Archaeologists Find the Earliest Work of “Abstract Art,” Dating Back 73,000 Years

in Art, History, Life | February 16th, 2021

Art, as we understand the term, is an activity unique to homo sapiens and perhaps some of our early hominid cousins. This much we know. But the matter of when early humans began making art is less certain. Until recently, it was thought that the earliest prehistoric art dated back some 40,000 years, to cave drawings found in Indonesia and Spain. Not coincidentally, this is also when archaeologists believed early humans mastered symbolic thought. New finds, however, have shifted this date back considerably. “Recent discoveries around southern Africa indicate that by 64,000 years ago at the very least,” Ruth Schuster writes at Haaretz, “people had developed a keen sense of abstraction.”

Then came the “hashtag” in 2018, a drawing in ochre on a tiny flake of stone that archaeologists believe “may be the world’s oldest example of the ubiquitous cross-hatched pattern drawn on a silcrete flake in the Blombos Cave in South Africa,” writes Krystal D’Costa at Scientific American, with the disclaimer that the drawing’s creators “did not attribute the same meaning or significance to [hashtags] that we do.” The tiny artifact, thought to be around 73,000 years old, may have in fact been part of a much larger pattern that bore no resemblance to anything hashtag-like, which is only a convenient, if misleading, way of naming it.

The artifact was recovered from Blombos Cave in South Africa, a site that “has been undergoing excavation since 1991 with deposits that range from the Middle Stone Age (about 100,000 to 72,000 years ago) to the Later Stone Age (about 42,000 years ago to 2,000 years BCE).” These findings have been significant, showing a culture that used heat to shape stones into tools and, just as artists in caves like Lascaux did, used ochre, a naturally occurring pigment, to draw on stone. They made engravings by etching lines directly into pieces of ochre. Archaeologists also found in the Middle Stone Age deposits “a toolkit designed to create a pigmented compound that could be stored in abalone shells,” D’Costa notes.

Nicholas St. Fleur describes the tiny “hashtag” in more detail at The New York Times as “a small flake, measuring only about the size of two thumbnails, that appeared to have been drawn on. The markings consisted of six straight, almost parallel lines that were crossed diagonally by three slightly curved lines.” Its discoverer, Dr. Luca Pollarolo of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, expresses his astonishment at finding it. “I think I saw more than ten thousand artifacts in my life up to now,” he says, “and I never saw red lines on a flake. I could not believe what I had in my hands.”

The evidence points to a very early form of abstract symbolism, researchers believe, and similar patterns have been found elsewhere in the cave in later artifacts. Professor Francesco d’Errico of the French National Center for Scientific Research tells Schuster, “this is what one would expect in traditional society where symbols are reproduced…. This reproduction in different contexts suggests symbolism, something in their minds, not just doodling.”

As for whether the drawing is “art”… well, we might as well try and resolve the question of what qualifies as art in our own time. “Look at some of Picasso’s abstracts,” says Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen and the lead author of a study on the tiny artifact published in Nature in 2018. “Is that art? Who’s going to tell you it’s art or not?”

Researchers at least agree the markings were deliberately made with some kind of implement to form a pattern. But “we don’t know that it’s art at all,” says Henshilwood. “We know that it’s a symbol,” made for some purpose, and that it predates the previous earliest known cave art by some 30,000 years. That in itself shows “behaviorally modern” human activities, such as expressing abstract thought in material form, emerging even closer to the evolutionary appearance of modern humans on the scene.

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

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The Color That May Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Green

in Chemistry, Fashion, History, Science, TED Talks | February 15th, 2021

“Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.” —Oscar Wilde

Looking to repel bed bugs and rats?

Decorate your bedroom à la Napoleon’s final home on the damp island of Saint Helena.

Those in a position to know suggest that vermin shy away from yellowish-greens such as that favored by the Emperor because they “resemble areas of intense lighting.”

We’d like to offer an alternate theory.

Could it be that the critters’ ancestors passed down a cellular memory of the perils of arsenic?

Napoleon, like thousands of others, was smitten with a hue known as Scheele’s Green, named for Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the German-Swedish pharmaceutical chemist who discovered oxygen, chlorine, and unfortunately, a gorgeous, toxic green pigment that’s also a cupric hydrogen arsenite.

Scheele’s Green, aka Schloss Green, was cheap and easy to produce, and quickly replaced the less vivid copper carbonate based green dyes that had been in use prior to the mid 1770s.

The color was an immediate hit when it made its appearance, showing up in artificial flowers, candles, toys, fashionable ladies’ clothing, soap, beauty products, confections, and wallpaper.

A month before Napoleon died, he included the following phrase in his will: My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligopoly and their hired murderer…”

His exit at 51 was indeed untimely, but perhaps the wallpaper, and not the English oligopoly, is the greater culprit, especially if it was hung with arsenic-laced paste, to further deter rats.

When Scheele’s Green wallpaper, like the striped pattern in Napoleon’s bathroom, became damp or moldy, the pigment in it metabolized, releasing poisonous arsenic-laden vapors.

Napoleon’s First Valet Louis-Joseph Marchand recalled the “childish joy” with which the emperor jumped into the tub where he relished soaking for long spells:

The bathtub was a tremendous oak chest lined with lead. It required an exceptional quantity of water, and one had to go a half mile away and transport it in a barrel.

Baths also figured in Second Valet Louis Étienne Saint-Denis’ recollections of his master’s illness:

His remedies consisted only of warm napkins applied to his side, to baths, which he took frequently, and to a diet which he observed from time to time.

Saint-Denis’s recall seems to have had some lacunae. According to a post in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History’s Power of Poison exhibit:

In Napoleon’s case, arsenic was likely just one of many compounds taxing an already troubled system. In the course of treatments for a variety of symptoms—swollen legs, abdominal pain, jaundice, vomiting, weakness—Napoleon was subjected to a smorgasbord of other toxic substances. He was said to consume large amounts of a sweet apricot-based drink containing hydrocyanic acid. He had been given tarter emetic, an antimonal compound, by a Corsican doctor. (Like arsenic, antimony would also help explain the preserved state of his body at exhumation.) Two days before his death, his British doctors gave him a dose of calomel, or mercurous chloride, after which he collapsed into a stupor and never recovered.

As Napoleon was vomiting a blackish liquid and expiring, factory and garment workers who handled Scheele’s Green dye and its close cousin, Paris Green, were suffering untold mortifications of the flesh, from hideous lesions, ulcers and extreme gastric distress to heart disease and cancer.

Fashion-first women who spent the day corseted in voluminous green dresses were keeling over from skin-to-arsenic contact. Their seamstresses’ green fingers were in wretched condition.

In 2008, an Italian team tested strands of Napoleon’s hair from four points in his life—childhood, exile, his death, and the day thereafter. They determined that all the samples contained roughly 100 times the arsenic levels of contemporary people in a control group.

Napoleon’s son and wife, Empress Josephine, also had noticeably elevated arsenic levels.

Had we been alive and living in Europe back then, ours likely would have been too.

All that green!

But what about the wallpaper?

A scrap purportedly from the dining room, where Napoleon was relocated shortly before death, was found by a woman in Norfolk, England, pasted into a family scrapbook above the handwritten caption, This small piece of paper was taken off the wall of the room in which the spirit of Napoleon returned to God who gave it.

In 1980, she contacted chemist David Jones, whom she had recently heard on BBC Radio discussing vaporous biochemistry and Victorian wallpaper. She agreed to let him test the scrap using non-destructive x‑ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The result?

.12 grams of arsenic per square meter. (Wallpapers containing 0.6 to 0.015 grams per square meter were determined to be hazardous.)

Dr. Jones described watching the arsenic levels peaking on the lab’s print out as “a crazy, wonderful moment.” He reiterated that the house in which Napoleon was imprisoned was “notoriously damp,” making it easy for a 19th century fan to peel off a souvenir in “an inspired act of vandalism.”

Death by wallpaper and other environmental factors is definitely less cloak and dagger than assassination by the English oligopoly, hired murderer, and other conspiracy theories that had thrived on the presence of arsenic in samples of Napoleon’s hair.

As Dr. Jones recalled:

…several historians were upset by my claim that it was all an accident of decor…Napoleon himself feared he was dying of stomach cancer, the disease which had killed his father; and indeed his autopsy revealed that his stomach was very damaged. It had at least one big ulcer…My feeling is that Napoleon would have died in any case. His arsenical wallpaper might merely have hastened the event by a day or so. Murder conspiracy theorists will have to find new evidence!

We can’t resist mentioning that when the emperor was exhumed and shipped back to France, 19 years after his death, his corpse showed little or no decomposition.

Green continues to be a noxious color when humans attempt to reproduce it in the physical realm. As Alice Rawthorn observed The New York Times:

The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.

Take a deeper dive into Napoleon’s wallpaper with an educational packet for educators prepared by chemist David Jones and Hendrik Ball.

via Messy Nessy

Napoleon’s English Lessons: How the Military Leader Studied English to Escape the Boredom of Life in Exile

Napoleon’s Disastrous Invasion of Russia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visualization: It’s Been Called “the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear a Prehistoric Conch Shell Musical Instrument Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years

in History, Life, Music | February 15th, 2021

Photo by C. Fritz, Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Toulouse

Brian Eno once defined art as “everything you don’t have to do.” But just because humans can live without art doesn’t mean we should—or that we ever have—unless forced by exigent circumstance. Even when we spent most of our time in the business of survival, we still found time for art and music. Marsoulas Cave, for example, “in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, has long fascinated researchers with its colorful paintings depicting bison, horses and humans,” Katherine Kornei writes at The New York Times. This is also where an “enormous tan-colored conch shell was first discovered, an incongruous object that must have been transported from the Atlantic Ocean, over 150 miles away.”

The 18,000-year-old shell’s 1931 discoverers assumed it must have been a large ceremonial cup, and it “sat for over 80 years in the Natural History Museum of Toulouse.” Only recently, in 2016, did researchers suspect it could be a musical instrument. Philippe Walter, director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Structural Archeology at the Sorbonne, and Carole Fritz, who leads prehistoric art research at the French National Center for Scientific Research, rediscovered the shell, as it were, when they revised old assumptions using modern imaging technology.

Fritz and her colleagues had studied the cave’s art for 20 years, but only understood the shell’s peculiarities after they made a 3D digital model. “When Walter placed the conch into a CT scan,” writes Lina Zeldovich at Smithsonian, “he indeed found many curious human touches. Not only did the ancient artists deliberately cut off the tip, but they also punctured or drilled round holes through the shell’s coils, through which they likely inserted a small tube-like mouthpiece.” The team also used a medical camera to look closely at the shell’s interior and examine unusual formations. Kornei describes the shell further:

This shell might have been played during ceremonies or used to summon gatherings, said Julien Tardieu, another Toulouse researcher who studies sound perception. Cave settings tend to amplify sound, said Dr. Tardieu. “Playing this conch in a cave could be very loud and impressive.”

It would also have been a beautiful sight, the researchers suggest, because the conch is decorated with red dots — now faded — that match the markings found on the cave’s walls.

The decoration on the shell looks similar to an image of a bison on the cave wall, suggesting it may have been played near that painting for some reason. The conch resembles similar “seashell horns” found in New Zealand and Peru, but it is much, much older. It may have originated in Spain, along with other objects found in the cave, and may have traveled with its owners or been exchanged in trade, explains archeologist Margaret W. Conkey at the University of California, who adds, writes Zeldovich, that “the Magdalenian people also valued sensory experiences, including those produced by wind instruments.

SmithsonianMag · An Ancient Conch Shell Played for the First Time in Millennia

Many thousands of years later, we too can hear what those early humans heard in their cave: musicologist Jean-Michel Court gave a demonstration, producing the three notes above, which are close to C, C‑sharp and D. The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, likely made of a hollow bird bone. The shell is hardly the oldest instrument in the world. Some are tens of thousands of years older. But it is the oldest of its kind. Whatever its prehistoric owners used it for—a call in a hunt, stage religious ceremonies, or a celebration in the cave—it is, like every ancient instrument and artwork, only further evidence of the innate human desire to create.

Watch an Archaeologist Play the “Lithophone,” a Prehistoric Instrument That Let Ancient Musicians Play Real Classic Rock

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

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Why Public Transit Sucks in the United States: Four Videos Tell the Story

in History, Politics, Technology | February 12th, 2021

Many different words could describe the state of public transportation in America today. In recent decades, more and more of a consensus seems to have settled around one word in particular: that it “sucks.” Given its “antiquated technology, safety concerns, crumbling infrastructure,” and often “nonexistence,” says the narrator of the video above, “it’s not hard to argue that the U.S. public transportation network is just not good.” That narrator, Sam Denby, is the creator of Wendover Productions, a Youtube channel all about geography, technology, economics, and the infrastructure where all three intersect. He believes not only that America’s public transit sucks, but that the country’s “lack of solid public transportation almost defines American culture.”

This would make a certain sense in a poor, small, struggling country — but not in the United States of America, described not long ago by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic as “accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world.”

As anyone making their first visit will experience, America’s still-formidable wealth and power doesn’t square with the experience on the ground, or indeed under it: whether by subway, bus, or streetcar, the task of navigating most U.S. cities is characterized by inconvenience, discomfort, and even impossibility. This in a country whose public transportation once really was the envy of the world: at the turn of the 20th century, its cities boasted 11,000 miles of streetcar track alone.

In the mid-2010s, by Denby’s reckoning, “the combined mileage of every tram, subway, light rail, and commuter rail system” added up only to 5,416. What happened in the hundred or so years between? He cites among other factors the production of the first widely affordable automobiles in the 1920s, and later that of buses, with their lower operating costs than streetcars — but as commonly operated today, their lower-quality transit experience as well. (Resentment about this large-scale replacement of urban streetcar systems runs deep enough to make some consider it a conspiracy.) The U.S. “grew up as the car grew up, so its cities were built for cars,” especially in its more recently settled west. Indirect subsides lowered the cost of gas, and from the 1950s the building of the Interstate Highway System made it easy, at least for at time, to commute between city and suburb.

As pointed out in the Vox videos “Why American Public Transit Is So Bad” and “How Highways Wrecked American Cities,” these massive roads ran not around or under cities (as they do in much of Europe and Asia) but straight through their centers, part of a larger process of “urban renewal” that ironically destroyed quite a few of what dense urban neighborhoods the U.S. had. More than half a century of highway-building, suburbanization, and strict zoning later, most Americans find themselves unable to get where they need to go without buying a car and driving themselves. The situation is even worse for those traveling between cities, as examined above in Wendover Productions’ “Why Trains Suck in America.” As an American, I take a certain satisfaction in hearing these questions addressed — but I take an even greater one in being an American living abroad.

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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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Hear an Ancient Chinese Historian Describe The Roman Empire (and Other Voices of the Past)

in History | February 10th, 2021

Those who see the world from only one narrow point of view get called a number of things–parochial, provincial, and worse–and are encouraged to seek out other perspectives and broaden their view. Not everyone can travel the world, but the world comes to us through immigration and the internet, restaurants and recipes. Most of us, if we are inclined, can learn about and appreciate the cultures, cuisines, and histories of others.

But can we see ourselves the way that others see us? This is a harder ask, I think, especially for Americans, who are used to the world coming to us and to defining the world on our terms, whether through soft power or military force.

When we read about history, we might diversify our sources, taking in perspectives from writers with different ideological commitments and beliefs. But how often do we hear the observations, say, of Japanese historians, recording their impressions of the U.S. as they saw it in the 19th century?

A great part of why we don’t read such histories is that we generally don’t even know they exist. The YouTube project Voices of the Past aims to remedy this, introducing viewers to primary historical sources from the past, and from all over the world, that show professional historians and ordinary people recording events across barriers of language, culture, nation state, and social class. At the top, we have a reading from “Konyo Zukishi,” written in 1845 by Japanese geographer and historian Mitsukuri Shōgo, who, in turn, based much of his knowledge of the outside world on Dutch books, “as they were the only European trading partner through the Sakoku period of isolation,” a caption in the video informs us.

Mitsukuri Shōgo’s history accepts as fact that the territories of North America “didn’t even have a name” before the arrival of European settlers, completely ignoring the presence of hundreds of indigenous nations. The descriptions of those settlers are charmingly revealing, if not wholly accurate. “Several tens of thousands of Englishmen, who refused to subscribe to the tenets of the Anglican church, were arrested and sent to this distant country,” we learn. “These people lacked sufficient food and clothing at that time, but they privately rejoiced because there were no rulers in this land.”

Further up, we have an early third century commentary written by Chinese historian Yu Huan. Hundreds of years before European navigators set out to find and appropriate the riches of the Indies, only to end up in the Americas, the Chinese wrote of a world history that included the Roman Empire, reached by way of Egypt, which is called Haixi, “because it is west of the sea,” and which contains the great city of Wuchisan, or Alexandria. Yu Huan writes as though he’s giving driving directions, and leaves every impression of having made the journey himself or transcribed the words of those who had.

Above, a young soldier in Napoleon’s Grande Armée describes the real horror of the death marches through Russia in 1812 in excerpts from Jakob Walter’s Diary of Napoleonic Foot Soldier. He calls one march “indescribable and inconceivable for people who have not seen anything of it,” then goes on to paint a grisly scene in the kind of grim detail we do not get in Napoleon’s justifications of the invasion, below, taken from The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in His Own Words. There are many more histories we rarely, if ever, encounter, which show a world that has been networked and connected for thousands of years, as in excerpts below from an Arabic compilation of travel accounts, Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī’s “Accounts of China and India,” written in 852.

Hear many more fascinating and usually inaccessible primary sources from ancient and modern history read aloud at Voices of the Past.

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

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

in Archives, History | February 9th, 2021

In central North Carolina, not far from where I live, sits the Franklinton Center at Bricks, a 224-acre educational campus and conference center built on the remains of a historic “Agricultural, Industrial, and Normal School,” then junior college, for the descendants of enslaved people. These schools were themselves built on the land of a former cotton plantation, on former territory of the Tuscarora Nation. The campus acts as a palimpsest of Southern U.S. history. Each successive generation on the site after the Civil War has built memorials alongside modern institutions of learning and activism. The model is rare. As historian Damian Pargas of Leiden University tells Atlas Obscura’s Sabrina Imbler, “slavery is largely invisible in the [current] Southern landscape, and therefore easy to ignore or forget.”

Even at the Franklinton Center, the remnants of the slave past consist only of a whipping post, the focus of a remembrance area on the campus, and an antebellum slave cemetery a short distance away. All traces of slave quarters and houses have been wiped away. Where they remain in the U.S., writes Imbler, such buildings often “bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground.” Since 2012, Jobie Hill, a preservation architect, has tried to change that with her project Saving Slave Houses.

Hill is determined to build a first-of-its-kind database that honors and preserves these spaces in more than memory, and to unite the houses with the stories of people who once inhabited them. As she sees it, such a repository is long overdue. “There has never been a national survey of slave houses, except for the one I’m trying to do,” Hill says.

Houses, says Hill, in her TEDx talk above, “can tell us a lot about the people that lived there…. Each slave house has a valuable story to tell.” A slave house, Hill writes, on the project’s site, “was a place where enslaved people found strength and comfort from one another; but at the same time, it was a place that imposed physical limitations and psychological trauma.”

The project grew out of Hill’s master’s theses in preservation architecture and through an internship for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), “a federal program established in 1933 to employ architects and draftsmen” during the Great Depression, Imbler notes. She has been able to identify slave houses by their small size, location on a property, “and if the building has a fireplace or chimney,” she says, noting that such buildings were rarely included in surveys. She has also cross-referenced surveys with the “largest, best-known collection of interviews from formerly enslaved people: the 1936–1938 WPA Slave Narrative Collection.”

These interviews “paint a grim picture of the cruel and cramped quarters enslaved people were forced to live in.” But slave houses are not only markers of a painful past. “A slave house simultaneously embodies suffering, yet perseverance and strong family bonds,” writes Hill. They are symbols of survival against daunting odds, and like the magnolia tree that marks the remembrance site at the Franklinton Center, they can “serve as a reminder that we too must do more than survive. We must find a way to thrive.” Learn more about Hill’s Saving Slave Houses project here.

via Atlas Obscura

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

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How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021

More than 40 years after Norman Rockwell’s death, the question of whether his paintings are realistic or unrealistic remains open for debate. On one hand, critical opinion has long dismissed his Saturday Evening Post-adorning visions of American life as sheerest fantasy. “A little girl with a black eye, an elderly woman saying grace with her grandson, a boy going to war: Rockwellian scenes represent a certain sentimental America — an ideal America, or at least Rockwell’s ideal,” says a 2009 NPR story on his work.

On the other hand, if Rockwell’s admirers give him a pass on this sentimentality, his detractors often turn a blind eye to his obvious technical mastery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a camera. Indeed, his process began with an actual camera. According to that NPR piece, he “used photos, taken by a rotating cast of photographers, to make his illustrations — and all of his models were neighbors and friends,” residents of his small town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The cameramen included a German immigrant named Clemens Kalischer: “An artist-photographer himself, Kalischer was at odds with the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter in Rockwell’s work. After all, Rockwell never painted freehand, and almost all of his paintings were commissioned by magazines and advertising companies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shutter, Rockwell directed every facet of every composition,” as you can see by examining his paintings and reference photos together, featured as they’ve been on sites like Petapixel.

At Google Arts & Culture, you can scroll through a short exhibition of Rockwell’s late work on race relations in America that reveals how he had not just one but many photographs taken as source material for each painting, which he would then combine into a single image. This quasi-cinematic “editing” process brings to mind the “storyboarding” of Edward Hopper, who stands alongside Rockwell as one of the most American painters of the 20th century.

But while Hopper gave artistic form to the country’s alienation, Rockwell — whom history hasn’t remembered as a particularly happy man — created an “American sanctuary others wished to share.” And though neither Hopper nor Rockwell’s America may ever have existed, they were crafted from the pieces of American life the artists found everywhere around them.

via Petapixel/MessyNessy

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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 ( 10 ) |

The Breathtaking Courage of Harriet Tubman: An Animated History Lesson Speaks to Her Place on the $20 Bill

in Current Affairs, Economics, History | February 8th, 2021

I was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and I can say what many others cannot. I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger. —Harriet Tubman

Remember how one of the Obama administration’s final initiatives was to redesign the $20 bill, banishing Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, to a minor role on the back of the bill, in favor of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery?

The announcement arrived on the heels of a controversy, after then-Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew enraged American women by going back on a promise to install a woman on the face of a newly designed $10 bill.

The decision to keep Alexander Hamilton, architect of our financial system and the country’s first Treasury Secretary, in place is rumored to owe rather a lot to his status as the subject of a certain hit musical that had opened earlier in the year.

The official design of the Tubman bill was to have been unveiled in 2020, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed a woman’s right to vote. Had all gone according to plan, it would have been in wide circulation later this decade.

At the time Lew was untroubled by the possibility that the incoming administration might kill off the proposed makeover:

I don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money? To take the image of the suffragists off?

It seems, however, that someone did want to do that.

In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump told NBC that replacing Jackson with Tubman was “pure political correctness,” suggesting instead that a place might be found for Tubman on the $2 bill… which is no longer printed.

He also reportedly remarked to former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, “You want me to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?”

The Treasury Department website’s revision in the wake of the 2016 election scrubbed all references to planned changes to the currency.

Lew’s replacement, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, finally announced that the new $20 bill wouldn’t be ready until 2028, and that the finished design might not include Tubman at all. He attributed this to technical reasons relating to security features, though a Treasury Department employee told The New York Times that the engraving plate for it was completed “as recently as May 2018” and that the design “appeared to be far along in the process.”

Certainly, there were bigger stories in 2020 than the absence of the promised Harriet Tubman $20 bill, but the obfuscation and delay were maddening given everything Tubman, a woman of action, was able to accomplish well over a hundred years ago.

Most of us are familiar with her prominence on the Underground Railroad, which led to the sobriquet “Moses of her people,” but there are several things in the above animated TED-Ed lesson by Janell Hobson, Department Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Albany, that may come as news to you.

Of particular note, Tubman was the first woman in US history to plan and lead a military raid, resulting in the liberation of nearly 700 enslaved persons in South Carolina.

Her second husband, Nelson Davis, also born into slavery, had been a Union soldier, which entitled her to a pension of $8 as a military widow.

She fought hard for an increase on the basis of her own service to the Union Army, enlisting various friends and supporters to lobby on her behalf, including Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, who said, “I have known her long as a noble high spirit, as true as seldom dwells in the human form.”

Finally, in 1899, her pension was increased to $20 a month.

Professor Hobson, whose lesson predates Mnuchin’s announcement of the stall, called the denomination “a fitting twist of fate.”

As is the rubber stamp that artist Dano Wal created to help disgusted Americans convert Jacksons into Tubmans without the help of the Treasury Department:

Who we choose to honor as a society affects the moral attitudes that are baked into us as we grow up. The impact that seeing the face of Harriet Tubman staring back at you from a $20 bill should not be underestimated. This sort of representation can subtly but deeply affect someone’s conception of themselves and their place in society. The slightly subversive nature of it being currency that’s been hand-stamped by another human makes a discovery of one of these bills all the more joyous.

Good news looms on the horizon. Less than a week into the Biden administration, the Treasury Department confirmed that the agency is “exploring ways to resume” putting Harriet Tubman on the bill, as well as ways to hasten their release. She will be the first female and first Black American to be featured on our folding money.

TED-Ed has a list of additional resources for those who’d like to delve deeper into Tubman’s life and legacy, as well as a discussion as to whether putting Tubman’s face on the $20 bill is a fitting honor.

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

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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The Breathtaking Courage of Harriet Tubman: An Animated History Lesson Speaks to Her Place on the $20 Bill

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