Watch World War II Unfold Day by Day: An Animated Map

in History | November 1st, 2022

In the story of World War II we all know, a handful of murderous villains and flawed yet capable defenders of democracy drive the narrative. The authors of a Kings College London project argue that this conventional history shows “a preoccupation with the culpability of statesmen.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around personalities.” But there is another way to see the causes of war: through the escalating arms race of the 1930s, despite the global push for disarmament following World War I’s devastation.

The leaders of Germany, Italy and Japan wanted war, yet their ability to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logistical contests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and finally in Tokyo,” writes historian Joseph Maiolo, “the ebb and flow of arms competition compelled leaders to make now-or-never decisions about war.” Such decisions produced a wealth of unintended consequences, and led to catastrophic losses of life. Air, sea, and land power created at an unheard-of industrial scale turned war into an assembly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larger military-industrial machine,” as theorist of war Manuel De Landa writes.

Thus, we see the enormity of the casualties of WWII. Millions of soldiers were fed to the front lines in “the need to prepare for future total wars that would demand sweeping mobilization,” writes Maiolo. Wars for global supremacy demanded all of the state’s capital, especially its human resources. The animated map above tells that story in raw numbers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Beginning with Germany’s declaration of war on Poland on September 1st, 1939, the map covers the entirety of the war, showing numbers — sometimes in the tens of millions — fluctuating wildly along the front lines of every theater.

1939 may be the only logical starting point for this presentation. Yet when it comes to understanding why World War II claimed more lives than any other war in history, the explanation must begin several years earlier with arms dealers and generals seeking bigger and bigger budgets for more sophisticated weaponry. As technical problems increased so too did the human costs, until the struggle for global supremacy during WWII became a proliferating race toward mutually assured destruction after the war’s end.

The Staggering Human Cost of World War II Visualized in a Creative, New Animated Documentary

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

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FAMOUS ARTIST DIES PENNILESS AND ALL ALONE: The Met Museum’s Fascinating Archive of Artists’ Death Notices

in Art, History, Life, Museums | October 31st, 2022

Oh to go behind the scenes at a world class museum, to discover treasures that the public never sees.

Among the most compelling — and unexpected — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are a pair of crumbing scrapbooks, their pages thick with yellowing obituaries and death notices for a wide array of late 19th and early 20th-century painters, sculptors, and photographers.

Some names, like Auguste Rodin or Jules Breton, are still familiar to many 21st-century art lovers.

Others, like Francis Davis Millet, who served as a Union Army drummer boy during the Civil War and perished on the Titanic, were much admired in their day, but have largely faded from memory.

The vast majority are requiems of a sort for those who toiled in obscurity. They may not have received much attention in life, but the circumstances of their deaths by suicide, murder, or bizarre accident had the whiff of the penny dreadful, a quality that could move a lot of newspapers. The deceased’s addresses were published, along with their names. Any tragic detail was sure to be heightened for effect, the tawdrier the better.

As the Met’s Managing Archivist, Jim Moske, who unearthed the scrapbooks four years ago while prowling for historic material for the museum’s 150th anniversary celebration, writes in Lit Hub:

Typical of the era’s crass tabloid journalism, they were crafted to wring maximum drama out of misfortune, and to excite and fix the attention of readers susceptible to raw emotional appeal and voyeurism. Their authors drew upon and reinforced stereotypes of artists as indigent, debauched, obsessed with greatness, eccentric, or suffering from mental illness.

It took Moske a fair amount of digging to identify the creator of these scrapbooks, one Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly.

D’Hervilly spent a decade working in various administrative capacities before being promoted to Assistant Curator of Paintings. A dedicated employee and talented artist himself, D’Hervilly put his calligraphic skills to work crafting illuminated manuscript-style keepsakes for the families of recently deceased trustees and locker room signs.

In a recent lecture hosted by the Victorian Society of New York, Moske noted that D’Hervilly understood that the museum could use newspapers for self-documentation as well promotion.

To that end, the Met maintained accounts with a number of clippings bureaus, media monitoring services whose young female workers pored over hundreds of daily newspapers in search of target phrases and names.

Think of them as an analog, paid precursor to Google Alerts.

Many of the clippings in the scrapbook bear the initials “D’H” or D’Hervilly’s surname, scrawled in the same blue crayon the National Press Intelligence Company and other clippings bureaus used to underline the target phrase.

Moske theorizes that D’Hervilly may have been using the Met’s account to pursue a personal interest in collecting these types of notices:

Newly promoted to curate masterpiece paintings, had he given up for good his own artistic ambition? Was the composition of these morbid tomes a veiled acknowledgement of the passing away of his creative aspiration? Did he identify with the hundreds of uncelebrated artists whose fates the news clippings recorded in grim detail? Perhaps, instead, his intent was more mundane, and compiling them was an expedient for collecting useful biographical data as he catalogued pictures in the Met collection that were made by recently deceased artists.

Many of the hundreds of clippings he preserved appear to be the only traces remaining of these artists’ creative existence on this earth.

After D’Hervilly suffered a fatal heart attack while getting ready to leave for work on the morning April 7, 1919, his colleagues took over his pet project, adding to the scrapbooks for another next ten years.

In researching the scrapbooks’ author’s life, Moske was able to truffle up scant evidence of D’Hervilly’s extracurricular creative output — just one painting in a catalogue of an 1887 National Academy of Design exhibition — but a 1919 clipping, dutifully pasted (posthumously, of course) into one of the scrapbooks, identified the longtime Met employee as a “SLAVE OF DUTY AT ART MUSEUM”, who never took time off for holidays or even luncheon, preferring to eat at his desk.

via Lit Hub

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

in History | October 26th, 2022

The adjective medieval tends to conjure up vivid and sometimes off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real people of the Middle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than asking historian Eleanor Janega, teacher of the course Medieval Gender and Sexuality and host of the History Hit video above, “What Was Sex Really Like For Medieval People?” In it, Janega has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Europeans had sex; if they hadn’t, of course, many of us wouldn’t be here today. But we’d be forgiven for assuming that the seemingly absolute dominance of the Church quashed any and all of their erotic opportunities.

According to the medieval Church, Janega says, “the only time sex is acceptable is between two married people for procreative purposes.” Its many other restrictions included “no sex on Saturdays and Sundays in case you’re too turned on during mass; only have sex in the missionary position, because anything else subverts the natural relationship between men and women; don’t get fully naked during sex, because it’s just too exciting; in short, during sex, you should be trying to have the least amount of fun possible.” Strict and unambiguous though these rules were, “nobody really listened to them” — and what’s more, given the lack of private spaces, “sex was almost a public affair in the Middle Ages.”

So says Kate Lister, who researches the history of sexuality, and who turns up to bring her own knowledge of the subject to the party. “We tend to think about medieval people as being real prudes,” says Janega, but even scant historical records — and rather more copious erotic manuscript marginalia — show that “they were interested in all kinds of sex and romance that we would find completely unacceptable.” Lister adds that, “in many ways, we’re not open like the medieval people were. We don’t have public communal bathing. We don’t have sex in the same room as other people. We don’t go to a high-brow dinner party and tell pubic-hair jokes.” Or we don’t, at least, if we haven’t devoted our careers to the sexuality of the Middle Ages, a field of history clearly unfit for prudes.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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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Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

in History, Language, Writing | October 25th, 2022

Literacy in Chinese may now be widely attained, but it isn’t easily attained. Just a century ago it wasn’t widely attained either, at least not by half of the Chinese speakers alive. As a rule, women once weren’t taught the thousands of logographic characters necessary to read and write in the language. But in one particular section of the land, Jiangyong County in Hunan province, some did master the 600 to 700 characters of a phonetic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or “women’s writing.”

In its heyday, Nüshu’s users had a variety of names for it, “including ‘mosquito writing,’ because it is a little slanted and with long ‘legs,’ ” writes Ilaria Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the script’s history. Its greatest concentration of practitioners lived in “the village of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friendly affection, such as fans decorated with calligraphy or handkerchiefs embroidered with a few auspicious words.”

Other, more formal occasions for the use of Nüshu, included when girls decided to “make a full-fledged pact of closeness with one another that they were ‘best friends’ — jiebai zimei or ‘sworn sisters’ — a relationship that was recognized as valuable and even necessary for them in the local social system. Such a once-obscure chapter of Chinese history has proven irresistible to readers from a variety of cultures in recent decades.

“Most interpretations and headlines have been about a ‘secret language’ that women used, preferably to communicate their pain,” writes Sala, which struck her as evidence of people taking the story of Nüshu and “reading into it what they wanted, regardless of what it meant.” Yet such an interpretation has surely done its part to spread interest in the near-extinct’s script’s revival, described by BBC.com’s Andrew Lofthouse as originating in “the tiny village of Puwei, which is surrounded by the Xiao river and only accessible via a small suspension bridge.” After three Nüshu writers were discovered there in the eighties, “it became the focal point for Nüshu research. In 2006, the script was listed as a National Intangible Cultural Heritage by the State Council of China, and a year later, a museum was built on Puwei Island.”

There training is provided to the few select “interpreters or ‘inheritors’ of the language, learning to read, write, sing and embroider Nüshu.” Ironically, Lofthouse adds, “much of what we know about Nüshu is due to the work of male researcher Zhou Shuoyi” who happened to hear of it in the nineteen-fifties and was later persecuted during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution — a treatment that included 21 years in a labor camp — for having researched such an artifact of the feudal past. Once a useful tool for expressing emotions and performing social rituals socialization, Nüshu had become politically dangerous. What it becomes now, half a century later and with its renewal only just beginning, is up to its new learners.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Did They Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?: An Animated Introduction

in Animation, Architecture, History | October 21st, 2022

The Great Pyramid of Giza is a miracle of geometry, construction, and planning ahead.

Pharaoh Khufu’s relative — likely nephew — Hemienu, was put in charge of the project as soon as Khufu succeeded his father, Pharaoh Sneferu circa 2550 B.C.E.

Hemienu, an engineer, priest and magician whose honorifics included Member of the Elite, Vizier, King’s Seal-Bearer, Priest of Bastet, Priest of Shesmetet, High Priest of Thoth, and, most importantly, Overseer of All Construction Projects of the King, picked wisely when choosing the Great Pyramid’s site - a rocky plateau on the Nile’s west bank made for a far sturdier foundation than shifting sands.

Historian Soraya Field Fiorio’s animated TED-Ed lesson, above, details how the 25,000 workers who took 20 years to make Hemienu’s vision a reality were not enslaved labor, as they have so often been portrayed — a rumor started by Greek historian Herodotus — but rather, ordinary Egyptian citizens fulfilling a period of mandatory government service.

Some toiled on the administrative end or in a support capacity, while others got to spend ten hours a day hauling limestone on massive cedar sleds.

A team of 500 hammered out the Pyramid’s granite support beams using dolerite rocks, a task so time consuming that Hemienu put them to work immediately, anticipating that it would take them 12 years to produce the necessary materials.

Construction schedules are always an iffy bet, but Hemienu had the added stress of knowing that Khufu could take his leave well before his glorious, golden tipped tomb was ready to receive him.

This is why there are three burial chambers within the Great Pyramid. The last and grandest of these, known as the King’s Chamber, is an impressive pink granite room at the heart of pyramid, where its roof supports over four hundred tons of masonry. An enormous red granite sarcophagus weighing well over 3 tons is located in the middle of this chamber, but alas, the lid has been ajar for centuries.

Khufu is not within.

What became of him is a mystery, but if Scooby-Doo taught us anything of value in our pre-TED-Ed childhood, it’s that mysteries exist to be solved.

Several years ago, an international team of architects and scientists Egypt surveyed the Great Pyramid and its Giza neighbors at sunrise and sunset, using infrared thermography, which seemed to indicate the existence of an as yet unexplored chamber.

TED-Ed’s lesson plan directs those interested in plumbing these and other mysteries further to the National Geographic documentary, Unlocking the Great Pyramid and Egyptologist Bob Brier’s book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery, both of which are rooted in the work of French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, below.

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The French Designed a Fake Replica of Paris to Fool German Bombers During World War I

in History | October 21st, 2022

Paris counts among the most beloved cities on Earth, a status that owes in part to the relative lack of damage taken in during both World Wars. The desire to protect and preserve Paris thus runs high today, but then, it also did a century ago. The prospect of the city’s obliteration during what was then called the Great War inspired an especially ambitious defensive scheme. “At the beginning of 1917, a wild idea was floated,” writes the Daily Beast’s Allison McNearney. “Why not build a replica of Paris just outside of the city and fool German bombers into dropping their destructive loads where only the decoys made of wood and fabric could be harmed.”

This Paris leurre (decoy) is the subject of the 35-minute British Pathé documentary above, Illusion: The City That Never Was. Its detailed plan “called for the construction of three separate ‘sham’ neighborhoods just outside of the city”: a large train station modeled after Gare du Nord, a replica city center with its own Champs-Élysées, and a “faux industrial zone with factories and other indications of wartime production.”

Built mostly out of wood and fabric, these remote uninhabited quarters were to be equipped with elements like working street lighting — designed by Fernand Jacopozzi, later famed for his illumination of the Eiffel Tower — and a moving train.

As it turned out, the train was one of the few elements of this elaborate fake City of Light actually constructed. “In 1918, before the project could be completed, the war came to an end and the government quickly moved to dismantle their secret project and suppress all information concerning its existence,” writes McNearney. Only in the twenty-first century has this World War I‑era push to build a fake Paris come to light. Though never completed, its sheer ambition speaks to France’s own conception of its capital as a store of priceless cultural and historical heritage. In a sense, Paris is civilization, or at least French civilization. One must ask: would humanity go to the same lengths to protect it today?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Futurist Makes Weirdly Accurate Predictions in 1922 About What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

in History, Technology | October 20th, 2022

Earlier this year, we revisited a set of predictions made in 1922 about what life would look like 100 years hence, in 2022. In the pages of the New York Herald, English novelist W.L. George imagined a world in which “commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace,” and “wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system,” resulting in generations who’ll never have seen “a wire outlined against the sky.” As for the cinema, “the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.” Above, you can hear a reading of W.L. George’s uncanny forecasts. The reading comes courtesy of the YouTube Channel Voices of the Past. You can read the original text of the article here.

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What the Rosetta Stone Actually Says

in History, Language | October 19th, 2022

When most of us think of the words “Rosetta Stone” — or, at least, when those of us past a certain age do — we also think of at-home language-learning courses. This must count as a triumph of branding, but not one without a genuine basis in history. For the Rosetta Stone, the real Rosetta Stone, did provide humanity with a means of greatly expanding its store of linguistic knowledge. The stone’s text, originally carved during the Hellenistic period, turned out to be useful indeed after the stone’s rediscovery about twenty centuries later. Its content, and more specifically its content’s having been written three times in three different scripts, unlocked the mystery of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

But what, exactly, is that content? In the video above, you can hear the nature of the Rosetta Stone’s message explained by British Museum curator Ilona Regulski. “It was a priestly decree that was drawn up on the 22nd of March, 196 BC,” she says. Issued by a council of priests who’d traveled to the ancient capital of Memphis, it lists “honors that they want to give to the king” Ptolemy V Epiphanes, going so far as “to compare him with a god.” These honors include his statue being placed in the temple and carried during processions, his birthday being celebrated in the temple, and the date of his succession being added to official documents — all of them enumerated in “one big sentence.”

The text also stipulates that this decree had to be “written in stone, in sacred writing, which is hieroglyphs, in native writing, which is the Demotic that we see in the middle, and the writing of the Greeks. And the stele would have to be put up in all important temples of Egypt,” which means that there would have been many copies all over the country. (And indeed, more have been found since the initial discovery in 1799.) Nor is the Rosetta Stone the only known example of such a priestly decree from Ancient Egypt. More recent research has turned toward the question of who wrote such texts, as well as who translated them.

“In the time the Rosetta Stone was inscribed, Egypt was a very multicultural place, with many foreigners and people who could speak more than one language,” says Regulski. “For Egyptian priests and scribes, who were working for the centralized administration for the states, it probably wouldn’t have been so difficult to compose the text in Greek and then translate it into their own Egyptian native language. In fact, this probably would have been easier for them, because they worked on a daily basis in the Greek language.” At the time, the task of translation would surely have seemed routine, even trivial beside the royal exaltation performed by the message itself. But today, when few of us worship kings as gods, we exalt the Rosetta Stone’s forgotten translator instead.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch World War II Unfold Day by Day: An Animated Map

FAMOUS ARTIST DIES PENNILESS AND ALL ALONE: The Met Museum’s Fascinating Archive of Artists’ Death Notices

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

How Did They Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?: An Animated Introduction

The French Designed a Fake Replica of Paris to Fool German Bombers During World War I

Futurist Makes Weirdly Accurate Predictions in 1922 About What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

What the Rosetta Stone Actually Says

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