the world’s prob­lems” and “can mea­sure them get­ting bet­ter.” But a dead­ly pan­dem­ic remains “the most pre­dictable cat­a­stro­phe in the his­to­ry of the human race,” writes Klein. Maybe Gates should have urged the gov­ern­ment to pre­pare by explain­ing how it would boost the oil and hotel indus­tries.

For those who can be per­suad­ed by evi­dence of a pos­si­ble pandemic’s effect on human lives, Gates mod­eled how a dis­ease as dead­ly and infec­tious as the Span­ish flu would act today. “With­in 60 days it’s basi­cal­ly in all urban cen­ters around the entire globe,” he says. “That didn’t hap­pen with the Span­ish flu.” He explains fur­ther in the TED talk above how the “great­est risk of glob­al cat­a­stro­phe” doesn’t look like a mush­room cloud but like the spiky micro­scop­ic ball of the influen­za virus, or its equiv­a­lent. That may not be COVID-19, but what­ev­er it is, Gates has been warn­ing for years, we are not ready.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

How to Pro­tect Your­self Against COVID-19/­Coro­n­avirus

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

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

Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

Many claim Los Ange­les was “built for the car,” a half-truth at best. When the city — or rather, the city and the vast region of south­ern Cal­i­for­nia sur­round­ing it — first boomed in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, it grew accord­ing to the spread of its elec­tric rail­way net­works. But for ear­ly adopters of the auto­mo­bile (as well as the many aspi­rants close behind), its sheer size, eas­i­ly nav­i­ga­ble ter­rain, and still-low pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty made greater Los Ange­les an ide­al place to dri­ve.

After the Sec­ond World War, the days of the Pacif­ic Elec­tric and Los Ange­les Rail­road, once among the finest urban rail sys­tems in the world, were clear­ly num­bered. Both went out of ser­vice by the ear­ly 1960s, and for the next few decades the car was indeed king. One the­o­ry holds, though with imper­fect evi­dence, that Los Ange­les lost its trains because of an automak­ers’ con­spir­a­cy.

What­ev­er the cause, the long hey­day of the auto­mo­bile and its atten­dant “car cul­ture” changed mid-20th-cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. It left its bold­est mark in the city’s archi­tec­ture, a cat­e­go­ry that must sure­ly include the swoop­ing con­crete of the free­ways, but more obvi­ous­ly includes the build­ings designed to catch the eye of a human being behind the wheel cruis­ing at speed. We notice at a dif­fer­ent scale in a car than we do on foot, and so the struc­tures along Los Ange­les’ main roads — espe­cial­ly boule­vards like Wilshire, Hol­ly­wood, and Sun­set — grew more leg­i­ble to the motorist in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

That means Los Ange­les’ archi­tec­ture grew ever big­ger, bold­er, more eye-catch­ing — or, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, ever more gar­ish, ungain­ly, and imper­son­al. You can see this trans­for­ma­tion cap­tured in action from the car win­dow in the three videos fea­tured here. At the top of the post is a six-minute dri­ve through the down­town Los Ange­les of the 1940s, which begins on Bunker Hill, an area orig­i­nal­ly built up with state­ly Vic­to­ri­an hous­es in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. 

By the time of this film those hous­es had been sub­di­vid­ed into cheap apart­ments, and films noirs (such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Dead­ly) were using it as a typ­i­cal “bad neigh­bor­hood.” That atmos­phere also made it a tar­get for a 50-year “urban renew­al” project that, start­ing in the late 50s onward, scraped the hous­es off Bunker Hill and rebuilt it with cor­po­rate tow­ers and pres­tige cul­tur­al venues.

A through-the-wind­shield view of Los Ange­les in the 50s appears in the video sec­ond from the top, a 1957 dri­ve down Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. That street and that year stand at the inter­sec­tion of pre-war and post-war Los Ange­les, and the built envi­ron­ment reflects as much the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry as it does what we know think of as “mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern.”

Below that we have a dri­ve through the city so many think of when they think of Los Ange­les: the Los Ange­les of the 1960s, a seem­ing­ly lim­it­less realm of palm trees, bright­ly col­ored bill­boards, and Space Age-influ­enced tow­ers that pop out even more from their low-slung sur­round­ings when seen from the free­way — in oth­er words, the Los Ange­les Quentin Taran­ti­no recre­ates in Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood.

To get a sense of the greater sweep of change in Los Ange­les, have a look at the New York­er video above (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) that puts the down­town dri­ve from the 1940s along­side the same dri­ve repli­cat­ed in the 2010s. Pop­u­lar cul­ture may asso­ciate Los Ange­les with the will­ful era­sure of his­to­ry as much as it asso­ciates Los Ange­les with the auto­mo­bile, but traces are there for those — in a car, on foot, on a bike, or going by any form of trans­porta­tion besides — who know how to see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Amer­i­can Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Ange­les & Detroit Look Today, Com­pared to the 1930s and 1940s

Enjoy Daz­zling & Dizzy­ing 360° Vir­tu­al Tours of Los Ange­les Land­marks

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Ange­les’ Sun­set Boule­vard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

Watch 85,000 Historic Newsreel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

The “piv­ot-to-video” moment of a few years back dev­as­tat­ed writ­ers every­where with mass lay­offs as com­pa­nies scram­bled to attract pro­ject­ed mil­lions of nonex­is­tent view­ers. It’s a sto­ry about preda­to­ry media monop­o­lies and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of news, doc­u­men­tary, and opin­ion video con­tent online. While the sheer amount of video can feel over­whelm­ing, we might remem­ber that peo­ple have been get­ting their news from screens for well over a hun­dred years.

First came the news­reels. Thou­sands were pro­duced from the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry into the 1960s, when TV became the dom­i­nant screen of choice. These were ephemer­al, often frag­men­tary films, not usu­al­ly pre­served in the way of great cin­e­ma.

But while “the news­reel may be his­to­ry,” notes the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, “vast col­lec­tions of it remain, much of it unseen.” One such col­lec­tion resides at the archives of British Pathé, “a trea­sure trove of 85,000 films unri­valed in their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.”

British Pathé has dig­i­tized their col­lec­tion and made all of it—including more than 136,000 items from the Reuters his­tor­i­cal collection—freely avail­able online at their web­site and on YouTube. You’ll find there exact­ly the kind of vari­ety Richard Eder described in The New York Times in 1977, a year when peo­ple also felt “flood­ed” by news:

Most of the time [news­reels] were patchy views of a rather scat­ter­brained real­i­ty. Sneez­ing con­tests would alter­nate with politi­cians cut­ting rib­bons and South Amer­i­cans rioting.But once in a while there was some­thing unfor­get­table: the Hin­den­burg float­ed lofti­ly into sight and sud­den­ly set­tled on the ground like burn­ing tin­sel; a mid­dle-aged French­man wept at Toulon when the fleet was scut­tled. The news­reel cam­eras and the big screen pro­vid­ed an author­i­ty to these things that tele­vi­sion equip­ment could­n’t man­age. Also there was the effect of wait­ing a day or two to see a dis­as­ter you had read of. World events were dis­crete, indi­vid­ual, weighty. They did not flood us.

British Pathé pro­duced short doc­u­men­tary films on every pos­si­ble sub­ject around the world from 1910 to 2008 and might lay claim to cap­tur­ing more unfor­get­table his­tor­i­cal moments than most any oth­er news­reel ser­vice of the era. A tiny sam­pling of news­reels in their mas­sive dig­i­tal archive includes the Beat­nik makeover from 1963 at the top; a very brief film on Tol­stoy; a longer fea­turette on the Titan­ic, with inter­views from sur­vivors; and a short on the psy­che­del­ic Mel­lotron.

Among the many “British Pathé Unis­sued” videos, we find the filmed inter­view clip below with H.G. Wells in the 1930s, in which he pro­pos­es dis­ar­ma­ment, inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion, full pub­lic employ­ment, and the nation­al­iza­tion of indus­try as anti­dotes to the ris­ing tides of World War and dev­as­tat­ing social inequal­i­ty. The inter­view was “unused by Pathé edi­tors and not screened in cin­e­mas,” explains a title added at the begin­ning. One sig­nif­i­cant shift from the news­reel to the dig­i­tal age is the unprece­dent­ed abil­i­ty to bypass the cen­sors.

“Before tele­vi­sion” and the inter­net, as the archive descrip­tion points out, “peo­ple came to movie the­atres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the fore­front of cin­e­mat­ic jour­nal­ism, blend­ing infor­ma­tion with enter­tain­ment to pop­u­lar effect.” If this blend sounds some­what akin to the mass media world we inhab­it today—one filled with pro­lif­er­at­ing video explain­ers, short doc­u­men­taries, talk­ing head con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists and every oth­er pos­si­ble use of the form—perhaps it’s use­ful to remem­ber that we’ve been liv­ing in that world a very long time. It has pro­duced many thou­sands of arti­facts that can tell us where we’ve been over the past 120 years or so, if not quite how we got to where we are now.

Enter the British Pathé col­lec­tion on YouTube or their web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000,000 Min­utes of News­reel Footage by AP & British Movi­etone Released on YouTube

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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

Why New Diseases Like COVID-19 Keep Appearing in China

From Vox comes a short explain­er that delves into why virus­es like COVID-19 have often first tak­en off in Chi­na. They write:

As of ear­ly March 2020, a new coro­n­avirus, called COVID-19, is in more than 70 coun­tries and has killed more than 3,100 peo­ple, the vast major­i­ty in Chi­na. That’s where the virus emerged back in Decem­ber 2019. This isn’t a new phe­nom­e­non for Chi­na; in 2003, the SARS virus also emerged there, and under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances, before spread­ing around the world and killing near­ly 800.

Both SARS and COVID-19 are in the “coro­n­avirus” fam­i­ly, and both appear to have emerged from ani­mals in Chi­na’s noto­ri­ous wildlife mar­kets. Experts had long pre­dict­ed that these mar­kets, known to be poten­tial sources of dis­ease, would enable anoth­er out­break. The mar­kets, and the wildlife trade that sup­ports them, are the under­ly­ing prob­lem of these pan­demics; until Chi­na solves that prob­lem, more are like­ly to emerge.

Days ago, Chi­na’s wildlife-farm­ing indus­try was per­ma­nent­ly shut down by Chi­nese offi­cials.

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.