Did the CIA Write the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change,” One of the Bestselling Songs of All Time?

in History, Music, Podcasts | July 6th, 2020

By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it seemed the fate of the Sovi­et Union was all but sealed. It would be two more years before the USSR offi­cial­ly dis­solved, and flew the Sovi­et flag over the Krem­lin for the last time, but the age of Cold War bel­liger­ence offi­cial­ly end­ed with the 1980s, so it seemed. Soft pow­er and sua­sion would fin­ish the job. And what bet­ter way to announce this tran­si­tion than with the soft-rock stylings of a pow­er bal­lad like the Scor­pi­ons’ “Wind of Change”? The sen­ti­men­tal song from Ger­man met­al and hard rock favorites was sud­den­ly inescapable in 1990, and it was not at all sub­tle about its mes­sage.

The song became a mas­sive hit and remains one of the best-sell­ing sin­gles of all time. It served as “a sound­track of sorts to a polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion,” writes Richard Bien­stock at Rolling Stone. Odd­ly, “espe­cial­ly in light of the Scor­pi­ons’ back­ground… ‘Wind of Change’ was about nei­ther the Berlin Wall nor their Ger­man home­land.” Instead, the song was osten­si­bly inspired by a his­toric two-day fes­ti­val the band played in Moscow in 1989, a so-called “hard-rock Wood­stock” fea­tur­ing met­al roy­al­ty like Ozzy Osbourne, Möt­ley Crüe, Cin­derel­la, and Skid Row along­side hard rock Sovi­et bands like Gorky Park.

Three months after the con­cert, the Berlin Wall fell, and Scor­pi­ons’ lead singer Klaus Meine wrote the words:

The world is clos­ing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like broth­ers
The future’s in the air
I can feel it every­where
Blow­ing with the wind of change

The icon­ic whis­tled intro and lighters-in-the-air video cement­ed “Wind of Change” as a defin­i­tive state­ment on how the “chil­dren of tomor­row” will “share their dreams” in a glob­al­ized world. Tan­ta­liz­ing­ly vague, the lyrics read like Sur­re­al­ist ad copy, slid­ing back and forth between dog­ger­el and weird Sym­bol­ist incan­ta­tion:

The wind of change
Blows straight into the face of time
Like a stormwind that will ring the free­dom bell
For peace of mind
Let your bal­alai­ka sing
What my gui­tar wants to say

These lines, it may not shock you to learn, may have been writ­ten by the CIA. At least, “that’s the mys­tery dri­ving the new eight-part pod­cast series Wind of Change,” writes Nicholas Quah at Vul­ture. (Lis­ten on Apple, Spo­ti­fy, Google, and on the pod­cast web­site.) “Led by New York­er staff writer Patrick Rad­den Keefe and pro­duced by Pineap­ple Street’s Hen­ry Molof­sky… the jour­ney takes us to a shape-shift­ing Won­der­land, a world where an Amer­i­can agency like the CIA may very well have par­tic­i­pat­ed in the pro­duc­tion of pop cul­ture as part of con­cert­ed efforts to build sen­ti­ment against its ene­mies abroad. It might even be some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing right now.”

Those who’ve read about how the Agency has influ­enced every­thing from Abstract Expres­sion­ism, to lit­er­ary mag­a­zines, cre­ative writ­ing, and Hol­ly­wood films might not find these alle­ga­tions par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing, but as with all the best exam­ples of the ser­i­al pod­cast form, it’s the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion that makes this sto­ry worth pur­su­ing. Keefe approach­es the sub­ject with a naiveté that might be delib­er­ate, play­ing up the idea of mass enter­tain­ment as “care­ful­ly devised and cal­i­brat­ed mes­sag­ing.”

The pod­cast is great fun (“it’s been described as This is Spinal Tap meets All the President’s Men,” writes Dead­line); its sto­ry, Keefe says in a state­ment, “stretch­es across musi­cal gen­res, and across bor­ders and peri­ods of his­to­ry.” Do we ever find out for sure whether the agency best known for over­throw­ing gov­ern­ments it doesn’t like wrote the Scor­pi­ons’ 1990 pow­er bal­lad “Wind of Change”? “Hear the music, and the accents and the voic­es,” says Keefe, “and judge for your­self who might be lying and who is telling the truth.”

If you ask Klaus Meine, it’s all a fan­ta­sy. (But, then, he would say that, would­n’t he?) “It’s weird,” the Scor­pi­ons singer com­ment­ed after learn­ing about Keefe’s pod­cast. “In my wildest dreams I can’t think about how that song would con­nect with the CIA.”  The idea, how­ev­er, would make “a good idea for a movie,” he says, “That would be cool.” A movie, maybe, fund­ed by the CIA.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the CIA Fund­ed & Sup­port­ed Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zines World­wide While Wag­ing Cul­tur­al War Against Com­mu­nism

The CIA Assess­es the Pow­er of French Post-Mod­ern Philoso­phers: Read a New­ly Declas­si­fied CIA Report from 1985

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

How the CIA Helped Shape the Cre­ative Writ­ing Scene in Amer­i­ca

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

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Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson Poses for a Presidential Portrait

in Art, Current Affairs, History, Museums, Photography | July 6th, 2020

We hold these truths to be self-evi­dent: that all men are cre­at­ed equal; that they are endowed by their Cre­ator with cer­tain unalien­able rights; that among these are life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness…  —Thomas Jef­fer­son, 3rd Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca

He was a bril­liant man who preached equal­i­ty, but he didn’t prac­tice it. He owned peo­ple. And now I’m here because of it. —Shan­non LaNier, co-author of Jefferson’s Chil­dren: The Sto­ry of One Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly

Many of the Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pants in pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner’s ongo­ing Descen­dants project agreed to tem­porar­i­ly alter their usu­al appear­ance to height­en the his­toric resem­blance to their famous ances­tors, adopt­ing Eliz­a­beth Cady Stanton’s lace cap and sausage curls or Fred­er­ick Dou­glass’ swept back mane.

Actor and tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Shan­non LaNier sub­mit­ted to an uncom­fort­able, peri­od-appro­pri­ate neck­wrap, tugged into place with the help of some dis­creet­ly placed paper­clips, but skipped the wig that would have brought him into clos­er vis­i­ble align­ment with an 1800 por­trait of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­fa­ther, Thomas Jef­fer­son.

“I didn’t want to become Jef­fer­son,” states LaNier, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand­moth­er, Sal­ly Hem­ings, was writ­ten out of the nar­ra­tive for most of our country’s his­to­ry.

An enslaved half-sis­ter of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, Hem­ings was around six­teen when she bore Jefferson’s first child, as per the mem­oir of her son, Madi­son, from whom LaNier is also direct­ly descend­ed.

She has been por­trayed onscreen by actors Car­men Ejo­go and Thandie New­ton (and Maya Rudolph in an icky Sat­ur­day Night Live skit.)

But there are no pho­tographs or paint­ed por­traits of her, nor any sur­viv­ing let­ters or diary entries. Just two accounts in which she is described as attrac­tive and light-skinned, and some polit­i­cal car­toons that paint an unflat­ter­ing pic­ture.

The mys­tery of her appear­ance might make for an inter­est­ing com­pos­ite por­trait should the Smith­son­ian, who com­mis­sioned Gardner’s series, seek to entice all of LaNier’s female and female-iden­ti­fy­ing cousins from the Hem­ings line to pose.

While LaNier was aware of his con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son from ear­li­est child­hood, his peers scoffed and his moth­er had to take the mat­ter up with the prin­ci­pal after a teacher told him to sit down and stop lying. As he recalled in an inter­view:

When they didn’t believe me, it became one of those things you stop shar­ing because, you know, peo­ple would make fun of you and then they’d say, “Yeah, and I’m relat­ed to Abra­ham Lin­coln.”

His fam­i­ly pool expand­ed when Jefferson’s great-great-great-great-grand­son, jour­nal­ist Lucian King Truscott IV—whose fifth great-grand­moth­er was Martha Jef­fer­son—issued an open invi­ta­tion to Hem­ings’ descen­dants to be his guests at a 1999 fam­i­ly reunion at Mon­ti­cel­lo.

It would be anoth­er 20 years before the Thomas Jef­fer­son Foun­da­tion and Mon­ti­cel­lo tour guides stopped fram­ing Hem­ings’ inti­mate con­nec­tion to Jef­fer­son as mere tat­tle.

Now vis­i­tors can find an exhib­it ded­i­cat­ed to her life, both online and in the recent­ly reopened house-muse­um.

Truscott laud­ed the move in an essay on Salon, pub­lished the same week that a year­book pho­to of Vir­ginia Gov­er­nor Ralph Northam in black­face pos­ing next to a fig­ure in KKK robes began to cir­cu­late:

Mon­ti­cel­lo is com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty by telling the sto­ry of slave life there, and by exten­sion, slave life in Amer­i­ca. When my cousins in the Hem­ings fam­i­ly stand up and proud­ly say, we are descen­dants of Thomas Jef­fer­son, they are com­mit­ting an act of equal­i­ty…. The pho­to­graph you see here is a pic­ture of who we are as Amer­i­cans. One day, a pho­to­graph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusu­al. One day, acts of equal­i­ty will out­weigh acts of racism. Until that day, how­ev­er, Shan­non and I will keep fight­ing for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

Watch a video of Jef­fer­son descen­dant Shan­non Lanier’s ses­sion with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Drew Gard­ner here.

See more pho­tos from Gardner’s Descen­dents project here.

Read his­to­ri­an Annette Gor­don-Reed’s New York Times op-ed on the com­pli­cat­ed Hem­ings-Jef­fer­son con­nec­tion here.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Trumbull’s Famous 1818 Paint­ing Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence Vir­tu­al­ly Defaced to Show Which Found­ing Fathers Owned Slaves

Meet “Found­ing Moth­er” Mary Katharine God­dard, First Female Post­mas­ter in the U.S. and Print­er of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence

Hamil­ton Mania Inspires the Library of Con­gress to Put 12,000 Alexan­der Hamil­ton Doc­u­ments Online

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

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16th Century Bookwheels, the E‑Readers of the Renaissance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Century Designers

in Books, History, Technology | July 3rd, 2020

Most of us, through our com­put­ers or our even our phones, have access to more books than we could ever read in one life­time. That cer­tain­ly would­n’t have been the case in, say, the mid­dle ages, when books — assum­ing you belonged to the elite who could read them in the first place — were rare and pre­cious objects. Both books and lit­er­a­cy became more com­mon dur­ing the Renais­sance, though acquain­tance with both could still be con­sid­ered the sign of a poten­tial­ly seri­ous schol­ar. And for the most seri­ous Renais­sance schol­ars of all, Ital­ian mil­i­tary engi­neer Agosti­no Ramel­li designed the book­wheel, an elab­o­rate mechan­i­cal device allow­ing the user to turn from one book to anoth­er in rel­a­tive­ly quick suc­ces­sion.

First drawn by Ramel­li in 1588 (and pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture in 2017) but nev­er actu­al­ly con­struct­ed by him, the book­wheel has attract­ed renewed atten­tion in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “In 2018, a group of under­grad­u­ate engi­neer­ing stu­dents at the Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy set out to build two,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Claire Voon. “They began by dili­gent­ly study­ing the Ital­ian engineer’s illus­tra­tion, then pro­cured his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate mate­ri­als, such as Euro­pean beech and white oak.

With the help of mod­ern pow­er tools and process­es, such as com­put­er mod­el­ing and CNC rout­ing, they brought it to life.” You can see the RIT book­wheels under con­struc­tion and in action in the video above. (Its schemat­ics, near-impos­si­bly com­plex by the stan­dards of Ramel­li’s day, are also avail­able at RIT’s web site.)

Oth­ers have also brought Ramel­li’s design into real­i­ty. In the video just above, for exam­ple, we have writer Joshua Foer (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here for his work on the sci­ence of mem­o­riza­tion) tak­ing his own repro­duc­tion for a spin. “It’s a fer­ris wheel for books,” Foer explains, “so that a schol­ar can have eight books in front of them, sort of like tabbed brows­ing before tabbed brows­ing.” The device’s cher­ry wood and laser-cut gears are cer­tain­ly hand­some, but what of its prac­ti­cal­i­ty? “I often read mul­ti­ple books at one time, and this way I can have them all open in front of me.” Most all of us start more books than we can fin­ish, and as we attempt to read them all in par­al­lel, occa­sion­al­ly one or two do get for­got­ten. Hence one advan­tage, even in our mod­ern times, of Ramel­li’s book wheel: any book placed on it becomes as unig­nor­able as the machine itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

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.

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An Animated Introduction to the Pioneering Anthropologist Margaret Mead

in Books, History | July 2nd, 2020

Mod­ern West­ern soci­eties haven’t solved the prob­lem of sex, but Samoa has the answer. Or at least it does accord­ing to the work of influ­en­tial anthro­pol­o­gist Mar­garet Mead, sub­ject of the ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life above. Her men­tor Franz Boas, the founder of anthro­pol­o­gy in the Unit­ed States, saw not a world pro­gress­ing “in a lin­ear fash­ion from bar­barism to sav­agery to civ­i­liza­tion” but “teem­ing with sep­a­rate cul­tures, each with their own unique per­spec­tives, insights, and effi­cien­cies.”

Though Mead­’s time liv­ing among the natives on the dis­tant islands of Samoa came at Boas’ sug­ges­tion, she already believed that “iso­lat­ed cul­tures could serve as lab­o­ra­to­ries that would reveal ways of liv­ing that the mod­ern world had for­got­ten about, but need­ed to remem­ber.” The result­ing book, 1928’s Com­ing of Age in Samoa, turned Mead into the most famous anthro­pol­o­gist in the world. In it she describes Samoan cul­ture as “far more open and com­fort­able with sex than the mod­ern Unit­ed States. Lit­tle chil­dren in Samoa knew all about mas­tur­ba­tion, and learned about inter­course and oth­er acts through first-hand obser­va­tion, but thought of it as no more scan­dalous or wor­thy of com­ment than death or birth.”

Mead also not­ed an accep­tance of not just homo­sex­u­al­i­ty but a nat­ur­al shift in sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion over time — a con­di­tion bound to intrigue a seri­ous schol­ar who her­self led a rather uncon­ven­tion­al life, “simul­ta­ne­ous­ly involved with suc­ces­sive hus­bands and her ever-present female lover.” Her analy­sis of Samoa, which informed the world­views of such influ­en­tial fig­ures as chil­drea­r­ing guru Ben­jamin Spock, would take on an even broad­er appeal in the 1960s, when a ris­ing coun­ter­cul­ture sought inspi­ra­tion in its push to trans­form West­ern soci­ety. Pro­po­nents of the “sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion” and its loos­en­ing of norms found a nat­ur­al ally in Mead, and traces of her life and work remain in frag­ments of the Sum­mer of Love up to and includ­ing Hair, one of whose minor char­ac­ters has her name.

Mead also comes up in Hunter Thomp­son’s 1971 epi­taph for the coun­ter­cul­ture, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The scene is the Nation­al Dis­trict Attor­neys Asso­ci­a­tion’s Con­fer­ence on Nar­cotics and Dan­ger­ous Drugs, at which a par­tic­i­pant sug­gests that Mead par­takes in the sub­stance known as mar­i­jua­na. The “drug expert” onstage replies thus: “At her age, if she did smoke grass, she’d have one hell of a trip.” Though Mead pub­licly showed sym­pa­thy for addicts, whom she described as “casu­al­ties of a bad­ly orga­nized soci­ety,” her own expe­ri­ences with mind-alter­ing sub­stances are less well doc­u­ment­ed. But then, her time in Samoa may well have been the only con­scious­ness-expand­ing trip she need­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac, Allen Gins­berg & Mar­garet Mead Explain the Mean­ing of “Beat” in Rare 1950s Audio Clips

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry, by Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Anthro­pol­o­gist Claude Lévi-Strauss Remem­bered

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.

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How Two Teenage Dutch Sisters Ended Up Joining the Resistance and Assassinating Nazis During World War II

in History | July 1st, 2020

Ger­many invad­ed the Nether­lands in 1940 and quick­ly over­pow­ered the country’s small forces. Nazis arrest­ed and deport­ed Jews, cre­at­ed forced labor, strict­ly rationed food, and banned all non-Nazi orga­ni­za­tions. “Almost every Dutch per­son was affect­ed by the con­se­quences of the occu­pa­tion,” the Verzets Resis­tance Muse­um writes. “The choic­es and dilem­mas fac­ing the pop­u­la­tion became more far reach­ing.” Often those choic­es were stark: Col­lab­o­rate and live? Or resist and will­ing­ly put one­self at risk of prison or death?

Two sis­ters, Fred­die and Tru­us Over­stee­gen, 14 and 16 years old dur­ing the Ger­man inva­sion, chose the lat­ter course of action. Along with 19-year-old Han­nie Schaft, a Dutch nation­al hero the Nazis called “the girl with the red hair,” they did things they cer­tain­ly nev­er imag­ined they would, killing sol­diers and col­lab­o­ra­tors in order to save lives. The sis­ters learned their first resis­tance lessons at home. They were raised in the city of Haar­lem by their work­ing-class, com­mu­nist moth­er, Tri­jn, who “taught the girls com­pas­sion for those less for­tu­nate,” writes Jake Rossen at Men­tal Floss.

The fam­i­ly shel­tered Jews, dis­si­dents, and gays flee­ing Ger­many in the 1930s. “When the Nazis invad­ed the Nether­lands,” Rossen notes, “Fred­die and Tru­us hand­ed out pam­phlets oppos­ing the occu­pa­tion and plas­tered warn­ings over pro­pa­gan­da posters.” The Dutch resis­tance asked the girls to join them, and their moth­er agreed, know­ing lit­tle of what lay in store.

Fred­die and Tru­us were, for a time, the only two women in the sev­en-per­son rebel­lion dubbed the Haar­lem Coun­cil of Resis­tance. After being recruit­ed by com­man­der Frans van der Wiel in 1941, the two learned the basics of sab­o­tage, pick­ing up tricks like how to rig rail­ways and bridges with dyna­mite so trav­el paths would be cut off; how to fire a weapon; and how to roam unde­tect­ed through an area pep­pered with Nazi sol­diers. The lat­ter abil­i­ty was a result of their appear­ance. With her hair in braids, Fred­die was said to have looked as young as 12 years old. Few sol­diers took notice of the two girls as they rode bicy­cles through occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry, though they were secret­ly act­ing as couri­ers, trans­port­ing paper­work and weapons for the resis­tance. The duo burned down a Nazi ware­house unde­tect­ed. They escort­ed small chil­dren and refugees to hid­ing spots and secured false iden­ti­fi­ca­tion for them, which they con­sid­ered of para­mount impor­tance even as Allied bombs went off over­head.

The sis­ters lured SS offi­cers into death­traps, act­ing as look­outs while fight­ers killed the Ger­mans. They soon “grad­u­at­ed to elim­i­nat­ing their own tar­gets, which Fred­die would lat­er describe as ‘liq­ui­da­tions,’” gun­ning down Nazis from their bicy­cles. “Some­times, Fred­die said, she would shoot a man and then feel a strange com­pul­sion to try to help him up.” It’s a chill­ing image of a resis­tance fight­er who is also a child sol­dier in a war she can­not avoid.

“There were a lot of women involved in the resis­tance in the Nether­lands,” says Bas von Ben­da-Beck­mann, a for­mer researcher at the Nether­lands’ Insti­tute for War, Holo­caust and Geno­cide Stud­ies, “but not so much in the way these girls were. There are not that many exam­ples of women who actu­al­ly shot col­lab­o­ra­tors.” The women nev­er revealed how many peo­ple they “liq­ui­dat­ed.” When asked in inter­views, History.com notes, “Fred­die would tell people…she and her sis­ter were sol­diers, and sol­diers don’t say.”

Han­nie was even­tu­al­ly cap­tured and exe­cut­ed. The Over­stee­gen sis­ters sur­vived the war and lived into their 90s, pass­ing away with­in two years of each oth­er: Tru­us in 2016 and Fred­die in 2018. The trau­mat­ic toll these events took on Fred­die was evi­dent to the end of her life. “If you ask me,” her son Remi Dekker said after her death, “In her mind [the war] was still going on, and on. It didn’t stop, even until the last day.”

The Over­stee­gen sis­ters were part of a hand­ful of Dutch resis­tance fight­ers who lived into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Anoth­er resis­tance hero, Sel­ma van de Perre, is still alive at 97 and has pub­lished a book about her expe­ri­ence and the many oth­er Jew­ish resis­tance fight­ers in the Nether­lands dur­ing the war. The coun­try “spawned one of Europe’s most for­mi­da­ble anti-Nazi net­works,” the Pitts­burgh Jew­ish Chron­i­cle points out, thanks to the brav­ery of young fight­ers like Schaft, the Over­stee­gan sis­ters, and van de Perre. Learn more at the Verzets Resis­tance Muse­um.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Secret Stu­dent Group Who Took on the Nazis: An Intro­duc­tion to “The White Rose”

How Jazz-Lov­ing Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resist­ed Con­for­mi­ty in Nazi Ger­many

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

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

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Hear the Voices of Americans Born in Slavery: The Library of Congress Features 23 Audio Interviews with Formerly Enslaved People (1932–75)

in History, Libraries | June 25th, 2020

“Dur­ing the last three decades of legal slav­ery in Amer­i­ca,” writes Lucin­da MacK­ethan at the Nation­al Human­i­ties Cen­ter, “African Amer­i­can writ­ers per­fect­ed one of the nation’s first tru­ly indige­nous gen­res of writ­ten lit­er­a­ture: the North Amer­i­can slave nar­ra­tive.” These heav­i­ly medi­at­ed mem­oirs were the only real first­hand accounts of slav­ery most Amer­i­cans out­side the South encoun­tered. Their authors were urged by abo­li­tion­ist pub­lish­ers to adopt con­ven­tions of the sen­ti­men­tal nov­el, and to fea­ture showy intro­duc­tions by white edi­tors to val­i­date their authen­tic­i­ty.

Fugi­tive slave nar­ra­tives did not nec­es­sar­i­ly give white Amer­i­cans new infor­ma­tion about slavery’s wrongs, but they served as “proof” that enslaved peo­ple were, in fact, peo­ple, with feel­ings and intel­lects and aspi­ra­tions just like theirs. Ex-enslaved writ­ers like Fred­er­ick Dou­glass and Har­ri­et Jacobs sen­sa­tion­al­ized read­ers with sto­ries of the phys­i­cal and sex­u­al vio­lence of slav­ery, and their sto­ries became abo­li­tion­ists’ most potent weapon. The form suc­ceed­ed as much on dra­mat­ic effect as on its doc­u­men­tary val­ue.

Dou­glas and Jacobs were excep­tion­al in that they had learned to read and write and escaped their ter­ri­ble con­di­tions through strength of will, inge­nu­ity, the kind­ness­es of oth­ers, and sheer luck. Most were not so for­tu­nate. But we now have access to many more first­hand accounts—thanks to the work of the Fed­er­al Writ­ers Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion and oth­ers, who record­ed thou­sands of inter­views with for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple liv­ing well into the 20th cen­tu­ry, all from the first gen­er­a­tion to out­live slav­ery.

Ted Kop­pel debuted some clips of those record­ings to his Night­line audi­ence in the 1999 episode above. “They are haunt­ing voic­es,” he says, then pref­aces the tape with “brace your­selves for a minor mir­a­cle.” What is mirac­u­lous about the fact that peo­ple who were born in slav­ery lived into the age of audio record­ing? Per­haps one rea­son it seems so is that we are con­di­tioned to think of legal enslave­ment and its effects as reced­ing fur­ther back in time than they actu­al­ly do. In the 1930s, the FWP filed tran­scripts of over 2,300 inter­views and 500 black-and-white pho­tographs of peo­ple born into slav­ery.

Also, in the 30s, eth­nol­o­gists like Zora Neale Hurston and the Lomax­es began record­ing audio inter­views with for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple like Foun­tain Hugh­es, fur­ther up, born in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia. Record­ed in 1949, he is fear­ful­ly reluc­tant to talk about his expe­ri­ence but vocal about it nonethe­less: ““You was­n’t no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You was­n’t treat­ed as good as they treat dogs now. But still I did­n’t like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes peo­ple feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don’t like to say. And I won’t say a whole lot more.”

The Library of Con­gress puts the 23 sur­viv­ing record­ings in con­text:

The record­ings of for­mer slaves in Voic­es Remem­ber­ing Slav­ery: Freed Peo­ple Tell Their Sto­ries took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twen­ty-three inter­vie­wees dis­cuss how they felt about slav­ery, slave­hold­ers, coer­cion of slaves, their fam­i­lies, and free­dom. Sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als sing songs, many of which were learned dur­ing the time of their enslave­ment. It is impor­tant to note that all of the inter­vie­wees spoke six­ty or more years after the end of their enslave­ment, and it is their full lives that are reflect­ed in these record­ings. The indi­vid­u­als doc­u­ment­ed in this pre­sen­ta­tion have much to say about liv­ing as African Amer­i­cans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond.

Only sev­en of these voic­es have been matched with pho­tographs. Many of these mean and women were inter­viewed else­where, but on the whole, lit­tle bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about them exists. The final inter­vie­wee, Char­lie Smith, record­ed in 1975, was the sub­ject of a book and numer­ous mag­a­zine arti­cles. He died four years lat­er at 137 years old. Hear all of the audio inter­views with for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple at the Library of Congress’s Voic­es Remem­ber­ing Slav­ery project and find resources for teach­ers here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Bib­li­cal Pas­sages In Order to Legit­imize Slav­ery & Dis­cour­age a Slave Rebel­lion (1807)

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

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

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The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting at The New York Times (1978)

in History, Technology | June 25th, 2020

This is usu­al­ly what hap­pens when I write a piece for Open Cul­ture: As I drink an over­priced cof­fee at my local cof­fee shop, I research a top­ic on the inter­net, write and edit an arti­cle on Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the whole thing into Word­Press. My edi­tor in Open Cul­ture’s gleam­ing inter­na­tion­al head­quar­ters up in San Fran­cis­co gives it a look-over and then, with the push of a but­ton, pub­lish­es the arti­cle on the site.

It’s sober­ing to think what I casu­al­ly do over the course of a morn­ing would require the effort of dozens of peo­ple 40+ years ago.

Until the 1970s, with the rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty of com­put­er type­set­ting, news­pa­pers were print­ed the same way for near­ly a cen­tu­ry. Lino­type machines would cast one line at a time from molten lead. Though an improve­ment from hand­set type, where print­ers would assem­ble lines of type one char­ac­ter at a time, lino­type still required numer­ous skilled print­ers to assem­ble each and every news­pa­per edi­tion.

The New York Times tran­si­tioned from that ven­er­at­ed pro­duc­tion method to com­put­er type­set­ting on Sun­day, July 2, 1978. David Loeb Weiss, a proof­read­er at the Times, doc­u­ment­ed this final day in the doc­u­men­tary Farewell — Etaoin Shrd­lu.

The title of the movie, by the way, comes from the first two lines of a printer’s key­board, which are arranged accord­ing to a letter’s fre­quen­cy of use. When a print­er typed “etaoin shrd­lu,” it meant that the line had a mis­take in it and should be dis­card­ed.

Watch­ing the movie, you get a sense of just how much work went into each page and how print­ers were skilled crafts­men. (You try spot­ting a typo on a page of upside down and back­wards type.) The film also cap­tures the furi­ous ener­gy and the cacoph­o­ny of clinks and clanks of the com­pos­ing room. You can see just how much phys­i­cal work was involved. After all, each page was print­ed off of a 40-pound plate made of lead.

The tone of the movie is under­stand­ably melan­choly. The work­ers are bid­ding farewell to a job that had exist­ed for decades. “All the knowl­edge I’ve acquired over my 26 years is all locked up in a lit­tle box now called a com­put­er,” notes one print­er. “And I think most jobs are going to end up the same way.” Some­one else wrote the fol­low­ing on the com­pos­ing room’s chalk­board. “The end of an era. Good while it last­ed. Cry­ing won’t help.”

You can watch the full doc­u­men­tary above. It will also be added to our list of 200 Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in August 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Inge­nious Type­writer That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion: The Keaton Music Type­writer Patent­ed in 1936

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball”

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The World According to Le Corbusier: An Animated Introduction to the Most Modern of All Architects

in Animation, Architecture, History | June 23rd, 2020

Among mod­ern archi­tects, was any archi­tect ever so moder­ni­ty-mind­ed as Charles-Édouard Jean­neret, bet­ter known a Le Cor­busier? Like many cul­tur­al fig­ures well-known out­side their field — Franz Kaf­ka, George Orwell, David Lynch — his name has long since been adjec­tivized, though nowa­days the term “Cor­bu­sian” is sel­dom used as a com­pli­ment. Many a self-described oppo­nent of mod­ern archi­tec­ture, what­ev­er they con­sid­er mod­ern archi­tec­ture to be, points to Le Cor­busier as the orig­i­na­tor of all the inhu­man­i­ty of build­ings designed over the past 90 years, and espe­cial­ly the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry: their drab col­ors (or lack there­of), their depress­ing aus­ter­i­ty, their for­bid­ding scale, their dark cor­ri­dors, their leaky roofs. But how much, real­ly, is he to blame?

“Le Cor­busier rec­om­mend­ed that the hous­es of the future be ascetic and clean, dis­ci­plined and fru­gal,” says The Book of Life, the com­pan­ion site to Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. Remem­bered as an archi­tect but both an artist and engi­neer at heart, he thought that “true, great archi­tec­ture – mean­ing, archi­tec­ture moti­vat­ed by the quest for effi­cien­cy – was more like­ly to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt elec­tric­i­ty tur­bine or a low-pres­sure ven­ti­lat­ing fan” than in the cap­i­tals of old Europe. For inspi­ra­tion he looked to mod­ern machines, espe­cial­ly those that had begun appear­ing in the sky in his youth: “he observed that the require­ments of flight of neces­si­ty rid air­planes of all super­flu­ous dec­o­ra­tion,” says de Bot­ton in the ani­mat­ed School of Life primer above, “and so unwit­ting­ly trans­formed them into suc­cess­ful pieces of archi­tec­ture.”

Hence Le Cor­busier’s infa­mous pro­nounce­ment that “a house is a machine for liv­ing in,” which first appeared in his 1923 man­i­festo Vers une archi­tec­ture (Towards an Archi­tec­ture). Le Cor­busier was a writer — and a painter, and a fur­ni­ture design­er, and an urban plan­ner — as much as he was an archi­tect. “The prob­lem is that both his detrac­tors and his acolytes want to believe that his writ­ten man­i­festos, urban­is­tic visions, utopi­an ide­olo­gies and the­o­ries are com­pat­i­ble with his build­ings,” writes Jonathan Meades, some­time archi­tec­tur­al crit­ic and full-time res­i­dent of Le Cor­busier’s Unité d’habi­ta­tion apart­ment block in Mar­seilles. But “Le Cor­busier, writer, has lit­tle in com­mon with Le Cor­busier, mak­er of the century’s most pro­found­ly sen­su­ous, most mov­ing archi­tec­ture”: one was a “self-adver­tis­ing pro­pa­gan­dist,” the oth­er “an artist-crafts­man of peer­less orig­i­nal­i­ty.”

Le Cor­busier’s head­line-mak­ing urban-renew­al pro­pos­als includ­ed, Meades writes, “the destruc­tion of the Right Bank in Paris and its replace­ment with ranks of cru­ci­form sky­scrap­ers”; he also pro­posed demol­ish­ing Man­hat­tan, as de Bot­ton says, “to make way for a fresh and more ‘Carte­sian’ attempt at urban design.” Le Cor­busier’s utopi­an dreams of colos­sal sky­scrap­ers placed in the mid­dle of vast green park­land and sur­round­ed by ele­vat­ed free­ways led, in this telling, to “the dystopi­an hous­ing estates that now ring his­toric Paris, the waste­lands from which tourists avert their eyes in con­fused hor­ror and dis­be­lief on their way into the city.” But if cities can still use Le Cor­busier’s plan­ning ideas as a neg­a­tive exam­ple, they have more to learn from the pos­i­tive exam­ple of his aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty, which remains exhil­a­rat­ing today, even amid a kind of moder­ni­ty the man him­self could nev­er have imag­ined.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Vis­it the Homes That Great Archi­tects Designed for Them­selves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Cor­busier, Wal­ter Gropius & Frank Gehry

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Mod­ernist Bird­hous­es Inspired by Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph Eich­ler

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.

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