Who Really Built the Egyptian Pyramids—And How Did They Do It?

Although it’s cer­tain­ly more plau­si­ble than hypothe­ses like ancient aliens or lizard peo­ple, the idea that slaves built the Egypt­ian pyra­mids is no more true. It derives from cre­ative read­ings of Old Tes­ta­ment sto­ries and tech­ni­col­or Cecil B. Demille spec­ta­cles, and was a clas­sic whataboutism used by slav­ery apol­o­gists. The notion has “plagued Egypt­ian schol­ars for cen­turies,” writes Eric Betz at Dis­cov­er. But, he adds emphat­i­cal­ly, “Slaves did not build the pyra­mids.” Who did?

The evi­dence sug­gests they were built by a force of skilled labor­ers, as the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above explains. These were cadres of elite con­struc­tion work­ers who were well-fed and housed dur­ing their stint. “Many Egyp­tol­o­gists,” includ­ing archae­ol­o­gist Mark Lehn­er, who has exca­vat­ed a city of work­ers in Giza, “sub­scribe to the hypothe­ses that the pyra­mids were… built by a rotat­ing labor force in a mod­u­lar, team-based kind of orga­ni­za­tion,” Jonathan Shaw writes at Har­vard Mag­a­zine. Graf­fi­ti dis­cov­ered at the site iden­ti­fies team names like “Friends of Khu­fu” and “Drunk­ards of Menkau­re.”

The exca­va­tion also uncov­ered “tremen­dous quan­ti­ties of cat­tle, sheep, and goat bone, ‘enough to feed sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple, even if they ate meat every day,’ adds Lehn­er,” sug­gest­ing that work­ers were “fed like roy­al­ty.” Anoth­er exca­va­tion by Lehner’s friend Zahi Hawass, famed Egypt­ian archae­ol­o­gist and expert on the Great Pyra­mid, has found work­er ceme­ter­ies at the foot of the pyra­mids, mean­ing that those who per­ished were buried in a place of hon­or. This was incred­i­bly haz­ardous work, and the peo­ple who under­took it were cel­e­brat­ed and rec­og­nized for their achieve­ment.

Labor­ers were also work­ing off an oblig­a­tion, some­thing every Egypt­ian owed to those above them and, ulti­mate­ly, to their pharaoh. But it was not a mon­e­tary debt. Lehn­er describes what ancient Egyp­tians called bak, a kind of feu­dal duty. While there were slaves in Egypt, the builders of the pyra­mids were maybe more like the Amish, he says, per­form­ing the same kind of oblig­a­tory com­mu­nal labor as a barn rais­ing. In that con­text, when we look at the Great Pyra­mid, “you have to say ‘This is a hell of a barn!’’’

The evi­dence unearthed by Lehn­er, Hawass, and oth­ers has “dealt a seri­ous blow to the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of a pyra­mid build­ing,” writes Shaw, “with Charl­ton Hes­ton as Moses inton­ing, ‘Pharaoh, let my peo­ple go!’” Recent arche­ol­o­gy has also dealt a blow to extrater­res­tri­al or time-trav­el expla­na­tions, which begin with the assump­tion that ancient Egyp­tians could not have pos­sessed the know-how and skill to build such struc­tures over 4,000 years ago. Not so. Ver­i­ta­si­um explains the incred­i­ble feats of mov­ing the out­er stones with­out wheels and trans­port­ing the gran­ite core of the pyra­mids 620 miles from its quar­ry to Giza.

Ancient Egyp­tians could plot direc­tions on the com­pass, though they had no com­pass­es. They could make right angles and lev­els and thus had the tech­nol­o­gy required to design the pyra­mids. What about dig­ging up the Great Pyramid’s 2 mil­lion blocks of yel­low lime­stone? As we know, this was done by a skilled work­force, who quar­ried an “Olympic swimming-pool’s worth of stone every eight days” for 23 years to build the Great Pyra­mid, notes Joe Han­son in the PBS It’s Okay to Be Smart video above. They did so using the only met­al avail­able to them, cop­per.

This may sound incred­i­ble, but mod­ern exper­i­ments have shown that this amount of stone could be quar­ried and moved, using the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able, by a team of 1,200 to 1,500 work­ers, around the same num­ber of peo­ple archae­ol­o­gists believe to have been on-site dur­ing con­struc­tion. The lime­stone was quar­ried direct­ly at the site (in fact the Sphinx was most­ly dug out of the earth, rather than built atop it). How was the stone moved? Egyp­tol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool think they may have found the answer, a ramp with stairs and a series of holes which may have been used as a pul­ley sys­tem.

Learn more about the myths and the real­i­ties of the builders of Egypt’s pyra­mids in the It’s Okay to Be Smart “Who Built the Pyra­mids, Part 1″ video above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What the Great Pyra­mids of Giza Orig­i­nal­ly Looked Like

A Walk­ing Tour Around the Pyra­mids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Take a 360° Inter­ac­tive Tour Inside the Great Pyra­mid of Giza

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

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

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How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe: Understanding the Great Divide Between North & South

Pra­da, Alfa Romeo, Pel­le­gri­no, Fer­rari, Illy, Lam­borgh­i­ni, Guc­ci: these are a few Ital­ian cor­po­ra­tions we all know, though we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that they’re all from the north of Italy. The same is true, in fact, of most Ital­ian brands that now enjoy glob­al recog­ni­tion, and accord­ing to the analy­sis pre­sent­ed in the Real­LifeLore video above, that’s not a coin­ci­dence. More than 160 years after the uni­fi­ca­tion of Italy, the south remains an eco­nom­ic and social under-per­former com­pared to the north, reflect­ed in mea­sures like the Human Devel­op­ment Index, GDP per capi­ta, and even vot­er turnout. At this point, the dis­par­i­ty between the two halves of the coun­try looks stark­er than that between the for­mer East and West Ger­many.

The rea­sons begin with geog­ra­phy: besides its obvi­ous prox­im­i­ty to the rest of Europe, north­ern Italy is home to the high­ly nav­i­ga­ble Po Riv­er and its sur­round­ing val­ley, the fresh­wa­ter (and hydro­elec­tric pow­er) sources of the Alps, and the deep-water ports at Tri­este and Genoa. What’s more, it does­n’t much over­lap with the fault zone under the Apen­nine Moun­tains of cen­tral and south­ern Italy, and thus isn’t as exposed to the earth­quakes that have tak­en such a toll over the cen­turies. Nor are any of the coun­try’s active vol­ca­noes — includ­ing Mt. Vesu­vius, which destroyed Pom­peii in the year 79 and killed thou­sands of Neapoli­tans in 1631 — locat­ed in the north.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the polit­i­cal fates of what would become north­ern and south­ern Italy also diverged. Large parts of the south expe­ri­enced rule by Greeks, Arabs, Nor­mans, Spaniards, and Aus­tri­an Hab­s­burgs. As the video’s nar­ra­tion tells the sto­ry, “The long reign of for­eign pow­ers through­out south­ern Italy estab­lished a cul­ture of absen­tee land­lords, large land hold­ings worked by peas­ants, and feu­dal­ism that per­sist­ed for much longer than it did in the north, which for cen­turies after the Mid­dle Ages was con­trolled by var­i­ous thriv­ing, inde­pen­dent­ly gov­erned com­munes and city-states that built up large amounts of trust, or social cap­i­tal, between the peo­ple who lived there and the insti­tu­tions they built.”

Even at the time of uni­fi­ca­tion, south­ern Italy had less infra­struc­ture than north­ern Italy, a dif­fer­ence that remains painful­ly obvi­ous to any trav­el­ers attempt­ing to make their way across the coun­try today. It also had quite a lot of catch­ing up to do with regard to indus­tri­al out­put and lit­er­a­cy rates. Though cer­tain gaps have nar­rowed, the north-south divide has actu­al­ly become more pro­nounced in cer­tain ways since, not least due to the recrude­s­cence of Mafia influ­ence since the Sec­ond World War (a major fac­tor in the per­sis­tent lack of a bridge to Sici­ly, as recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). Not to say that each half is homo­ge­neous with­in itself: spend enough time in any of the regions that con­sti­tute either one, and it will come to feel like a dis­tinct nation unto itself. Even­tu­al­ly, you may also find your­self in agree­ment with the Ital­ians who insist that Italy nev­er real­ly uni­fied in the first place.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why There Isn’t a Bridge from Italy to Sici­ly – and Why the 2,000-Year-Old Dream of Build­ing the Bridge May Soon Be Real­ized

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books

Nobody reads books any­more. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve prob­a­bly heard it expressed fair­ly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiq­ui­ty. Dur­ing that time, as ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the edu­cat­ed elite that had sup­port­ed it. The copy­ing of sec­u­lar texts slowed, and final­ly ceased. The books in Roman libraries, pub­lic and pri­vate, crum­bled on their shelves. Only a small con­tin­gent of sur­vivors found their way into monas­ter­ies.” As went the read­ing cul­ture of the empire, so went the empire itself.

Some may be tempt­ed to draw par­al­lels with cer­tain coun­tries in exis­tence today. But what may be more sur­pris­ing is the extent of Roman read­ing at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined them­selves by a sophis­ti­cat­ed lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion, and filled their cities with texts.”

Those includ­ed the Acta Diur­na, a kind of pro­to-news­pa­per carved into stone or met­al and dis­played in pub­lic places. But from the reign of Augus­tus onward, “the city of Rome boast­ed an impres­sive array of pub­lic libraries,” filled with texts writ­ten on papyrus scrolls, and lat­er — espe­cial­ly in the third and fourth cen­turies — on codices, whose for­mat close­ly resem­bles books as we know them today.

Rome even had taber­nae librari­ae, which we’d rec­og­nize as book­stores, whose tech­niques includ­ed paint­ing the titles of best­sellers on their exte­ri­or columns. Some of them also pub­lished the books they sold, set­ting an ear­ly exam­ple of what we’d call “ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion.” Roman read­ers of the first cen­tu­ry would all have had at least some famil­iar­i­ty with Mar­tial’s Epi­grams, but even such a big con­tem­po­rary hit would have been out­sold by a clas­sic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any fam­i­ly with a library owned.” With 99 per­cent of its lit­er­a­ture lost to us, we’re unlike­ly ever to deter­mine if, like mod­ern-day Amer­i­ca, ancient Rome was real­ly sat­u­rat­ed with less-respectable works, its own equiv­a­lents of self help, busi­ness mem­oir, and genre fic­tion. Who knows? Per­haps Rome, too, had roman­ta­sy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Was Actu­al­ly Lost When the Library of Alexan­dria Burned?

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

The First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Cen­tu­ry Space Trav­el­ogue A True Sto­ry

How 99% of Ancient Lit­er­a­ture Was Lost

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The 1927 Film Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026–and It Hits Close to Home

Ultra-tall high-ris­es against dark skies. A huge dis­tance between the rich and the poor. Rob­ber barons at the helm of large-scale indus­tri­al oper­a­tions that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intel­li­gent enough to dis­place man. These have all been stan­dard ele­ments of dystopi­an visions so long that few of us could man­age to imag­ine a grim future with­out includ­ing at least a cou­ple of them. We’ve all seen these ele­ments used before, and they owe much of their stay­ing pow­er to the impact they first made in Fritz Lang’s cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle Metrop­o­lis, which pre­miered 98 years ago. Many imi­ta­tions have since passed through pop­u­lar cul­ture, most of which haven’t mas­tered the tech­niques that gave the orig­i­nal its pow­er.

“Set in a futur­is­tic urban dystopia, the film por­trays a divid­ed soci­ety where the wealthy elite live in lux­u­ri­ous sky­scrap­ers while the oppressed work­ing class toil under­ground,” writes Pruethicheth Lert-udom­pruk­sa at the IAAC blog. “The film explores themes of class strug­gle, social inequal­i­ty, and the dehu­man­iz­ing effects of indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

One of those the­me’s strongest icons is the Tow­er of Babel, a loom­ing sky­scraper that “sym­bol­izes the stark divi­sion between the priv­i­leged and the oppressed.” As Paul Bat­ters writes at the Sil­ver Screen Clas­sics blog, “like the zig­gu­rats of Ur, the pyra­mids and tem­ples of Egypt,” that build­ing and oth­er ele­ments real­ized by the film’s ground­break­ing visu­al design add up to a tit­u­lar “city that dom­i­nates human­i­ty.”

The loss of human­i­ty is the prime con­cern of the Junkies video essay at the top of the post, which explains sev­er­al ways Lang and his col­lab­o­ra­tors con­vey that phe­nom­e­non through light, shad­ow, and per­spec­tive — light, shad­ow, and per­spec­tive being the main tools avail­able to a black-and-white silent film. The One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma video essay just above cov­ers more such aspects of the pic­ture’s con­struc­tion, as well as its his­tor­i­cal con­text: “In nine­teen-twen­ties Europe, a rad­i­cal form of nation­al­ism called fas­cism was com­ing to promi­nence, and six years after the film’s release, Lang found him­self exiled to Amer­i­ca for his refusal to join the Nazi par­ty.”

For quite some time, the ver­sions of Metrop­o­lis that peo­ple could see were cen­sored or oth­er­wise incom­plete cuts; only in 2008 did it under­go a com­plete restora­tion. But now, it’s eas­i­er than ever to see that its “win­ning com­bi­na­tion of cam­era shots and angles, light­ing con­trasts, and shot com­po­si­tion real­ly do well to depict human­i­ty as becom­ing sub­servient to tech­nol­o­gy. And so, per­haps today, more so than in 1927, it is eas­i­er to read the mes­sage that Lang is try­ing to por­tray through the cin­e­mat­ic devices he employs.” Watch­ing the impov­er­ished work­ers of Metrop­o­lis become part of the machine they work for, while its idle rich “become part of the machine by sub­mis­sion [to] plea­sure,” we might reflect upon the astute­ness of the choice to set the film’s sto­ry in the year 2026.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Behold Beau­ti­ful Orig­i­nal Movie Posters for Metrop­o­lis from France, Swe­den, Ger­many, Japan & Beyond

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

Despite its sta­tus as one of the most wide­ly known and stud­ied epic poems of all time, Home­r’s Ili­ad has proven sur­pris­ing­ly resis­tant to adap­ta­tion. How­ev­er much inspi­ra­tion it has pro­vid­ed to mod­ern-day nov­el­ists work­ing in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions, it’s trans­lat­ed some­what less pow­er­ful­ly to visu­al media. Per­haps peo­ple still watch Wolf­gang Petersen’s Troy, the very loose, Brad Pitt-star­ring cin­e­mat­ic Ili­ad adap­ta­tion from 2004. But chances are, a cen­tu­ry or two from now, human­i­ty on the whole will still be more impressed by the 52 illus­tra­tions of the Ambrosian Ili­ad, which was made in Con­stan­tino­ple or Alexan­dria around the turn of the sixth cen­tu­ry.

As not­ed at HistoryofInformation.com, “along with the Vergilius Vat­i­canus [pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture] and the Vergilius Romanus, [the Ambrosian Ili­ad] is one of only three illus­trat­ed man­u­scripts of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture that sur­vived from antiq­ui­ty.” It’s also the only ancient man­u­script that depicts scenes from the Ili­ad. Its illus­tra­tions, which “show the names of places and char­ac­ters,” offer “an insight into ear­ly man­u­script illu­mi­na­tion.” They “show a con­sid­er­able diver­si­ty of com­po­si­tion­al schemes, from sin­gle com­bat to com­plex bat­tle scenes,” as Kurt Weitz­mann writes in Late Antique and Ear­ly Chris­t­ian Book Illu­mi­na­tion. “This indi­cates that, by that time, Ili­ad illus­tra­tion had passed through var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment and thus had a long his­to­ry behind it.”

Above, you can see the Ambrosian Ili­ad’s illus­tra­tions of the cap­ture of Dolon (top), Achilles sac­ri­fic­ing to Zeus for Patro­clus’ safe return (mid­dle), and Hec­tor killing Patro­clus as Autome­don escapes (bot­tom). You can find more scans at the War­burg Insti­tute Icono­graph­ic Data­base, along with oth­er Ili­ad-relat­ed arti­facts. Some of the lat­er artis­tic ren­di­tions of Homer in that col­lec­tion date from the fif­teenth, sev­en­teenth, eigh­teenth, and even the nine­teenth cen­turies, each inter­pret­ing these age-old poems for their own time. Indeed, the Ili­ad and Odyssey have proven endur­ing­ly res­o­nant for the bet­ter part of three mil­len­nia, and there’s no rea­son to believe that they won’t con­tin­ue to find new artis­tic forms for just as long to come. But there’s some­thing espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful about see­ing Homer ren­dered by artists who, though they may have come cen­turies and cen­turies after the blind poet him­self, knew full well what it was to live in antiq­ui­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vat­i­can Dig­i­tizes a 1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid

One of the Best Pre­served Ancient Man­u­scripts of the Ili­ad Is Now Dig­i­tized: See the “Bankes Homer” Man­u­script in High Res­o­lu­tion (Cir­ca 150 C.E.)

A Handy, Detailed Map Shows the Home­towns of Char­ac­ters in the Ili­ad

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

See the Ili­ad Per­formed as a One-Woman Show in a Mon­tre­al Bar by McGill Uni­ver­si­ty Clas­sics Pro­fes­sor Lynn Kozak

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Ili­ad & Odyssey Using Stick-Man Draw­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence

For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er that would reach the heav­ens. Deter­mined to pun­ish our effron­tery, God not only destroyed the work in progress, but ren­dered our lan­guages mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble in order to hin­der any fur­ther attempts to do it again. Or at least that’s how one sto­ry goes.

You may not sub­scribe to a lit­er­al read­ing of the account of the Tow­er of Babel as it appears in the Bible’s Book of Gen­e­sis, but accord­ing to the Hochela­ga video above, the struc­ture does have a fair­ly plau­si­ble basis in his­to­ry.

It could be a leg­endary ver­sion of Ete­me­nan­ki, a Mesopotami­an zig­gu­rat built to hon­or the god Mar­duk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its con­struc­tion required mobi­liz­ing the man­pow­er of all human­i­ty. But it real­ly did exist, as evi­denced by its ruins dis­cov­ered at the site of the ancient city of Baby­lon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A cuneiform-cov­ered tablet con­ve­nient­ly found at the same loca­tion describes a con­struc­tion project of Ete­me­nanki’s size as using mate­ri­als like bitu­men and baked brick, which aligns with bib­li­cal details of the Tow­er of Babel, as do the Greek his­to­ri­an Herodotus’s ref­er­ences to its lay­out and struc­ture. Also rel­e­vant is the Baby­lo­ni­ans’ 587 BC inva­sion of Jerusalem, which brought cap­tives to the cap­i­tal. It’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that some of those dis­placed Jews would have the loom­ing Ete­me­nan­ki in mind when they went on to write the his­to­ries that would ulti­mate­ly find their way into the Hebrew Bible. They may have had no hope of return­ing to their home­land, but they must, at least, have felt rea­son­ably cer­tain that Mar­duk’s days were num­bered.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan

Years ago, back in 2016, we fea­tured a 1950 Super­man poster that urged stu­dents to defend the Amer­i­can way and fight dis­crim­i­na­tion every­where. Today, we present anoth­er chap­ter from Super­man’s lit­tle-known his­to­ry as a Civ­il Rights defend­er.

The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now mem­ber­ship in the Ku Klux Klan starts to rise again. Enter Stet­son Kennedy, a human rights activist, who man­ages to infil­trate the KKK and then fig­ures out an inge­nious way to take them down. He con­tacts the pro­duc­ers of the pop­u­lar Adven­tures of Super­man radio show, and pitch­es them on a new sto­ry­line: Super­man meets and defeats the KKK. Need­ing a new ene­my to van­quish, the pro­duc­ers green­light the idea.

The 16-episode series, “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” aired in June 1946 and effec­tive­ly chipped away at the Klan’s mys­tique, grad­u­al­ly reveal­ing their secret code­words and rit­u­als. Lis­ten to the episodes above. And take heart in know­ing this: Accord­ing to Stephen J. Dub­n­er and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freako­nom­icsThe Clan of the Fiery Cross was “the great­est sin­gle con­trib­u­tor to the weak­en­ing of the Ku Klux Klan.” Mocked and triv­i­al­ized, the Klan’s num­bers went back into decline.

For more infor­ma­tion on this chap­ter in super­hero his­to­ry, read the well-reviewed YA book, Super­man Ver­sus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Sto­ry of How the Icon­ic Super­hero Bat­tled the Men of Hate. Also find more infor­ma­tion on these episodes at the Super­man Home­page.

To hear more orig­i­nal Super­man radio shows, head over to Archive.org.

Note: There is a lit­tle bit of a con­tro­ver­sy about the exact role Stet­son Kennedy played in infil­trat­ing the Klan. You can read up on that here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

1950 Super­man Poster Urged Kids to Defend All Amer­i­cans, Regard­less of Their Race, Reli­gion or Nation­al Ori­gin

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

75 Years of Super­man in 2 Min­utes

Nine Clas­sic Super­man Car­toons Restored and Now on YouTube

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The Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of: An Introduction to Tseng Kwong Chi

Once, the Unit­ed States was known for send­ing forth the world’s most com­plained-about inter­na­tion­al tourists; today, that dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion arguably belongs to Chi­na. But it was­n’t so long ago that the Chi­nese tourist was a prac­ti­cal­ly unheard-of phe­nom­e­non, espe­cial­ly in the West. That’s an impor­tant con­tex­tu­al ele­ment to under­stand when con­sid­er­ing the work of pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tseng Kwong Chi, who trav­eled around Amer­i­ca tak­ing pic­tures of him­self at var­i­ous rec­og­niz­able mon­u­ments and land­marks while wear­ing a suit most com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chair­man Mao. The fig­ure that emerged from this project is the sub­ject of the new Nerd­writer video above.

“He called this char­ac­ter ‘an ambigu­ous ambas­sador,’ and, in a series he called ‘East Meets West,’ posed him — posed him­self — in front of var­i­ous icons of touris­tic Amer­i­ca,” writes Bri­an Dil­lon in New York­er piece on Tsen­g’s work. “He leaps into the air in front of the Brook­lyn Bridge, stands impas­sive beside Mick­ey Mouse at Dis­ney­land, gazes off into the dis­tance with Nia­gara Falls behind him.”

Inspired by Richard Nixon’s 1972 vis­it to Chi­na and Deng Xiaop­ing’s 1979 vis­it to the U.S., Tseng pro­duced most of these pho­tos in the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies, and even “took the ambigu­ous ambas­sador to Europe, where he appears hero­ic before the Arc de Tri­om­phe, and diminu­tive between two police­men at the Tow­er of Lon­don.”

Born in British Hong Kong, then par­tial­ly raised in Cana­da and edu­cat­ed in Paris, Tseng arrived in New York in 1979, ready to join the down­town scene that includ­ed Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ann Mag­nu­son, Cindy Sher­man, and Kei­th Har­ing. It’s for his doc­u­men­ta­tion of Har­ing’s work, in fact, that he remains most wide­ly known, 35 years after his own AIDS-relat­ed death. But now, as tak­ing pic­tures of one­self in famous places around the world becomes an increas­ing­ly uni­ver­sal prac­tice, “East Meets West” draws more and more atten­tion. Maybe, in an art world where cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty is so fierce­ly declared and defend­ed, the very ambi­gu­i­ty of the ambas­sador por­trayed by Tseng — who, as Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak empha­sizes, “did­n’t want to be known as a Chi­nese artist, or an Asian-Amer­i­can artist, or a gay artist; he just want­ed to be an artist” — has become that much more com­pelling.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of Gor­don Parks: An Intro­duc­tion to the Renais­sance Amer­i­can Artist

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Paint­ings of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Video Essay

How Dorothea Lange Shot Migrant Moth­er Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

The Pho­to That Trig­gered China’s Dis­as­trous Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (1966)

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bill Cun­ning­ham (RIP) on Liv­ing La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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