The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music

in History, Music | March 28th, 2024

In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvious a choice. For Dowland had long since been rediscovered as one of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’s musical superstars, thanks in part to the recordings of classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.

“When I was a kid, I went to the public library in Fairport, New York, where I’m from, and I got this Julian Bream record,” says music producer and popular Youtuber Rick Beato (previously featured here on Open Culture) in the video above. Beato describes Bream as “one of the greatest classical guitarists who ever lived” and credits him with having “popularized the classical guitar and the lute and renaissance music.” The particular Bream recording that impressed the young Beato was of a John Dowland composition made exotic by distance in time called “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” a performance of which you can watch on Youtube.

Half a century later, Beato’s enjoyment for this piece seems undiminished — and indeed, so much in evidence that this practically turns into a reaction video. Listening gets him reminiscing about his early Dowland experiences: “I would put on this Julian Bream record of him playing lute, just solo lute, and I would sit there and I would putt” — his father having been golf enthusiast enough to have installed a small indoor putting green — and “imagine living back in the fifteen-hundreds, what it would be like.” These pretend time-travel sessions matured into a genuine interest in early music, one he pursued at the New England Conservatory of Music and beyond.

What a delight it would have been for him, then, to find that Sting had laid down his own version of “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” sometimes otherwise known as “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.” In one especially striking section, Sting takes “the soprano-alto-tenor-bass part” and records the whole thing using only layers of his own voice: “there’s four Stings here,” Beato says, referring to the relevant digitally manipulated scene in the music video, “but there’s actually more than four voices.” Songs from the Labyrinth may only have been a modestly successful album by Sting’s standards, but it has no doubt turned more than a few middle-of-the-road pop fans onto the beauty of English Renaissance music. If Beato’s enthusiasm has also turned a few classic-rock addicts into John Dowland connoisseurs, so much the better.

Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments

Hear Classic Rock Songs Played on a Baroque Lute: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “White Room” & More

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

What Makes This Song Great?: Producer Rick Beato Breaks Down the Greatness of Classic Rock Songs in His New Video Series

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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The Beautiful Art of Making Japanese Calligraphy Ink Out of Soot & Glue

in Art | March 28th, 2024

Founded in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s oldest manufacturer of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and animal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an inkstone, with a little water added—produces a beautiful black ink used by Japanese calligraphers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000.

How can soot and animal glue command such a high price? As the Business Insider video above shows, there’s a fine art to making each ingredient—an art honed over the centuries. Watching the artisans make the soot alone, you immediately appreciate the complexity beneath the apparent simplicity. When you’re done watching how the ink gets made, you’ll undoubtedly want to watch the artisans making calligraphy brushes, an art form that has its own fascinating history. Enjoy!

Learn Calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famously Inspiring Calligraphy Teacher

The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596): A Stunningly Detailed Illuminated Manuscript Created over Three Decades

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Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

in History, Music | March 27th, 2024

More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have it, four years old). It’s not unknown, even today, for precocious, musically inclined children of that age to sit down and put together simple melodies, or even reasonably complete songs. But how many of them can write something like Mozart’s “Minuet in G Major”?

The video above, which traces the evolution of Mozart’s music, begins with that piece — naturally enough, since it’s his earliest known work, and thus honored with the Köchel catalogue number of KV 1. Thereafter we hear music composed by Mozart at various ages of childhood, youth, adolescence, and adulthood, accompanied by a piano roll graphic that illustrates its increasing complexity.

And as with complexity, so with familiarity: even listeners who know little of Mozart’s work will sense the emergence of a distinctive style, and even those who’ve barely heard of Mozart will recognize “Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major” when it comes on.

Mozart composed that piece when he was 32 years old. It’s also known as the “Sonata facile” or “Sonata semplice,” despite its distinct lack of easiness for novice (or even intermediate) piano players. It’s now cataloged as KV 545, which puts it toward the end of Mozart’s oeuvre, and indeed his life. Three years later, the evolutionary listening journey of this video arrives at the “Requiem in D minor,” which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its extensive cinematic use to evoke evil, loneliness, desperation, and reckoning. The piece, KV 626, contains Mozart’s last notes; the unanswerable but nevertheless irresistible question remains of whether they’re somehow implied in his first ones.

Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only Five Years Old

Read an 18th-Century Eyewitness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extraordinary Musical Skills

Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online

What Movies Teach Us About Mozart: Exploring the Cinematic Uses of His Famous Lacrimosa

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepiano, the Instrument That Most Authentically Captures the Sound of His Music

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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Radiohead’s “Creep” Sung by a 1,600-Person Choir in Australia

in Music | March 27th, 2024

Everybody can sing. Maybe not well. But why should that stop you? That’s the basic philosophy of Pub Choir, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia. At each Pub Choir event, a conductor “arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony.” Then, the evening culminates with a performance that gets filmed and shared on social media. Anyone (18+) is welcome to attend.

Above, you can watch a PubChoir performance, with 1600 choir members singing a moving version of Radiohead’s “Creep.” On their YouTube channel, you can also find Pub Choir performances of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” Toto’s “Africa,” and The Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love.”

Find other choir performances in the Relateds below.

via Kottke

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Patti Smith Sings “People Have the Power” with a Choir of 250 Fellow Singers

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The Oldest Known Photographs of India (1863–1870)

in Architecture, History, Photography | March 26th, 2024

After about a century of indirect company rule, India became a full-fledged British colony in 1858. The consequences of this political development remain a matter of heated debate today, but one thing is certain: it made India into a natural destination for enterprising Britons. Take the aspiring clergyman turned Nottingham bank employee Samuel Bourne, who made his name as an amateur photographer with his pictures of the Lake District in the late eighteen-fifties. When those works met with a good reception at the London International Exhibition of 1862, Bourne realized that he’d found his true métier; soon thereafter, he quit the bank and set sail for Calcutta to practice it.

It was in the city of Shimla that Bourne established a proper photo studio, first with his fellow photographer William Howard, then with another named Charles Shepherd. (Bourne & Shepherd, as it was eventually named, remained in business until 2016.) Bourne traveled extensively in India, taking the pictures you can see collected in the video above, but it was his “three successive photographic expeditions to the Himalayas” that secured his place in the history of photography.

In the last of these, “Bourne enlisted a team of eighty porters who drove a live food supply of sheep and goats and carried boxes of chemicals, glass plates, and a portable darkroom tent,” says the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he crossed the Manirung Pass “at an elevation of 18,600 feet, Bourne succeeded in taking three views before the sky clouded over, setting a record for photography at high altitudes.”

Though he spent only six years in India, Bourne managed to take 2,200 high-quality pictures in that time, some of the oldest — and indeed, some of the finest — photographs of India and its nearby region known today.

In addition to views of the Himalayas, he captured no few architectural wonders: the Taj Mahal and the Ramnathi temple, of course, but also Raj-era creations like what was then known as the Government House in Calcutta (see below).

Colonial rule has been over for nearly eighty years now, and in that time India has grown richer in every sense, not least visually. It hardly takes an eye as keen as Bourne’s to recognize in it one of the world’s great civilizations, but a Bourne of the twenty-first century probably needs something more than a camera phone to do it justice.

Related content:

The First Photograph Ever Taken (1826)

Some of the Oldest Photos You Will Ever See: Discover Photographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Other Mediterranean Lands (1840s)

The Oldest Known Photographs of Rome (1841–1871)

The Earliest Surviving Photos of Iran: Photos from 1850s-60s Capture Everything from Grand Palaces to the Ruins of Persepolis

Behold the Photographs of John Thomson, the First Western Photographer to Travel Widely Through China (1870s)

Around the World in 1896: 40 Minutes of Real Footage Lets You Visit Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Budapest & More

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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3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

in Art, Literature, Theatre | March 26th, 2024

“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not overawed by the Shakespearean canon; he pronounced Hamlet “most certainly an artistic failure,” though he did love Coriolanus. Whatever we make of his ambivalent, contrarian opinions of the most famous author in the English language, we can credit Eliot for keen observation: Shakespeare’s universe, which can seem so sprawlingly vast, is actually surprisingly spare given the kinds of things it mostly contains.

This is due in large part to the visual limitations of the stage, but perhaps it also points toward an author who made great works of art from humble materials. Look, for example, at a search cloud of the Bard’s plays.

You’ll find one the front page of the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, created by Michael John Goodman, an independent researcher, writer, educator, curator and image-maker. The cloud on the left features a galaxy composed mainly of elemental and archetypal beings: “Animals,” “Castles and Palaces,” “Crowns,” “Flora and Fauna,” “Swords,” “Spears,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Woods,” “Death.” One thinks of the Zodiac or Tarot.

This particular search cloud, however, does not represent the most prominent terms in the text, but rather the most prominent images in four collections of illustrated Shakespeare plays from the Victorian period. Goodman’s site hosts over 3000 of these illustrations, taken from four major UK editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works published in the mid-19th century. The first, published by editor Charles Knight, appeared in several volumes between 1838 and 1841, illustrated with conservative engravings by various artists. Knight’s edition introduced the trend of spelling Shakespeare’s name as “Shakspere,” as you can see in the title page to the “Comedies, Volume I,” at the top of the post. Further down, see two representative illustrations from the plays, the first of Hamlet’s Ophelia and second Coriolanus’ Roman Forum, above.

Part of a wave of “early Victorian populism” in Shakespeare publishing, Knight’s edition is joined by one from Kenny Meadows, who contributed some very different illustrations to an 1854 edition. Just above, see a Goya-like illustration from The Tempest. Later came an edition illustrated by H.C. Selous in 1864, which returned to the formal, faithful realism of the Knight edition (see a rendering of Henry V, below), and includes photograuvure plates of famed actors of the time in costume and an appendix of “Special Wood Engraved Illustrations by Various Artists.”

The final edition whose illustrations Goodman has digitized and catalogued on his site features engravings by artist John Gilbert. Also published in 1864, the Gilbert may be the most expressive of the four, retaining realist proportions and mise-en-scène, yet also rendering the characters with a psychological realism that is at times unsettling—as in his fierce portrait of Lear, below. Gilbert’s illustration of The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherina and Petruchio, further down, shows his skill for creating believable individuals, rather than broad archetypes. The same skill for which the playwright has so often been given credit.

But Shakespeare worked both with rich, individual character studies and broader, archetypal, material: psychological realism and mythological classicism. What I think these illustrated editions show us is that Shakespeare, whoever he (or she) may have been, did indeed have a keen sense of what Eliot called the “objective correlative,” able to communicate complex emotions through “a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions” that have impressed us as much on the canvas, stage, and screen as they do on the page. The emotional expressiveness of Shakespeare’s plays comes to us not only through eloquent verse speeches, but through images of both the starkly elemental and the uniquely personal.

Spend some time with the illustrated editions on Goodman’s site, and you will develop an appreciation for how the plays communicate differently to the different artists. In addition to the search clouds, the site has a header at the top for each of the four editions. Click on the name and you will see front and back matter and title pages. In the pull-down menus, you can access each individual play’s digitized illustrations by type—“Histories,” “Comedies,” and “Tragedies.” All of the content on the site, Goodman writes, “is free through a CC license: users can share on social media, remix, research, create and just do whatever they want really!”

Update: This post originally appeared on our site in 2016. Since then, Goodman has been regularly updating the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive with more editions, giving it more richness and depth. These editions include “one published by John Tallis, which features famous actors of the time in character.” This also includes “the first ever comprehensive full-colour treatment of Shakespeare’s plays with the John Murdoch edition.” The archive, Goodman tells us, “now contains ten editions of Shakespeare’s plays and is fairly comprehensive in how people were experiencing Shakespeare, visually, in book form in the 19th Century.”

Watch Very First Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tempest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Folger Shakespeare Library Puts 80,000 Images of Literary Art Online, and They’re All Free to Use

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

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The Evolution of Animation, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistiscope to Pixar

in Animation, History | March 25th, 2024

This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an early version of a certain Mickey Mouse — into the public domain. Though it may look comparatively primitive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actually represents a great many advancements in the art and technology of animation since its inception. You can get a sense of that entire process, just about, from the video above, “The Evolution of Animation 1833–2017,” which ends up at The LEGO Batman Movie but begins with the humble phenakistiscope.

First introduced to the public in 1833, the phenakistiscope is an illustrated disc that, when spun, creates the illusion of motion. Essentially a novelty designed to create an optical illusion (the Greek roots of its name being phenakizein, or “deceiving,” and óps, or “eye”), it seems to have attained great popularity as a children’s toy in the nineteenth century, and it later became capable of projection and gained utility in scientific research. Pioneering motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, now immortalized in cinema history as a predecessor of the movie projector, was based on the phenakistiscope.

The first moments of “The Evolution of Animation” include a couple of phenakistiscopes, but soon the compilation moves on to clips starring somewhat better-known figures from the early twentieth century like Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur. But it’s only after Steamboat Willie that animation undergoes its real creative explosion, bringing to whimsical and hyperkinetic life not just human characters but a host of animals, trees, and non-living objects besides. After releasing the monumental Snow White in 1937, Disney dominated the form both technologically and artistically for at least three decades. Though this video does contain plenty of Disney, it also includes the work of other studios that have explored quite different areas of the vast field of possibility in animation.

Take, for example, the psychedelic Beatles movie Yellow Submarine, the French-Czech surrealist science-fiction fable Fantastic Planet, the stop-motion between-holidays spectacle of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and of course, the depth and refinement of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, beginning with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which came before the formation of the studio itself). From the mid-nineties — with certain notable exceptions, like Wallace & Gromit: The Movie and Charlie Kaufman’s AnomaLisa — computer-generated 3D animation more or less takes over from the traditional varieties. This has produced a number of features widely considered masterpieces, most of them from the now-Disney-owned Pixar. But after experiencing the history of the form in miniature, it’s tempting to hope that the next stage of the animation’s evolution will involve the rediscovery of its past.

Gertie the Dinosaur: The Mother of all Cartoon Characters (1914)

Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917–1931)

The Animations That Changed Cinema: The Groundbreaking Legacies of Prince Achmed, Akira, The Iron Giant & More

The Beautiful Anarchy of the Earliest Animated Cartoons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Early Animations

Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Photography Experiments from the 1870s Presented in 93 Animated Gifs

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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The Cult of the Criterion Collection: The Company Dedicated to Gathering & Distributing the Greatest Films from Around the World

in Film | March 25th, 2024

There was a time, not so very long ago, when many Americans watching movies at home neither knew nor cared who directed those movies. Nor did they feel particularly comfortable with dialogue that sometimes came subtitled, or with the “black bars” that appeared below the frame. The considerable evolution of these audiences’ general relationship to film since then owes something to the adoption of widescreen televisions, but also to the Criterion Collection: the home-video brand that has been targeting its prestige releases of acclaimed films squarely at cinephiles — and even more so, at cinephiles with a collecting impulse — for four decades now.

“The company’s first release was a LaserDisc edition of Citizen Kane that included supplementary materials like a video essay and extensive liner notes on the provenance of the negative from which the restoration was made,” writes the New York Times’ Magazine’s Joshua Hunt in a recent piece on how Criterion became a (or perhaps the) cinematic tastemaker.

“Next came King Kong, which featured the first ever audio-commentary track, inspired, as an afterthought, by the stories that the film scholar Ronald Haver told while supervising the tedious process of transferring the film from celluloid.”

With the coming of the more successful DVD format in the late nineteen-nineties, such audio-commentary tracks became a staple feature of video releases, Criterion or otherwise. They were a godsend to the cinephiles of my generation coming of age in that era, a kind of informal but intensive film school taught by not just expert scholars but, often, the auteurs themselves. “Some of the earliest were recorded by Martin Scorsese for the Taxi Driver and Raging Bull LaserDiscs, which helped cement his influence on an entire generation of young directors” — including a certain Wes Anderson, who would go on to record commentary tracks for the Criterion releases of his own pictures.

At this point, Criterion has “become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.” It’s also amassed an unusually dedicated customer base, as explained in the Royal Ocean Film Society video “The Cult of the Criterion Collection.” “We’re at a point in film culture where brands are increasingly more popular than products,” says host Andrew Saladino, a self-confessed Criterion devotee. “More and more, it seems as though the films and the people who made them are secondary to the name and logo of the company behind them,” a phenomenon that Criterion — itself a kind of media universe — somehow both participates in and rises above.

“While studios and streaming services chase audiences by producing endless sequels and spinoffs,” writes Hunt, “Criterion has built a brand that audiences trust to lead them.” I can testify to its having led me to the work of auteurs from Chris Marker to Jacques Tati, Akira Kurosawa to Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Altman to Nicolas Roeg. Today, budding cinema enthusiasts can even benefit from the advice of famous directors and actors for navigating its now‑1,650-title-strong catalog through its “Criterion closet” video series. Recently, that closet has hosted the likes of Paul Giamatti, Willem Dafoe, and Wim Wenders, who pulls off the shelf a copy of his own Until the End of the World — which Criterion released, of course, in its nearly five-hour-long director’s cut. “I always think this is maybe the best thing I’ve done in my life,” he says, “but then again, who am I to judge?”

Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Criterion Collection)

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

A Celebration of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cassettes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

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 ) |

Learn to Become a Supply Chain Data Analyst with Unilever’s New Certificate Program

in Business, Online Courses | March 25th, 2024

Supply chains—we never thought too much about them. That is, until the pandemic, when supply chains experienced severe disruptions worldwide, leaving us waiting for products for weeks, if not months. That’s when we started appreciating the importance of supply chains and their resilience.

Companies like Unilever rely on supply chains to manufacture their goods (e.g., Dove, Lipton, and Ben & Jerry’s) and then move them around the globe. For Unilever, it’s essential that their supply chains remain efficient and strong. Working in partnership with Coursera, the company has created a new Supply Chain Data Analyst Professional Certificate to help entry-level professionals learn more about using data to manage effective supply chains. Designed to be completed in roughly four months, the certificate consists of four courses: 1) Supply Chain Management and Analytics, 2) Using Data Analytics in Supply Chain, 3) Implementing Supply Chain Analytics, and 4) Supply Chain Software Tools.

As students move through the program, they will learn how to “achieve cost savings, reduce lead times, enhance customer satisfaction, and adapt to changing market conditions through data-driven insights and analytical approaches.” They will also learn key skills like demand forecasting and how to monitor supply chains for security risks.

Emphasizing real-world experience, students will “take on the role of an analyst for a fictitious consumer goods company specializing in organic farm to table consumer products. With over 20 unique assignments, [students will] use spreadsheets and visualization tools to analyze data and make recommendations.”

You can audit the four courses for free, or sign up to earn a shareable certificate for a fee. Students who select the latter option will be charged $49 per month. Coursera estimates that the certificate will take four months to complete, assuming you’re dedicating 10 hours per week. That amounts to about $200 in total. You can enroll here.

For those interested, Unilever has also recently released a new Digital Marketing Analyst Certificate, which you can find here.

In addition, until March 31, 2024, Coursera is offering $100 off of Coursera Plus, which will let you take 7,000 courses (including the ones above) and not pay for the certificates. If you plan to take a lot of courses, and want to earn certificates, it can be a cost effective approach.

Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

Google & Coursera Create a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months

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Around The World in 1896: See Colorized & Upscaled Footage of Egypt, Venice, Istanbul, New York City, London & More

in Film, History | March 22nd, 2024

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world and captured footage of life in Barcelona, Jerusalem, Venice, Moscow, Istanbul, Kyoto and other locations. For viewers, unaccustomed to seeing moving films, let alone far-flung parts of the world, it must have been a sight to behold. Below, you can see the different places featured in the footage, along with timestamps. To see what the original black & white footage looked like, visit this post in our archive.

00:00 Intro
00:12 France
01:50 New York City, United States
02:38 Jerusalem
04:25 Geneva, Switzerland
04:53 Vietnam
05:12 Martinique
05:22 Paris, France
07:56 Madrid, Spain
08:07 Barcelona, Spain
08:43 Venice, Italy
09:00 London, United Kingdom
09:49 Germany
10:17 Dublin, Ireland
11:00 Moscow, Russia
11:24 Lyon, France
14:56 Giza, Egypt
15:36 Istanbul, Turkey
15:58 Kyoto, Tokyo
16:20 Marseille, France
16:35 La Ciotat, France

The Earliest Known Motion Picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene, Restored with Artificial Intelligence

Restored Footage of 1896 Snowball Fight Makes It Seem Like the Fun Happened Yesterday

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Laurence Fishburne Reads a Former Slave’s Incredible Letter to His Old Master (1865)

in History, Letters | March 21st, 2024

Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors. That has secured his place in pop culture as Morpheus from The Matrix, for example. But he could even marshal it early in his career, as evidenced by his role as Apocalypse Now’s “Mr. Clean,” which he took on at just fourteen years old. But it was a much more recent performance he gave for Letters Live, which you can see in the video above, that clearly brings out the qualities that have made him a beloved and enduring figure onscreen: not just his moral seriousness, but this sense of humor as well.

“To my old master,” Fishburne begins, getting a laugh right away. The letter in question, previously featured here on Open Culture, was originally written in 1865 by a man named Jourdon Anderson, who had escaped a life of slavery in Tennessee with his wife the previous year. Having since fallen on hard times, that former master had written to Anderson and asked him to come back to work on the plantation. “I have often felt uneasy about you,” Anderson writes. “I thought the Yankees would’ve hung you before this for harboring Rebs that they found at your house,” among other crimes he recalls.

Having set himself and his family up in Ohio, Anderson could hardly have felt tempted to go down South again. “I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me,” he writes. “I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing, have a comfortable home for Mandy — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson — and the children, Millie, Jane, and Grundy, go to school and are learning well.” But “if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will better be able to decide whether it will be to my advantage to move back again.”

Fishburne delivers these lines with a thick layer of irony, as Anderson no doubt intended. “Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us kindly and justly, and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time that we served you.” When Fishburne says that, he practically gets a standing ovation, and indeed, the letter met with a favorable reception in its day as well — not from Colonel P. H. Anderson himself, but from the readers of the newspapers in which it was reprinted. In the end, Jourdon Anderson kept his freedom, and got fame lasting more than a century after his death to go with it.

What the Textbooks Don’t Tell Us About The Atlantic Slave Trade: An Animated Video Fills In Historical Gaps

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

A New Database Will Document Every Slave House in the U.S.: Discover the “Saving Slave Houses Project”

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

“Ask a Slave” by Azie Dungey Sets the Historical Record Straight in a New Web Series

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 ) |

The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music

The Beautiful Art of Making Japanese Calligraphy Ink Out of Soot & Glue

Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

Radiohead’s “Creep” Sung by a 1,600-Person Choir in Australia

The Oldest Known Photographs of India (1863–1870)

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Presented in a Digital Archive

The Evolution of Animation, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistiscope to Pixar

The Cult of the Criterion Collection: The Company Dedicated to Gathering & Distributing the Greatest Films from Around the World

Learn to Become a Supply Chain Data Analyst with Unilever’s New Certificate Program

Around The World in 1896: See Colorized & Upscaled Footage of Egypt, Venice, Istanbul, New York City, London & More

Laurence Fishburne Reads a Former Slave’s Incredible Letter to His Old Master (1865)

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