Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

in History, Travel | May 27th, 2026

Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Earlier that day, for that matter, the officials involved in the opening didn’t foresee that Socialist Unity Party of Germany Secretary of Information Günter Schabowski would, that evening, mistakenly declare on national television that the liberalization of border travel was effective “immediately, without delay.”

When the border guards finally gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the surrounding scene in both Berlins had turned into what attendees now remember, 36 years later, as the biggest street festival of their lives. To those of us unable to join in the celebration at the time, it may seem unlikely that such an event could really have occurred with no intimations whatsoever.

Yet the footage shot by a traveler in Berlin during the summer of 1989, right there in the vicinity of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built environment isn’t without touches of faded grandeur here and there (and as many West Berliners were soon to discover, the real urban stateliness was over East), the overall impression given by what was then the red hot center of Cold War geopolitics is that of a dullsville.

The most outwardly interesting feature in these parts of Berlin at the very end of the nineteen-eighties is, of course, the wall itself: the brutishness of its form, the humdrum menace of its guards, the accumulation of graffiti both political and apolitical. At one point, the tourist’s camcorder captures the memorials for fallen wall jumpers, the most recent of which, a certain Chris Gueffroy, had made his fateful escape attempt from the East that past February. History would soon immortalize him as the last person to be shot trying to get over the wall, though not the last to die doing so. That title belongs to Winfried Freudenberg, who in March of 1989 fell from a balloon he’d rigged up to fly across the border. At this point, when the rapid urban evolution of the reunified German capital has long since made it one of the most popular cities in Europe, neither she nor Gueffroy would recognize the former East Berlin they were desperate to escape — nor, for that matter, the West Berlin of which they dreamed.

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Startling Color Video

The Golden Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Classic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)

The Dos & Don’ts of Driving to West Berlin During the Cold War: A Weird Piece of Ephemera from the 1980s

Bruce Springsteen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Government. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Watch Samuel Beckett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

in History | May 25th, 2026

The young George Washington may never have hacked up his father’s cherry tree and refused to lie about it, but his life nevertheless offers plenty of deeds both virtuous and adequately documented. It was no small thing, for instance, to refuse to seek a third term as the first President of the United States of America — much less to exchange that title for “King of the United States of America.” As every enthusiast of American history knows, this set the precedent, only once violated and thereafter written into law, of a two-term limit. But as every enthusiast of alternate American history has wondered, what would have happened had Washington become king? And if the U.S. monarchy had remained intact for the past 227 years, who would rule it today?

In the UsefulCharts video above, Matt Baker explains a series of different succession scenarios. While none is highly plausible in itself, they together give an idea of the lines along which American monarchical history could have played out, at least assuming that every other event played out exactly the same way as it has in our reality.

One of the first complicating factors is that Washington himself had no biological descendants. Given that, we can trace down a theoretical royal lineage starting with his adopted son, born from his wife Martha’s first marriage; with the nephew he selected as the primary heir of his estate; or with the senior-most heir of his father (owner of the notional cherry tree). Not that any of those major paths through the chart of Washington’s indirect descendants is necessarily straightforward either.

The whole matter seems at least as complicated as figuring out who would be the Roman emperor if Rome had never fallen, an exercise Baker works through in another UsefulCharts video previously featured here on Open Culture. The possibilities for the American monarch in 2026 come down to King Robert III, or Robert E. Lee V (and great-great grandson of Robert E. Lee); Queen Brynda, or Brynda Hansen; King Richard, or Richard Washington; and King Larry II, or Lawrence Shaffner, the descendant of George Washington’s nephew Bushrod. Baker finds that Shaffner is the most convincing candidate for the job, which is hard to deny. Even apart from the relevant familial, political, and legal factors, consider that name again. King Larry: apart from the title, how much more American could it possibly sound?

How George Washington Became President of the United States: It Was Weirder Than You Think

George Washington’s 110 Rules for Civility and Decent Behavior

What We Can Learn from Past Presidents

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

A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today, on an Animated Map

in History, Religion | May 21st, 2026

Christianity has long been closely identified with Western civilization. The association is especially strong, in modern times, with the United States of America, that source of derisively quoted, quite possibly apocryphal arguments that “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our children.” But of course, Jesus never heard a word of English, and though the spread of the religion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death — to say nothing of after Constantine’s — it took its sweet time getting to the American continent. In fact, it doesn’t show up there until more than five and a half minutes into the new eight-minute video from Ollie Bye above, which animates Christianity’s historical propagation on a world map.

It’s a world map by the end, in any case: the view zooms out as the reach of Christianity increases, starting with the region we now call the Middle East and ending up with every continent on display, none of them untouched save Antarctica (which actually does have eight churches of its own). Remarkable though it is that this first-century “desert religion” has taken root in such a variety of environments, cultures, and societies, it hasn’t come through that process completely unchanged.

Indeed, Bye’s map includes a running legend of its major variants, from Nicene, Celtic, and Chalcedonian Christianity early on to Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, and many more in our time. It makes less sense to speak of the spread of Christianity, perhaps, than the spread of Christianities.

In the singular or the plural, what has made all this so adaptable to such a wide variety of human settings? Christianity’s non-ethnic universalism surely has something to do with it, as does the broad emotional resonance of its core narratives of sin, salvation, and rebirth. The assiduous translation of its texts and outward march of missionaries and other carriers of the gospel has been going on almost since the very beginning. Throughout its history, Christianity has also shown the versatility to thrive as a clandestine underground movement, a state religion, and everything in between. All the while, it has assimilated qualities of the civilizations it enters, from Greco-Roman philosophy to Celtic festivals to Korean shamanistic traditions. In fact, I’m writing this very post from one of the many church cafés in Seoul, as convincing an experience as to underscore Christianity’s improbable — and continuing — endurance.

180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Animated (622‑1453)

A Visual Map of the World’s Major Religions (and Non-Religions)

World Religions Explained with Useful Charts: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity & More

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

in History, Photography | May 20th, 2026

What we euphemistically refer to as the “Opening of Japan” catalyzed a period of seismic upheaval for the proud formerly closed country. Between the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1853 and the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese society changed rapidly due to the sudden forced influx of foreign capital and influence, much of it destructive. “Unemployment rose,” writes historian John W. Dower, “Domestic prices soared sky high…. Much of Japan was wracked by famine in the mid 1860s…. As if all this were not curse enough, the foreigners also brought cholera with them.” They also brought photography, and both Western and Japanese photographers documented not only the country’s profound transformation, but also its traditional dress and culture.

Closed for 200 years, Japan became a source of endless fascination for Westerners as artifacts made their way across the sea. Among them was “an extensive photographic documentation of Japan,” notes the New York Public Library, and “of interaction between the Japanese and foreigners” (Commodore Perry’s expedition to Tokyo Bay included a daguerreotype photographer.)

“In the broadest sense, photography entered Asia from Europe and America as part of the process of colonialism, but soon took root in those regions with local photographers.”

The colorized images you see here come from the NYPL’s large collection of late 19th century Japanese photography, taken by photographers like the Italian-British Felice Beato and his Japanese student Kimbei, who “assisted Beato in the hand-coloring of photographs until 1863,” then “set up his own large and flourishing studio in Yokohama in 1881.” The archive provides “a rich resource for the understanding of the political, social, economic, and artistic history of Asia from the 1870s to the early 20th century.” These images date from between 1890 and 1909, by which time much of Japan had already been extensively westernized in dress, architecture, and style of government.

To many Japanese, the old ways, sustained through a couple hundred years of isolation, must have seemed in danger of slipping away. To many Westerners, however, the encounter with Japan offered a kind of cultural renewal. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out, “a tidal wave of foreign imports” from Asia, including “woodcut prints by masters of the ukiyo‑e school… transformed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.” European collectors, traders, and artists discovered a mania for all things Japanese, even as some of its cultural forms threatened to disappear. Enter the NYPL’s digital collection, Photographs of Japan, here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

in Books, History, Religion | May 19th, 2026

Whether we’re religious or not, we can all agree that the Bible isn’t just a book. In fact, it’s at least 66 of them, 39 Old Testament and 27 in the New, and that’s just in the Protestant tradition. Even if you’ve never read a single page of the Bible, you may well have a decent idea of what quite a few of those books contain: the stories of Adam, Eve, Noah, and the creation in Genesis; the plagues and Moses parting the Red Sea in Exodus; the various depictions of Jesus in the Gospels that define his popular image; the apocalyptic grotesqueries of Revelation. That’s even likelier to be true if you watch Hochelaga, the YouTube channel that just came out with a new video explaining all those stories and everything in between.

The result is long, to be sure, but not as long as you might expect: Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny manages to cover the 66 books of the Bible in two hours, the length of an ordinary feature film. For visuals, he draws upon the history of Western art, whose connections with Christianity and penchant for depicting the religion’s central events goes without saying.

In the case of biblical figures like Jonah, Job, or Lot’s wife (before or after her conversion into a pillar of salt), we’ve developed our own mental images at least through cultural osmosis, informed or not by the visions of Renaissance masters. But how many of us can call so easily scenes from the books of Obadiah, Haggai, or Philemon up in our mind’s eye?

This video may prove most helpful in providing a “big picture” of the Bible, allowing viewers with no experience of biblical scholarship to place isolated episodes to which they’ve heard references all their lives in context with each other. And yet, it’s also entirely possible that they’ll come out of these two hours wondering to what extent all these parts really fit together in the first place. Collected from material originally written over centuries and in various forms, not to mention passed through the vagaries of translation, the Bible could hardly be expected to present itself with polished coherence. Whether or not you believe it contains the word of God, you could well feel ready, after Hochelaga’s overview, to grapple with its text in all its linguistic richness, its surprising contradictions, and its moral grandeur — as well as its more-than-occasional strangeness.

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible — It Wasn’t Pretty

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Archaeologists Discover Ancient Egyptian Mummy Buried with Pages from Homer’s Iliad: When Literature Guided Souls Through the Afterlife

in History, Literature | May 18th, 2026

Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deeper well of knowledge and wisdom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archaeological evidence shows that the Egyptians, in turn, were hardly dismissive of Greek accomplishment. Many Hellenic texts have been discovered in Egyptian burial sites, but only recently has a Greek literary work turned up packaged with a mummy — and not just any literary work, but pages from Homer’s Iliad.

Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy. It dates from an era in ancient Egypt, centuries after the reign of the Greek-descended Cleopatra, when “Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport,” as the New York Times’ Franz Lidz writes.

“Being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.” It’s possible that pages of the Iliad were assumed to act as a kind of Greek passport that would let the deceased bypass the trials of the underworld described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

So venerated was Homer’s work at this stage of ancient Egyptian history, in fact, that physicians also credited it with curative properties. “For a bed-bound patient shivering with malaria, the prescription was simple: Brace your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.” Whatever the effectiveness of the Iliad against infectious disease, or even to assure safe passage into the world beyond, its continued study around the world more than a millennium and a half after it was getting slipped into Egyptian tombs — and the better part of three millennia after its composition — suggests a kind of historical and cultural power not possessed by ordinary literature. If Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to get Hollywood back on its feet, perhaps we’ll have to give it to the ancient Egyptians and admit that Homer really does offer salvation after all.

Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek

The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity

The Oldest Tattoos Ever Discovered on an Egyptian Mummy Date Back 5,000 Years

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: A Guidebook for Surviving the Afterlife

How Did the Egyptians Make Mummies? An Animated Introduction to the Ancient Art of Mummification

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Watch the Moment When the Wreck of the Titanic Was First Discovered (1985)

in History | May 13th, 2026

The wreck of the RMS Titanic has never ceased to command attention, from pop-cultural fascination to scientific scrutiny and everything in between. That can make it seem, especially to the younger generations, as if humanity has been gazing upon its remains since they first settled at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the precise location of the shipwreck went unknown for more than 73 years, between the day of the disaster, April 15th, 1912, and that of the discovery, September 1, 1985. In the video above, you can watch the very moment debris from the Titanic first came into the view of Argo, the unmanned undersea camera used by the researchers seeking it out.

“Somebody should get Bob,” says one of the crew as soon as it becomes clear, even on their low-resolution black-and-white monitor, that they’re looking at man-made objects on the sea floor. And well they should have: the Bob in question is oceanographer and Argo inventor Robert Ballard, who’d been actively thinking about how to find the Titanic since at least the early nineteen-seventies and boarded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s R/V Knorr with intent to find it.

In truth, the voyage was financed by the U.S. Navy, which had much less interest in finding the wreck of the Titanic than those of the USS Scorpion and Thresher, two nuclear submarines lost in the sixties. If Ballard could look for them, so the deal went, he could use the expedition’s spare time and resources on his life’s mission.

After determining that the Scorpion and Thresher had imploded, Ballard and the Knorr crew continued on to the general area in which the Titanic sank. Knowing that the infamously “unsinkable” ocean liner would have been subject to the same mighty undersea pressure, they kept their eyes open, through Argo, for similarly scattered fragments rather than intact sections of the hull. As the video shows us, the strategy worked: only when a trail of debris leads them to an identifiable boiler, proof positive that they’d found what they were looking for, does the cheer go up. Ballard would go on to discover other widely known shipwrecks — the battleship Bismarck, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998 — but one suspects that nothing quite matches that first Titanic high.

Watch 80 Minutes of Never-Released Footage Showing the Wreckage of the Titanic (1986)

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titanic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Capturing the Wreck’s Every Detail

Titanic Survivor Interviews: What It Was Like to Flee the Sinking Luxury Liner

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real-Time

See the Well-Preserved Wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarctica

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible—It Wasn’t Pretty

in History, Religion | May 13th, 2026

The stories in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cinematic adaptations of Christianity’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explaining the later fate of each character, in the manner of Animal House, American Graffiti, or Goodfellas. This is surprising, since that device could do much to satisfy our curiosity about so many secondary Biblical figures. Take the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, whose lives Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny takes as his subject in the new video above. Be warned: things didn’t end particularly well for most of them.

Peter, who “has to be one of the most studied figures in history,” seems to have ended his days in Rome. Christianity’s rapid spread there in the first century AD, eventually brought about a crackdown by the ruling class. The emperor Nero blamed the fire of 64 on Christians, and Peter, now known as Saint Peter, was among the victims of the resulting persecution. Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, “remains the most controversial figure in all of Christianity,” though questions about his motivations have gone without definitive answers. We do know, however, that remorse eventually overtook him, leading him to take his own life in Akeldama, or the “field of blood” — and if you believe Dante, he now resides in the ninth circle of Hell.

Trelawny gives the title of most underrated to the one whose skepticism about Jesus’ return from death has guaranteed him his own eternal life through the expression “doubting Thomas.” (As with Peter and Judas, his identity was solidified by a Caravaggio painting.) According to certain stories, he also traveled the farthest of any of the disciples: far enough to follow existing Roman spice routes and found the church of the Saint Thomas Christians in Kerala, India. The not-quite-as-widely known but nevertheless highly important Andrew made travels of his own, going to Scythia, and from there to Greece. After his eventual capture and crucifixion, his holy relics were scattered far and wide: even to Scotland, so the legend has it, home of the University of St. Andrews. The St. Andrews’ Cross appears as the main design element of Scotland’s national flag, as well as a part of the Union Jack.

In these and other ways, the legacies of the disciples continue to manifest in familiar ways throughout the Western (and, occasionally, non-western) world. After telling the stories of the remaining eight, from John to Bartholomew to Simon the Zealot, Trelawny considers the possibility of a mnemonic rhyme for their fates. Alas, he admits, “I’m still trying to think of what goes with ‘flayed alive by Armenians.’ ” Being a disciple of Jesus turns out, for the most part, to have been a calling with a very low survival rate indeed. But then, in early Christianity, martyrdom was a holy act, a demonstration of devotion in imitation of the Messiah himself — and an element sure to make most any disciple biopic a gruesome viewing experience.

The Gnostic Gospels: An Introduction to the Forbidden Teachings of Jesus

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

How Our Depiction of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actually Looked Like

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ a Timeless, Great Painting?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

Who Would Be King of the United States If George Washington Had Become a Monarch?

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today, on an Animated Map

Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

Archaeologists Discover Ancient Egyptian Mummy Buried with Pages from Homer’s Iliad: When Literature Guided Souls Through the Afterlife

Watch the Moment When the Wreck of the Titanic Was First Discovered (1985)

What Happened to Jesus’ Twelve Disciples After the Bible—It Wasn’t Pretty

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