The Joy of Watching Old, Damaged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Captivated by Restoration Videos

in Design, History | September 15th, 2020

The internet has given us a few new ways to watch things, but many more new things to watch. It’s not just that we now tune in to our favorite shows online rather than on television, but that our “favorite shows” have assumed forms we couldn’t have imagined before. Thirty years ago, if you’d gone to a TV network and pitched a program consisting of nothing but the process of antique restoration — no music, no narration, no story, and certainly no stars — you’d have been told nobody wanted to watch that. In 2020, we know the truth: not only do people want to watch that, but quite a lot of people want to watch that, as evidenced by the enormous view counts of Youtube restoration videos.

At Vice, Mike Dozier profiles the Swiss Youtube restoration channel My Mechanics. Its “videos don’t just appeal to people interested in antique restoration, which they surely do, but many viewers watch because they find the process relaxing.”

Some come for the techniques and stay for the “hypnotic quality — the sounds of clinking metal, the grinding of sandpaper and the whirring of a lathe populate each video. And watching something, like a rusty old coffee grinder, come back to life, shiny and looking brand-new, is uniquely satisfying.” This verges on the newly carved-out territory of “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or ASMR, a genre of video engineered specifically to deliver psychologically pleasing sounds.

In Korea, where I live, ASMR has attained disproportionately massive popularity — though not quite the popularity of mukbang, the style of long-form eating-on-camera video that has gone international in recent years. One theory of the appeal of mukbang holds that it offers vicarious satisfaction to viewers who are dieting, broke, or otherwise unable to consume enormous meals themselves. That may also be true, to a degree, of restoration videos. To bring a 19th-century screwdriver, say, or a World War II military watch back to like-new condition requires not just the right equipment but formidable amounts of knowledge and dexterity as well. Clicking on a Youtube video asks of us much less in the way of time and dedication. And yet, among the billions of views restoration videos have racked up, there are surely fans who have acted on the inspiration and built old-school skills of their own.

In our increasingly digital age — characterized by nothing more acutely than our tendency to spend hours clicking through increasingly specialized Youtube videos — skilled physical work has become an impressive spectacle in itself. As everywhere on the internet, subgenres have produced sub-subgenres: take the vintage toy restoration channel Rescue & Restore or art restorer Julian Baumgartner (who produces both narrated and ASMR version of his videos), both previously featured here on Open Culture. If those don’t absorb you, have a look at Cool Again Restoration, Iron Man Restoration, Hand Tool Rescue, MrRescue (a model-car specialist), Restoration and Metal, Random Hands… and the list goes on, given how much needs restoring in this world.

via metafilter

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

How an Art Conservator Completely Restores a Damaged Painting: A Short, Meditative Documentary

Watch a 17th-Century Portrait Magically Get Restored to Its Brilliant Original Colors

The Art of Restoring a 400-Year-Old Painting: A Five-Minute Primer

The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

Behold the First Underwater Portrait in the History of Photography (Circa 1899)

in History, Photography | September 14th, 2020

The image above may at first look like a plate from a Jules Verne novel, or perhaps a still from one of Georges Méliès’ more fantastical moving pictures. It does indeed come from fin de siècle France, a time and place in which Verne, Méliès, and many other imaginative creators lived and worked, but it is in fact a genuine underwater photograph — or rather, a genuine underwater portrait, and the first example of such a thing in photographic history. Taken in the 1890s (most likely 1899) by biologist and photography pioneer Louis Boutan, it depicts Boutan’s Romanian colleague Emil Racovitza holding up a sign that reads “Photographie Sous Marine,” or “Underwater Photography.”

Such an outlandish concept could hardly have crossed many minds back then, and fewer still would have dreamt up practical ways to realize it. To start with the most basic of challenges, there is, as David Byrne sung, water at the bottom of the ocean — but not a whole lot of light, especially compared to the burdensome requirements of late 19th-century cameras. This necessitated the development of what Petapixel’s Laurence Bartone calls a “crazy underwater flash photography rig,” one powerful enough that it “could easily double as a bomb. The creation involved an alcohol lamp on an oxygen-filled barrel. A rubber bulb would then blow a puff of magnesium powder over the flame, creating a flash.”

Photography enthusiasts will understand the magnitude of Boutan’s achievement (made with the help of his brother Auguste and a laboratory technician named Joseph David). Some have gone so far as to recreate it, an effort you can see in the Barcelona Underwater Festival video just above. Not only are there fish and other sea creatures swimming everywhere, a feature of the environment not visible in Boutan’s original shot, but the re-enactors face the pressure of curious passersby, young and old, who walk through a nearby transparent underwater tunnel, not a consideration for Boutan and his collaborators. That groundbreaking success in underwater portraiture came 54 years after a Philadelphia chemist named Robert Cornelius first turned his camera on himself. Has photographic history recorded how long it took humanity after Boutan’s famous picture to snap the first underwater selfie?

via Diane Doniol-Valcroze on Twitter

Reef View: Google Gives Us Stunning Underwater Shots of Great Coral Reefs

Sunken Films: Watch a Cinematic Meditation on Films Found on the Ocean’s Floor

See the First “Selfie” In History Taken by Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia Chemist, in 1839

The History of Photography in Five Animated Minutes: From Camera Obscura to Camera Phone

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

19th-Century Japanese Woodblocks Illustrate the Lives of Western Inventors, Artists, and Scholars (1873)

in Art, History | September 11th, 2020

For more than 200 years between the mid-17th and mid-19th century, Japan closed itself to the outside world. But when it finally opened again, it couldn’t get enough of the outside world. The American Navy commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his formidable “Black Ships” in 1853, demanding that Japan engage in trade. Five years later came the Meiji Restoration, which consolidated Japan’s political system under imperial rule and encouraged both industrialization and Westernization. Or rather, it encouraged the importation of Western technology and ideas for use in Japanese ways, a combination known as wakon-yōsai, meaning “Japanese spirit and Western techniques.”

It is in the mindset of wakon-yōsai, says the Public Domain Review, that we should view these Japanese woodblock prints of Western inventors, scholars, and artists. Most likely dating from 1873 — a heady time for the mixture of Japanese spirit and Western techniques — they depict these figures facing a variety of challenges, some more plausible than others.

“The great naturalist John James Audubon battles with a mischievous rat who has eaten his work; the dog of historian and poet Thomas Carlyle has upset a lamp burning his papers; the wife of Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-frame, smashes his creation; the developer of the Watt steam engine James Watt suffers the wrath of his impatient Aunt; pottery impresario Bernard Palissy has to burn his family’s furniture to keep his kiln’s fire going.”

Commissioned by the Japanese Department of Education, these schoolbook illustrations may bring to mind the 1861 Japanese history of America previously featured on Open Culture, with its tiger-punching George Washington and serpent-slaying John Adams. But the text that accompanies these mightily struggling Western luminaries, translations of which you can find along with the images at the Public Domain Review, “paints a slightly more positive picture, revealing the moral, something akin to ‘If at first you don’t succeed then try again,’ or ‘Perseverance prospers.’ ” In Japan’s case, perseverance would indeed make it one of the most prosperous nations in the world — if only after its defeat in World War II, by some of the very nations whose historical figures it had lionized less than a century before. Find more images at the Public Domain Review and the Library of Congress.

A Japanese Illustrated History of America (1861): Features George Washington Punching Tigers, John Adams Slaying Snakes & Other Fantastic Scenes

19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body

Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

The 10 Commandments of Chindōgu, the Japanese Art of Creating Unusually Useless Inventions

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Studies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

in Art, Biology, Health, History | September 11th, 2020

Leonardo da Vinci didn’t really have hobbies; he had passionate, unpaid obsessions that filled whole notebooks with puzzles scientists are still trying to solve. Many of the problems to which he applied himself were those none of his contemporaries understood, because he was the only person to have noticed them at all. The amateur anatomist was the first, for example, “to sketch trabeculae,” notes Medievalists.net, “and their snowflake-like fractal patterns in the 16th century.”

These geometric patterns of muscle fibers on the inner surface of the heart have remained a mystery for over 500 years since Leonardo’s anatomical investigations, carried out first on pig and oxen hearts, then later, in hasty dissections in the winter cold, on human specimens. He speculated they might have warmed the blood, but scientists have recently found they enhance blood flow “just like the dimples on a golf ball reduce air resistance.”

Leonardo may have been wide of the mark in his trabeculae theory, not having access to genetic testing, AI, or MRI. But he was the first to describe coronary artery disease, which would become one of the leading causes of death 500 years later. Many of his medical conclusions have turned out to be startingly correct, in fact. He detailed and elegantly sketched the heart’s anatomy from 1507 until his death in 1519, working out the flow of the blood through the body.

As the Medlife Crisis video above explains, Leonardo’s studies on the heart elegantly brought together his interests in art, anatomy, and engineering. Because of this multi-dimensional approach, he was able to explain a fact about the heart’s operation that even many cardiologists today get wrong, the movement of the aortic valve. In order to visualize the “flow dynamics” of the heart’s machinery, without imaging machinery of his own, he built a glass model, and drew several sketches of what he saw. “Incredibly, it took 450 years to prove him right.”

The mind of this extraordinary figure continues to divulge its secrets, and scholars and doctors across multiple fields continue to engage with his work, in the pages, for example, of the Netherlands Heart Journal. His studies on the heart particularly show how his astonishing breadth of knowledge and skill paradoxically made him such a focused, determined, and creative thinker.

via Medievalists.net

Leonardo da Vinci’s Earliest Notebooks Now Digitized and Made Free Online: Explore His Ingenious Drawings, Diagrams, Mirror Writing & More

Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Lime Kiln Club Field Day, One of the Earliest Surviving Feature Films with an All Black Cast (1913)

in Film, History | September 11th, 2020

For some of us (no names) the world of TikTok is baffling and bizarre. Why does Gen Z flock to it? Who knows, but they do, in droves. Anyone can be a “creator” on what Jason Parham at Wired calls “the most exciting cultural product of this time.” It also happens to be a place where “digital blackface” has evolved—an online cultural phenomenon in which Black users of a platform get disproportionately censored while others who adopt the trappings of Black American culture, often in exaggerated, stereotypical ways, rack up followers and views.

21st century forms of blackface persist for all sorts of reasons. The intent may not be consciously to demean, but the effects are usually otherwise, especially given the long history of blackface as a way of mocking Black Americans, while forcing Black actors to themselves perform in blackface to gain an audience and get work. Minstrelsy performed by white stage actors, comedians, musicians, etc. set a tragically low bar for Black actors.

A once-prominent example comes from the career of performer Bert Williams. “Largely forgotten today,” Claudia Roth Pierpont writes at The New Yorker, Williams was “the first African-American star: the most famous ‘colored man’ in America during the early years of the twentieth century.” He performed at Buckingham Palace, was the only Black member of Ziegfeld Follies (and a headliner) and played “alongside Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor—for nearly a decade.”

He did all of it in blackface, decades after the original Jim Crow character appeared in 1830. Born in 1874 in the Bahamas, says Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips, Williams “was an outsider in all sorts of ways… He didn’t see himself to be fully a part of African American traditions, so in a sense he didn’t quite understand the full implications of the blackface performance. He saw it as part of his costume.” That may not necessarily be so. In his stage act, Williams and his partner resisted the practice for as long as they could, until they realized that they would be subject to constant violence from white audiences without it.

Blackface affectations helped Williams cross over into a film career. He “produced, wrote, directed and starred in two short films for Biograph,” the San Francisco Silent Film Festival notes, “A Natural Born Gambler (1916) and Fish (1916). Produced by a black man for white audiences, they were groundbreaking, however, these films featured characters and storylines that still satisfied dominant racist stereotypes of black men.”

In contrast, a third film, produced three years earlier, titled Lime Kiln Club Field Day, “one of a handful of surviving silent films with an all-black cast,” told a very different kind of story. Williams appeared in blackface, but the other actors did not. “The film … features one of the first examples of on-screen intimacy between a black man and a black woman—a kiss—along with scenes of middle class leisure; story elements that challenged the mostly negative, sometimes evil, depictions of blacks in the majority of white-produced films, which reached a distressing nadir in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released two years later.”

Lime Kiln Club Field Day was never completed. Its many unedited reels of film were only recently rediscovered, a century later, in the archives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. See the film above, restored by curator Ron Magliozzi and preservation officer Peter Williamson, who conducted research “over nearly a decade,” the MoMA writes, to decipher the plot of the film and recover its production history, even going so far as to employ a lip reader and explore Staten Island and New Jersey in search of locations.”

Film historians do not know why the project was abandoned. They do know that Williams suffered significantly for the racist caricatures he felt forced to perform. Read more about his extraordinary career at The New Yorker and learn more about the Lime Kiln Club Field Day restoration project at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival site.

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

In 1183, a Chinese Poet Describes Being Domesticated by His Own Cats

in History, Poetry | September 9th, 2020

Here in Korea, where I live, cat owners aren’t called cat owners: they’re called goyangi jibsa, literally “cat butlers.” Clearly the idea that felines have flipped the domestic-animal script, not serving humans but being served by humans, transcends cultures. It also goes far back in history: witness the 12th-century verses recently tweeted out in translation by writer Xiran Jay Zhao, in which “Song dynasty poet Lu You” — one of the most prolific literary artists of his time and place — “poem-liveblogged his descent from cat owner to cat slave.”

The story begins in 1138, writes Zhao, when “Down On His Luck scholar-official Lu You gets a cat because rats keep munching on his books.” The eight poems in this series begin with praise for the animal — “It’s so soft to touch and warm to hold in bed / So brave and capable that it has ousted the rat nest” — and goes on to describe the cats he subsequently acquires, who selflessly vanquish the household rats while indulging in nothing more than the occasional catnip binge.

Or at least they do at first. “Night after night you used to massacre rats / Guarding the grain store so ferociously,” Lu asks one in “Poem for Pink-Nose.” “So why do you now act as if you live within palace walls / Eating fish every day and sleeping in my bed?”

As time goes on, Lu finds himself “serving fish on time” to his cats only to find them “sleeping without worry.” As the rats rampage, he poetically moans, “my books are getting ruined and the birds wake me before dawn.” Has it all been nothing more than “a ruse to get food from me?”

Yet it seems that Lu has no regrets about cat ownership, if ownership be the word. “Wind sweeps the world and rain darkens the village / Rumbles roll off the mountains like ocean waves churning,” he writes in 1192’s “A Rainstorm on the Fourth Day of the Eleventh Month.” Yet “the furnace is soothing and the rug is warm / Me and my cat are not leaving the house.” This is relatable content for the cat butlers of Korea (a culture thoroughly influenced by China in Lu’s day), or indeed anywhere else in the world. The patriotic poet would surely be pleased by the modern-day ascent of China — and perhaps just as much by the high and ever-rising status of the domestic cat.

via Xiran

Two Cats Keep Trying to Get Into a Japanese Art Museum … and Keep Getting Turned Away: Meet the Thwarted Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Century Manuscripts

T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats & Other Classic Poems (75 Minutes, 1955)

What Ancient Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About Living the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Popular Professor, Michael Puett

Free Chinese Lessons

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Fall of Civilizations Podcast Engagingly Explores the Collapse of Civilizations & Empires Throughout History

in History, Podcasts | September 8th, 2020

Now the country does not even boast a tree.

—Robert Browning, “Love Among the Ruins”

Every empire seems to think (as much as empires seem to think) that it will be the one to outlast them all. And all of them have ended up more or less the same way in the end. This isn’t just a gloomy fact of human history, it’s a fact of entropy, mortality, and the linear experience of time. If imperial rulers forget—begin to think themselves immortal—there have always been poets to remind them, though maybe not so directly. Epic poetry often legitimizes the founding of empires. Another form, the poetry of ruin, interprets their inevitable demise.

All the Romantics were doing it, and so too was an unknown 8th century British poet who encountered Roman ruins during the so-called “Dark Ages.” The poem they left behind “gives us a glimpse of a world of mystery,” says Paul Cooper above in episode one of his Fall of Civilizations podcast, which begins with Roman Britain and continues, in each subsequent (but not chronological) episode, to explore the collapse of empires around the world through literature and culture. “Every ruin,” says Cooper in an interview with the North Star Podcast, “is a place where a physical object was torn apart, and that happened because of some historical force.”

We are enthralled with ruins, though this can seem like the product of a distinctly modern sensibility—that of the poets who inhabited what novelist Rose Macaulay called in her 1953 study Pleasure of Ruins “a ruined and ruinous world.”

But as our Old English poet above demonstrates, the fascination predates Shakespeare and Marlowe. Cooper would know. He has dedicated his life to studying and writing about ruins, earning a PhD in their cultural and literary significance. Along the way, he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Discover Magazine, and the BBC.

Cooper also began publishing one of the most intriguing Twitter feeds in 2017, detailing in “several nested threads” various “ruin-related thoughts and feelings,” as Shruti Ravindran writes at Timber Media. His tweets became so popular that he turned them into a podcast, and it is not your standard informally chatty podcast fare. Fall of Civilizations engages deeply with its subjects on their own terms, and avoids the sensationalist cliches of so much popular history. Cooper “knew, for certain, what he wanted to avoid,” when he began: the “focus on gruesome torture techniques, executions, and the sexcapades of nobles.”

“History writers often don’t trust their audience will be interested in the past if they don’t Hollywoodize it,” says Cooper. Instead, in the latest episode on the Byzantine Empire he recruits the choir from the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London, “and a number of musicians playing traditional Byzantine instruments such as the Byzantine lyra, the Qanun and the Greek Santur,” he explains. In his episode on the Han dynasty, Cooper looks back through “ancient Chinese poetry, songs and folk music” to the empire’s rise, “its remarkable technological advances, and its first, tentative attempts to make contact with the empires of the west.”

This is a rich journey through ancient history, guided by a master storyteller dedicated to taking ruins seriously. (Cooper has published a novel about ruins, River of Ink, “inspired by time spent in UNESCO sites in Sri Lanka,” Ravindran reports.) There is “love among the ruins,” wrote Robert Browning, and there is poetry and music and story and song—all of it brought to bear in Fall of Civilizations to “make sense about what must have happened,” says Cooper. Find more episodes, on fallen civilizations all around the world, on YouTube or head to Fall of Civilizations to subscribe through the podcast service of your choice.

Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glorious Original State with Animated GIFs: The Temple of Jupiter, Luxor Temple & More

The History of Literature Podcast Takes You on a Literary Journey: From Ancient Epics to Contemporary Classics

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Medieval Metropolis Existed In What’s Now St. Louis, Then Mysteriously Disappeared in the 14th Century

in History | September 7th, 2020

In our current epoch of human history, when populations of major cities swell into the tens of millions, an urban center of 30,000 people doesn’t seem very impressive. 1,000 years ago, a city that size was larger than London or Paris, and sat atop what is now East St. Louis. At its height in 1050, Annalee Newitz writes at Ars Technica, “it was the largest pre-Colombian city in what became the United States…. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis.”

It is called Cahokia, but that name comes from later inhabitants who themselves didn’t know who built the ancient metropolis, Roger Kaza explains, “We really have no idea what the builders called their city.” Also, no one, including the people who settled there not long afterward, knows what happened to the city’s inhabitants. Archaeologists call these lost indigenous societies the Mississippians.

They occupied a territory along the river of nearly 1,600 hectares during what is called the Mississippian period, roughly between 800 and 1400 A.D. The society built mounds, “some 120,” notes UNESCO, who have designated Cahokia a world heritage site. (See an introductory video below from the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society and two artist recreations elsewhere on this page.) The largest of these mounds, Monk’s Mound, stands 30 meters high.

Cahokia is “a striking example of a complex chiefdom society, with many satellite mound centres and numerous outlying hamlet and villages.” Size estimates vary. UNESCO’s is more conservative “This agricultural society may have had a population of 10–20,000 at its peak between 1050 and 1150,” they write—still, at any rate, a major city at the time. The Mississippian civilization left behind “pottery, ceremonial art, games and weapons,” Kaza notes. “Their trade network was vast, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.”

The mounds were a symbol of both earthly and religious power, and the city appears to have been a pilgrimage site of some kind, with remains of what may have been a 5,000 square foot temple at the top of Monk’s Mound and evidence of human sacrifice on other mounds. “A circle of posts west of Monk’s Mound has been dubbed ‘Woodhenge,’ because the posts clearly mark solstices and equinoxes,” writes Kaza.

But the true strength of Cahokia, as in all great metropolises, was economic power. As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat of the University of Illinois notes, “it just so happens that some of the richest agricultural soils in the midcontinent are right up against that area of Cahokia.” Corn grew plentifully, produced surpluses, and the society grew rich. Then, seemingly inexplicably, it collapsed. “By the time European colonizers set foot on American soil in the 15th century, these cities were already empty,”

One recent study suggests two natural climate change events several hundred years apart explain both Cahokia’s rise and fall: “an unusually warm period called the Medieval Climatic Anomaly” gave rise to the region’s abundance, and an abrupt cooling period called “the Little Ice Age” brought on its end. Climatologists have found evidence showing how a drought in 1350 caused the pre-Columbian Mississippian corn industry to implode.

Pauketat finds this explanation persuasive, but insufficient. Politics and culture played a role. It’s possible, says archeologist Jeremy Wilson, who coauthored the recent climate paper, that “the climate change we have documented may have exacerbated what was an already deteriorating sociopolitical situation.”

Evidence suggests mounting conflict and violence as food grew scarcer. Climatologist Broxton Bird argues that the Mississippians left their cities and “migrated to places farther south and east like present-day Georgia,” Angus Chen writes at NPR, “where conditions were less extreme. Before the end of the 14th century, the archaeological record suggests Cahokia and other city-states were completely abandoned.”

We should be careful of seeing in this contemporary language any close parallels to the situation major cities face in the 21st century. Just one link in the global supply chain that drives climate change today can employ 10,000–20,000 people. But perhaps it’s possible to see, in the distant indigenous past of North America, the not-so-future vision of a migratory future for the inhabitants of many cities around the world.

via Art Technica and Messy Nessy

Interactive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Billion Acres of Native American Land Between 1776 and 1887

Two Animated Maps Show the Expansion of the U.S. from the Different Perspectives of Settlers & Native Peoples

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

The Joy of Watching Old, Damaged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Captivated by Restoration Videos

Behold the First Underwater Portrait in the History of Photography (Circa 1899)

19th-Century Japanese Woodblocks Illustrate the Lives of Western Inventors, Artists, and Scholars (1873)

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Studies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Watch Lime Kiln Club Field Day, One of the Earliest Surviving Feature Films with an All Black Cast (1913)

In 1183, a Chinese Poet Describes Being Domesticated by His Own Cats

The Fall of Civilizations Podcast Engagingly Explores the Collapse of Civilizations & Empires Throughout History

A Medieval Metropolis Existed In What’s Now St. Louis, Then Mysteriously Disappeared in the 14th Century

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