John Steinbeck Wrote a Werewolf Novel, and His Estate Won’t Let the World Read It: The Story of Murder at Full Moon

in History, Literature | May 24th, 2021

Pho­to of Stein­beck by Sonya Noskowiak, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

John Stein­beck wrote Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden, but not before he’d put a few less-acclaimed nov­els under his belt. He did­n’t even break through to suc­cess of any kind until 1935’s Tor­tilla Flat, which lat­er became a pop­u­lar roman­tic-com­e­dy film with Spencer Tra­cy and Hedy Lamarr. That was already Stein­beck­’s fourth pub­lished nov­el, and he’d writ­ten near­ly as many unpub­lished ones. Two of those three man­u­scripts he destroyed, but a fourth sur­vives at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas in Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter, which spe­cial­ized in hoard­ing lit­er­ary ephemera, espe­cial­ly from Nobel lau­re­ates. The unpub­lished nov­el deals not with labor­ers, farm­ers, or wastrels, but a were­wolf.

“Set in a fic­tion­al Cal­i­forn­ian coastal town, Mur­der at Full Moon tells the sto­ry of a com­mu­ni­ty gripped by fear after a series of grue­some mur­ders takes place under a full moon,” writes The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “Inves­ti­ga­tors fear that a super­nat­ur­al mon­ster has emerged from the near­by marsh­es. Its char­ac­ters include a cub reporter, a mys­te­ri­ous man who runs a local gun club and an eccen­tric ama­teur sleuth who sets out to solve the crime using tech­niques based on his obses­sion with pulp detec­tive fic­tion.”

Alberge quotes Stan­ford lit­er­ary schol­ar Gavin Jones describ­ing the book as relat­ed to Stein­beck­’s “inter­est in vio­lent human trans­for­ma­tion – the kind of human-ani­mal con­nec­tion that you find all over his work; his inter­est in mob vio­lence and how humans are capa­ble of oth­er states of being, includ­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly vio­lent mur­der­ers.”

Then still in his twen­ties, Stein­beck wrote Mur­der at Full Moon under the pseu­do­nym Peter Pym. After receiv­ing only rejec­tions from pub­lish­ers, he shelved the man­u­script and seems not to have giv­en it anoth­er thought, even in order to dis­pose of it. Though Stein­beck­’s estate has declared its lack of inter­est in its posthu­mous pub­li­ca­tion, Jones believes it would find a recep­tive read­er­ship today:  “It’s a hor­ror pot­boil­er, which is why I think read­ers would find it more inter­est­ing than a more typ­i­cal Stein­beck.” It also “pre­dicts Cal­i­forn­ian noir detec­tive fic­tion. It is an unset­tling sto­ry whose atmos­phere is one of fog-bound, mali­cious, malig­nant secre­cy.” It could at least have made quite a noir film, ide­al­ly one star­ring Lon Chaney, Jr., whose per­for­mance in Of Mice and Men proved he could play a Stein­beck char­ac­ter — to say noth­ing of his sub­se­quent turn in The Wolf Man.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

John Stein­beck Reads Two Short Sto­ries, “The Snake” and “John­ny Bear” in 1953

John Stein­beck Has a Cri­sis in Con­fi­dence While Writ­ing The Grapes of Wrath: “I am Not a Writer. I’ve Been Fool­ing Myself and Oth­er Peo­ple”

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 Story of Elizebeth Friedman, the Pioneering Cryptologist Who Thwarted the Nazis & Got Burned by J. Edgar Hoover

in Gender, History, Language | May 21st, 2021

Elize­beth S. Fried­man: Sub­ur­ban Mom or Nin­ja Nazi Hunter?

Both, though in her life­time, the press was far more inclined to fix­ate on her lady­like aspect and home­mak­ing duties than her career as a self-taught cryp­to­an­a­lyst, with head­lines such as “Pret­ty Woman Who Pro­tects Unit­ed States” and “Solved By Woman.”

The nov­el­ty of her gen­der led to a brief stint as America’s most rec­og­niz­able code­break­er, more famous even than her fel­low cryp­tol­o­gist, hus­band William Fried­man, who was instru­men­tal in the found­ing of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency dur­ing the Cold War.

Renowned though she was, the high­ly clas­si­fied nature of her work exposed her to a secu­ri­ty threat in the per­son of FBI direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover cred­it­ed the FBI, and by exten­sion, him­self, for deci­pher­ing some 50 Nazi radio cir­cuits’ codes, at least two of them pro­tect­ed with Enig­ma machines.

He also rushed to raid South Amer­i­can sources in his zeal to make an impres­sion and advance his career, scup­per­ing Fried­man’s mis­sion by caus­ing Berlin to put a stop to all trans­mis­sions to that area.

Too bad no one asked him to demon­strate the meth­ods he’d used to crack these impos­si­ble nuts.

The Ger­man agents used the same codes and radio tech­niques as the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Exporters Cor­po­ra­tion, a mob-backed rum-run­ning oper­a­tion whose codes and ciphers Elize­beth had trans­lat­ed as chief cryp­tol­o­gist for the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion.

As an expert wit­ness in the crim­i­nal tri­al of inter­na­tion­al rum­run­ner Bert Mor­ri­son and his asso­ciates, she mod­est­ly assert­ed that it was “real­ly quite sim­ple to decode their mes­sages if you know what to look for,” but the sam­ple decryp­tion she pro­vid­ed the jury made it plain that her work required tremen­dous skill. The Mob Museum’s Jeff Bur­bank sets the scene:

She read a sam­ple mes­sage, refer­ring to a brand of whiskey: “Out of Old Colonel in Pints.” She showed how the three “o” and “l” let­ters in “Colonel” had iden­ti­cal cipher code let­ters. From the cipher’s let­ters for “Colonel” she could fig­ure out the let­ter the rack­e­teers chose for “e,” the most fre­quent­ly occur­ring let­ter in Eng­lish, based on oth­er brand names of liquor they men­tioned in oth­er mes­sages. The “o” and “l” let­ters in “alco­hol,” she said, had the same cipher let­ters as “Colonel.” 

Cinchy, right?

Elizebeth’s biog­ra­ph­er, Jason Fagone, notes that in dis­cov­er­ing the iden­ti­ty, code­name and ciphers used by Ger­man spy net­work Oper­a­tion Bolí­var’s leader, Johannes Siegfried Beck­er, she suc­ceed­ed where “every oth­er law enforce­ment agency and intel­li­gence agency failed. She did what the FBI could not do.”

Sex­ism and Hoover were not the only ene­mies.

William Friedman’s crit­i­cism of the NSA for clas­si­fy­ing doc­u­ments he thought should be a mat­ter of pub­lic record led to a rift result­ing in the con­fis­ca­tion of dozens of papers from the cou­ple’s home that doc­u­ment­ed their work.

This, togeth­er with the 50-year “TOP SECRET ULTRA” clas­si­fi­ca­tion of her WWII records, ensured that Elize­beth’s life would end beneath “a vast dome of silence.”

Recog­ni­tion is mount­ing, how­ev­er.

Near­ly 20 years after her 1980 death, she was induct­ed into the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s Cryp­to­log­ic Hall of Hon­or as “a pio­neer in code break­ing.”

A Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency build­ing now bears both Fried­mans’ names.

The U.S. Coast Guard will soon be adding a Leg­end Class Cut­ter named the USCGC Fried­man to their fleet.

In addi­tion to Fagone’s biog­ra­phy, a pic­ture book, Code Break­er, Spy Hunter: How Elize­beth Fried­man Changed the Course of Two World Wars, was pub­lished ear­li­er this year.

As far as we know, there are no pic­ture books ded­i­cat­ed to the pio­neer­ing work of J. Edgar Hoover….

Elize­beth Fried­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Watch The Code­break­er, PBS’s Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence biog­ra­phy of Elize­beth Fried­man here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

How British Code­break­ers Built the First Elec­tron­ic Com­put­er

Three Ama­teur Cryp­tog­ra­phers Final­ly Decrypt­ed the Zodi­ac Killer’s Let­ters: A Look Inside How They Solved a Half Cen­tu­ry-Old Mys­tery

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her June 7 for a Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

in History, Technology | May 20th, 2021

We get the cul­ture our tech­nol­o­gy per­mits, and in the 21st cen­tu­ry no tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment has changed cul­ture like that of the smart­phone. As with every piece of per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy that we strug­gle to remem­ber how we lived with­out, it evolved into being from a series of sim­pler pre­de­ces­sors that, no mat­ter how clunky they seem now, were received as tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels in their day. Take it from Mar­tin Coop­er, the Motoro­la Engi­neer who invent­ed the first hand­held cel­lu­lar mobile phone. “We did­n’t know it was going to be his­toric in any way at all,” he says of the first pub­licly demon­strat­ed cell­phone call in 1973 in the Bloomberg video above. “We were only wor­ried about one thing: is the phone going to work when we turn it on?”

The device Coop­er had in hand was the pro­to­type that would even­tu­al­ly become the Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X, the first com­mer­cial portable cel­lu­lar phone. (This as dis­tinct from the exist­ing car-phone sys­tems that Coop­er cred­its with inspir­ing him to devel­op an entire­ly hand­held ver­sion.) Brought to mar­ket in 1983, it weighed about two pounds, took ten hours to charge a bat­tery that last­ed only 30 min­utes, could store no more than 30 phone num­bers, and cost near­ly $10,000 in today’s dol­lars.

Yet “con­sumers were so impressed by the con­cept of being always acces­si­ble with a portable phone that wait­ing lists for the DynaT­AC 8000X were in the thou­sands,” says Motoro­la design mas­ter Rudy Krolopp as quot­ed by the Project Man­age­ment Insti­tute. “In 1983, the notion of sim­ply mak­ing wire­less phone calls was rev­o­lu­tion­ary.”

38 years after “the brick,” as the 8000X was known, we’ve grown so used to that notion that many of us hard­ly ever make wire­less phone calls any­more, pre­fer­ring to com­mu­ni­cate on our phones through text mes­sages or an ever-expand­ing uni­verse of inter­net-based apps — to say noth­ing of the oth­er aspects of our lives increas­ing­ly han­dled through palm-sized touch­screens. “The mod­ern smart­phone is a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel,” says Coop­er. “It real­ly is incred­i­ble, all the stuff that is squeezed into that cell­phone.” Yet despite the aston­ish­ing evo­lu­tion of his inven­tion it rep­re­sents, he’s not sat­is­fied. “We think that we can make a smart­phone that does all things for all peo­ple, and yet we know that it does­n’t do any of those things per­fect­ly. We’ve still got a ways to go.” If you’re read­ing this on a smart­phone, know that you hold in your hand the “brick” of 2059.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

Sci­en­tist Cre­ates a Work­ing Rotary Cell­phone

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 Surprising Reason Why Chinatowns Worldwide Share the Same Aesthetic, and How It All Started with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

in Architecture, History | May 19th, 2021

Anti-Chi­nese racism runs deep in Amer­i­can cul­ture and law, begin­ning in the 19th cen­tu­ry as com­pe­ti­tion inten­si­fied in Cal­i­for­nia gold and land rush­es. Chi­nese immi­grants were pushed into teem­ing cities, then den­i­grat­ed for sur­viv­ing in over­crowd­ed slums. To get a sense of the scope of the prej­u­dice, we need only con­sid­er the 1882 law known as the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act — the only leg­is­la­tion passed to explic­it­ly restrict immi­gra­tion by one eth­nic or nation­al group. The law actu­al­ly goes back to 1875, when the Page Act banned Chi­nese women from immi­grat­ing. It was only repealed in 1943.

Although rou­tine­ly evad­ed, the severe restric­tions and out­right bans on Chi­nese immi­gra­tion under the Exclu­sion Act drove and were dri­ven by racist ideas still vis­i­ble today in tropes of dan­ger­ous, exoti­cized “drag­on ladies” or sex­u­al­ly sub­mis­sive con­cu­bines: roles giv­en in ear­ly Hol­ly­wood films to the first Chi­nese-Amer­i­can movie star, Anna May Wong, who, after 1909 — despite being the most rec­og­niz­able Chi­nese-Amer­i­can in the world — had to car­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion at all times to prove her legal sta­tus.

Wong was born in Los Ange­les, a city that — like every oth­er major metrop­o­lis — became home to its own Chi­na­town, and a famous one at that. But the most famous of the seg­re­gat­ed urban areas orig­i­nat­ed in San Fran­cis­co, after the 1906 earth­quake that near­ly lev­eled the city and “came on the heels of decades of vio­lence and racist laws tar­get­ing Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties in the US,” notes Vox. “The earth­quake dev­as­tat­ed Chi­na­town. But in the destruc­tion, San Francisco’s Chi­nese busi­ness­men had an idea for a fresh start” that would define the look of Chi­na­towns world­wide.

The new Chi­na­town was more than a new start; it was sur­vival. As often hap­pens after dis­as­ters, pro­pos­als for relo­cat­ing the unpop­u­lar immi­grant neigh­bor­hood appeared “before the dust had set­tled and smoke cleared,” notes 99 Per­cent Invis­i­ble. “The city’s may­or com­mis­sioned archi­tect and urban design­er Daniel Burn­ham to draw up plans aligned with the City Beau­ti­ful move­ment.” Feel­ing they had to cater to white Amer­i­can stereo­types to gain accep­tance, Chi­nese-Amer­i­can busi­ness lead­ers “hired archi­tect T. Pater­son Ross and engi­neer A.W. Bur­gren to rebuild—even though nei­ther man had been to Chi­na.”

The archi­tects “relied on cen­turies-old images, pri­mar­i­ly of reli­gious ver­nac­u­lar, to devel­op the look of the new Chi­na­town,” and the result was to cre­ate a gen­uine tourist attrac­tion — an “icon­ic look,” the Vox Miss­ing Chap­ter video explains, that bears lit­tle resem­blance to actu­al Chi­nese cities. The Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty in San Fran­cis­co “kept their cul­ture alive by invent­ing a new one,” a delib­er­ate co-opta­tion of Ori­en­tal­ist stereo­types for a city, its mer­chants decid­ed, that would be built of “ver­i­ta­ble fairy palaces.”

The New Chi­na­town was “not quite Chi­nese, not quite Amer­i­can”; safe for mid­dle-class tourism and con­sump­tion and safer for Chi­nese busi­ness­es to flour­ish. The mod­el spread rapid­ly. Now, in what­ev­er major city we might might vis­it — out­side of Chi­na, that is — the Chi­na­town we encounter is both a unique cul­tur­al hybrid and a mar­ket­ing tri­umph that offered a mea­sure of pro­tec­tion to belea­guered Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Learn the Untold His­to­ry of the Chi­nese Com­mu­ni­ty in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course Mov­ing from Ancient Greece to Roco­co

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

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How to Shop Online & Check Your E‑Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

in History, Technology, Television | May 18th, 2021

“Links between com­put­ers and tele­vi­sion sets are, it is always threat­ened, about to her­ald in an age of unbe­liev­able con­ve­nience,” announces tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the socia­bil­i­ty of going down to your cor­ner shop to order the week’s gro­ceries will be replaced with an order over the air­waves.” Do tell. Live though we increas­ing­ly do with inter­net-con­nect­ed “smart TVs,” the only unfa­mil­iar-sound­ing part of that pre­dic­tion is its ref­er­ence to tele­vi­sion sets. But back then, most every home com­put­er used them as dis­plays, and when also plugged into the tele­phone line they grant­ed users the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able abil­i­ty to make instant finan­cial trans­ac­tions at any hour of the day or night, with­out leav­ing the house.

Mun­dane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our enter­tain­ment online, pay­ing bills was a draw for ear­ly adopters, who could come from unlike­ly places: Not­ting­ham, for instance, the Not­ting­ham Build­ing Soci­ety being one of the first finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the world to offer online bank­ing to its mem­bers.

Clos­er to Thames Head­quar­ters, North Lon­don cou­ple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demon­strate how to use some­thing called “e‑mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and con­nect to Pres­tel (a nation­al online net­work that in the Unit­ed King­dom played some­thing like the role Mini­tel did in France), an “extreme­ly sim­ple” process that will look ago­niz­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed to any­one who grew up in the age of wi-fi.

I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Mod­el 100, an ear­ly lap­top inher­it­ed from my technophile grand­fa­ther. Bastable whips out the very same com­put­er in the seg­ment above, shot dur­ing Data­base’s trip to Japan. “The big advan­tage of a piece of equip­ment like this is to be able to cou­ple it up back to my home base over the tele­phone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, hold­ing up the acoustic cou­pler designed to con­nect the Mod­el 100 direct­ly to a stan­dard hand­set, in this case the pay phone in the front of the car­riage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to Eng­land,” forc­ing him to check his mes­sages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effort­less expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing to wi-fi onboard a train cross­ing South Korea just yes­ter­day. The future, to coin a phrase, is now.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

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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Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404

in Books, History | May 17th, 2021

Giv­en recent events, the prospect of hun­dreds of young men meet­ing on Face­book, then trav­el­ing from around the coun­try to a cen­tral U.S. loca­tion might sound like rea­son­able cause for alarm. Yet a recent con­ven­tion fit­ting that descrip­tion had noth­ing to do with polit­i­cal vio­lence but, rather, a cel­e­bra­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of the name “Josh” (full dis­clo­sure: this writer did not attend). The gath­er­ing of the Josh­es this past April in Nebras­ka could not have been more peace­ful, includ­ing its fin­ish­ing bat­tle royale, con­duct­ed with pool noo­dles. (Win­ner: adorable 4‑year-old Josh Vin­son, Jr., or “Lit­tle Josh,” from Lin­coln, NE).

The Josh­es had no con­cern for prop­er pool-noo­dle-wield­ing tech­nique, if there is such a thing. But groups of peo­ple who gath­er around the coun­try to stage medieval-style bat­tles in live-action role play­ing (LARP) games with weapons both real and fake might ben­e­fit from point­ers.

So, too, might those who chore­o­graph sword fights on stage and screen. Where can seri­ous his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ators learn how to wield a real blade in his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate com­bat? One resource can be found at Wik­te­nauer, a wiki devot­ed to col­lect­ing “all of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary source lit­er­a­ture that makes up the text of his­tor­i­cal Euro­pean Mar­tial arts (HEMA) research.”

The Fior di Battaglia (“Flower of Bat­tle”) — an Ital­ian fenc­ing man­u­al by Fiore de’i Liberi dat­ing from cir­ca 1404 — offers rich­ly- and copi­ous­ly-illus­trat­ed demon­stra­tions of medieval Ital­ian longsword fight­ing tech­niques. In the orig­i­nal man­u­script, seen here and at The Get­ty, “the illus­tra­tions are inked sketch­es with gold leaf­ing on the crowns and garters,” notes the Wik­te­nauer entry. They dom­i­nate the text, which “takes the form of descrip­tive para­graphs set in poor Ital­ian verse, which are nev­er­the­less fair­ly clear and infor­ma­tive.” So clear, indeed, the brood­ing young men of Akademia Szer­mierzy — a Pol­ish group that recre­ates medieval sword-fight­ing tech­niques — can more than con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the moves in the video at the top.

Once they get going, after some req­ui­site pre-fight riga­ma­role, it’s impres­sive stuff, maybe already famil­iar to mod­ern fencers and cer­tain mem­bers of the Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism, the LARP-ing orga­ni­za­tion of ama­teurs recre­at­ing every­thing from the Mid­dle Ages and the Renais­sance. But for those who think all live-action role-play­ing is the equiv­a­lent of the Bat­tle of the Josh­es (or off-brand Nazis run­ning through the streets in home­made armor), the sheer bal­let of his­tor­i­cal sword-fight­ing may come as a sur­prise — and maybe inspire a few more peo­ple to pull on the dou­blet and hose. See more medieval sword-fight­ing recre­ations from Akademia Szer­mierzy here, and the full text of the Fior di Battaglia here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

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

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Rick Steves Tells the Story of Fascism’s Rise & Fall in Germany

in History, Politics, Television, Travel | May 14th, 2021

“Healthy, vig­or­ous, respectable: every­one’s favorite uncle.” How many of us hear these words and think of that most beloved of all Amer­i­can trav­el-tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties, Rick Steves? Indeed, in the video above they’re spo­ken by Steves, though to describe a fig­ure very dif­fer­ent from him­self: Adolf Hitler, who con­vinced his peo­ple not to tour Europe but to invade it, spark­ing the dead­liest con­flict of all time. How and why this hap­pened has been a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion writ­ten about per­haps more volu­mi­nous­ly than any oth­er. But the Stevesian method of under­stand­ing demands first-hand expe­ri­ence of Ger­many, the land in which the Nazi par­ty came to pow­er.

Hence “Ger­many’s Fas­cist Sto­ry,” a 2020 episode of Rick Steves’ Europe whose itin­er­ary includes such des­ti­na­tions as Nurem­berg, site of the epony­mous Nazi ral­lies; Hitler’s moun­tain retreat in Bercht­es­gaden; the Gestapo and SS head­quar­ters in Berlin. We’re a long way indeed from Steves’ usu­al cir­cuit of cathe­drals, mar­kets, and bed-and-break­fasts.

Enriched with the his­tor­i­cal footage and the reflec­tions of Ger­man inter­vie­wees, this trav­el­ogue explains the rise in the 1930s and fall in the 1940s of a pow­er­ful Euro­pean strain of fas­cism. This man­i­fest­ed in pop­u­lar capit­u­la­tion to race-based, nation­al­is­tic, and ulti­mate­ly total­i­tar­i­an state pow­er, not just in Ger­many but oth­er coun­tries also once regard­ed as the cen­ter of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.

We all know how World War II end­ed, and the blue-jeaned Steves sums up the rel­e­vant chap­ter of the sto­ry while stand­ing atop the under­ground bunker in which Hitler killed him­self. But such a defeat can nev­er tru­ly be con­sid­ered final, an idea that under­lies the con­tin­u­ing encour­age­ment of tourism to places like Berlin’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews of Europe and the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz-Birke­nau, which fig­ures briefly into this episode despite being locat­ed in Poland. As any ded­i­cat­ed “Rick­nick” knows, the pur­suit of any giv­en cul­tur­al or his­tor­i­cal inter­est inevitably leads the trav­el­er through a vari­ety of lands. Hence a project like The Sto­ry of Fas­cism, Steves’ hour­long doc­u­men­tary on that ide­ol­o­gy’s traces as found all through­out his favorite con­ti­nent. As he him­self has put it, trav­el is a polit­i­cal act — and it’s one nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing both the pol­i­tics you like and the pol­i­tics you don’t.

For those inter­est­ed in how Steves built his trav­el empire, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to Guy Raz’s lengthy inter­view with Steves, one episode in his How I Built This pod­cast.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

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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Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

in Archives, Art, History, Science | May 13th, 2021

From the hand of Leonar­do da Vin­ci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Sup­per, among oth­er art objects of intense rev­er­ence and even wor­ship. But to under­stand the mind of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, one must immerse one­self in his note­books. Total­ing some 13,000 pages of notes and draw­ings, they record some­thing of every aspect of the Renais­sance man’s intel­lec­tu­al and dai­ly life: stud­ies for art­works, designs for ele­gant build­ings and fan­tas­ti­cal machines, obser­va­tions of the world around him, lists of his gro­ceries and his debtors. Intend­ing their even­tu­al pub­li­ca­tion, Leonar­do left his note­books to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death half a cen­tu­ry lat­er lit­tle had been done with them.

Absent a prop­er stew­ard, Leonar­do’s note­books scat­tered across the world. Six cen­turies lat­er, their sur­viv­ing pages con­sti­tute a series of codices in the pos­ses­sion of such enti­ties as the Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana, the British Muse­um, the Insti­tut de France, and Bill Gates.

In recent years, they and their col­lab­o­rat­ing orga­ni­za­tions have made efforts to open Leonar­do’s note­books to the world, dig­i­tiz­ing them, trans­lat­ing them, and orga­niz­ing them for con­ve­nient brows­ing on the web. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the Codex Arun­del as made avail­able to the pub­lic by the British Library, Codex Atlanti­cus by the Visu­al Agency, and the three-part Codex Forster by the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um.

Oth­er col­lec­tions of Leonar­do’s note­books made avail­able to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Bib­liote­ca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archi­vo Stori­co Civi­co e Bib­liote­ca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Air and Space Muse­um. (Pub­lished as a stand­alone book, his Trea­tise on Paint­ing is avail­able to down­load at Project Guten­berg.) Even so, many of the pages Leonar­do wrote haven’t yet made it to the inter­net, and even when they do, gen­er­a­tions of inter­pre­tive work — well beyond revers­ing his “mir­ror writ­ing” — will sure­ly remain. Much as human­i­ty is only now putting some of his inven­tions to the test, the full pub­li­ca­tion of his note­books remains a work in progress. Leonar­do him­self would sure­ly under­stand: after all, one can’t cul­ti­vate a mind like his with­out patience.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

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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