Take a Virtual Tour of the Mütter Museum and Its Many Anatomically Peculiar Exhibits

in Biology, History, Museums, Science | May 11th, 2020

A few months before Philaelphia’s Müt­ter Muse­um, exer­cis­ing now famil­iar COVID-19 pre­cau­tions, closed its doors to the pub­lic, it co-spon­sored a parade to hon­or the vic­tims to the pre­vi­ous century’s Span­ish Flu pan­dem­ic, as well as “those who keep us safe today.”

The event was part of a tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion, Spit Spreads Death: The Influen­za Pan­dem­ic of 1918–19 in Philadel­phia.

Anoth­er tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion, Going Viral: Infec­tion Through the Ages, opened in Novem­ber, and now seems even stronger proof that the muse­um, whose 19th-cen­tu­ry dis­play cab­i­nets are housed in the his­toric Col­lege of Physi­cians, is as con­cerned with the future as it is with the past.

For now, all tours must be under­tak­en vir­tu­al­ly.

Above, cura­tor Anna Dhody, a phys­i­cal and foren­sic anthro­pol­o­gist and Direc­tor of the Müt­ter Research Insti­tute, gives a brief intro­duc­tion to some of the best known arti­facts in the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion.

The muse­um’s many antique skulls and med­ical odd­i­ties may invite com­par­isons to a ghoul­ish sideshow attrac­tion, an impres­sion Dhody cor­rects with her warm, mat­ter-of-fact deliv­ery and respect­ful acknowl­edg­ment of the humans whose sto­ries have been pre­served along with their remains:

Mary Ash­ber­ry, an achon­droplas­tic dwarf, died from com­pli­ca­tions of a Cesare­an sec­tion, as doc­tors who had yet to learn the impor­tance of ster­il­iz­ing instru­ments and wash­ing hands, attempt­ed to help her deliv­er a baby who proved too big for her pelvis. (The baby’s head was crushed as well. Its skull is dis­played next to its mother’s skele­ton.)

Madame Dimanche is rep­re­sent­ed by a wax mod­el of her face, instant­ly rec­og­niz­able due to the 10-inch cuta­neous horn that began grow­ing from her fore­head when she was in her 70s. (It was even­tu­al­ly removed in an ear­ly exam­ple of suc­cess­ful plas­tic surgery.)

Albert Ein­stein and the con­joined twins Chang and Eng Bunker are among the house­hold names grac­ing the museum’s col­lec­tion.

One of the most recent addi­tions is the skele­ton of artist and dis­abil­i­ty aware­ness advo­cate Car­ol Orzel, who edu­cat­ed the pub­lic and incom­ing Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia med­ical stu­dents about fibrodys­pla­sia ossi­f­i­cans pro­gres­si­va (FOP), a rare dis­or­der that turned her mus­cle and con­nec­tive tis­sue to bone. She told her physi­cian, Fred­er­ick Kaplan, below, that she want­ed her skele­ton to go to the Müt­ter, to join that of fel­low FOP suf­fer­er, Har­ry East­lack… pro­vid­ed some of her prized cos­tume jew­el­ry could be dis­played along­side. It is.

Get bet­ter acquaint­ed with the Müt­ter Museum’s col­lec­tion through this playlist.

The exhib­it Spit Spreads Death is cur­rent­ly slat­ed to stay up through 2024. While wait­ing to vis­it in per­son, you can watch an ani­ma­tion of the Span­ish flu’s spread, and explore an inter­ac­tive map show­ing the demo­graph­ics of the infec­tion.

h/t Tanya Elder

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

Take a Long Vir­tu­al Tour of the Lou­vre in Three High-Def­i­n­i­tion Videos

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of The Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence, the World-Famous Col­lec­tion of Renais­sance Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Here lat­est project is a series of free down­load­able posters, encour­ag­ing cit­i­zens to wear masks in pub­lic and wear them prop­er­ly. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Earliest Known Motion Picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene, Restored with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History, Technology | May 7th, 2020

No image is more close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the birth of the motion pic­ture than a train pulling into the French coastal town of La Cio­tat. Cap­tured by cin­e­ma pio­neers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the 50-sec­ond clip fright­ened the audi­ence at its first screen­ing in 1896, who thought a real loco­mo­tive was hurtling toward them — or so the leg­end goes. Those ear­ly view­ers may sim­ply have felt a tech­no­log­i­cal aston­ish­ment we can no longer muster today, and cer­tain­ly not in response to such a mun­dane sight. That goes dou­ble for the slight­ly short­er and old­er Lumière Broth­ers pro­duc­tion La Sor­tie de l’U­sine Lumière a Lyon. Though it depicts noth­ing more than work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry at the end of the day, it has long been referred to as “the first real motion pic­ture ever made.”

That qual­i­fi­er “real,” of course, hints at the exis­tence of a pre­de­ces­sor. Where­as La Sor­tie de l’U­sine Lumière a Lyon pre­miered in 1895, Louis Le Prince’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene dates to 1888. With its run­time under two sec­onds, this depic­tion of a moment in the life of four fig­ures, a younger man and woman and an old­er man and woman, would even by the stan­dards of the Lumière Broth­ers’ day bare­ly count as a movie at all.

Equal­ly dis­qual­i­fy­ing is its low frame rate: just sev­en to twelve per sec­ond (which one it is has been a mat­ter of some dis­pute), which strikes our eyes more as a rapid sequence of still pho­tographs than as con­tin­u­ous motion. Even so, it must have been a thrill of a result for Le Prince, an Eng­land-based French artist-inven­tor who had been devel­op­ing his motion-pho­tog­ra­phy sys­tem in secre­cy since ear­ly in the decade.

We now have a clear­er sense of the action cap­tured in Round­hay Gar­den Scene thanks to the efforts Youtube-based film restora­tionist Denis Shiryaev, who’s used neur­al net­works to bring the his­toric film more ful­ly to life. Tak­ing a scan of Le Prince’s orig­i­nal paper film, Shiryaev “man­u­al­ly cut this scan into indi­vid­ual frames and cen­tered each image in the frame,” he says in the video at the top of the post. He then “added a sta­bi­liza­tion algo­rithm and applied an aggres­sive face recog­ni­tion neur­al net­work in order to add more details to the faces.” There fol­lowed adjust­ments for con­sis­ten­cy in bright­ness, dam­age repairs, and the work of “an ensem­ble of neur­al net­works” to upscale the footage to as high a res­o­lu­tion as pos­si­ble, inter­po­lat­ing as many frames as pos­si­ble. We may feel star­tled by the life­like qual­i­ty of the result in much the same way as 19th-cen­tu­ry view­ers by the Lumière Broth­ers’ train — which, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, has also received the Shiryaev treat­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (May 1896)

Watch AI-Restored Film of Labor­ers Going Through Life in Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land (1901)

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

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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3D Interactive Globes Now Online: Spin Through an Archive of Globes from the 17th and 18th Century

in Astronomy, History, Maps, Museums | May 6th, 2020

Willem Jan­szoon Blaeu Celes­tial Globe 1602

No mat­ter how accus­tomed we’ve grown over the cen­turies to flat maps of the world, they can nev­er be per­fect­ly accu­rate. Strict­ly speak­ing, no map can per­fect­ly cap­ture the ter­ri­to­ry it describes (an impos­si­bil­i­ty mem­o­rably fic­tion­al­ized by Jorge Luis Borges in “On Exac­ti­tude in Sci­ence”), but there’s a rea­son we also call the Earth “the globe”: only a globe can rep­re­sent not just the plan­et’s true shape, but the true shape of the land mass­es on which we live. This is not to say that globes have always been accu­rate. Like the his­to­ry of map­mak­ing, the his­to­ry of globe-mak­ing is one of edu­cat­ed (or une­d­u­cat­ed) guess­es, free mix­ture of fact and leg­end, and labels like “ter­ra incog­ni­ta” or “here be drag­ons.” You can see that for your­self in the British Library’s new online his­toric globe archive — and not just through flat pho­tographs and scans.

Richard Cushee Ter­res­tri­al Globe 1730

“The archive presents 3D mod­els of 11 globes — a sub­set of the library’s his­toric maps col­lec­tion — that can be rotat­ed and zoomed into for greater detail at every angle,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. She points to one in par­tic­u­lar, “stun­ning 1602 celes­tial globe by Dutch car­tog­ra­ph­er Willem Jan­szoon Blaeu, first pro­duced in 1602. In addi­tion to rep­re­sent­ing the con­stel­la­tions as their fan­tas­tic and mytho­log­i­cal name­sakes, it iden­ti­fies a nova in the con­stel­la­tion of Cygnus which Blaeu had per­son­al­ly observed in 1600.”

The British Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion boasts sev­er­al such “celes­tial globes,” which chart the sky rather than the Earth. How­ev­er few of us have ever turned a celes­tial globe by hand, we can now do it vir­tu­al­ly. If 1602 seems a bit too vin­tage, give a dig­i­tal spin to the oth­ers from 1700, 1728, and 1783.

G.Wright & W. Bardin — Ter­res­tri­al Globe

Back on land, these globes fea­ture not just “fan­tas­tic crea­tures,” Sharp writes, but “charm­ing archa­ic con­cep­tions of the oceans — the ‘Ata­lantick Ocean’ in the 1730 Richard Cushee ter­res­tri­al globe, or the ‘Ethipoic Ocean’ in the 1783 ter­res­tri­al globe by G. Wright and W. Bardin.” In Chushee, Wright and Bardin’s times, few globe-users, or indeed globe-mak­ers, would have had the chance to see much of those vast bod­ies of water for them­selves. Of course, with the cur­rent state of pan­dem­ic lock­down in so many coun­tries, few of us are tak­ing transocean­ic jour­neys even today. If you’re dream­ing about the rest of the world, spend some time with the British Library’s 3D-mod­eled globes on Sketch­fab — where you’ll also find the Roset­ta Stone and Bust of Nefer­ti­ti among oth­er arti­facts pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — and get your hands on an idea of how human­i­ty imag­ined it in cen­turies past.

Thomas Tut­tell Celes­tial Globe C1700

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enchant­i­ng Video Shows How Globes Were Made by Hand in 1955: The End of a 500-Year Tra­di­tion

Watch the Mak­ing of the Dymax­ion Globe: A 3‑D Ren­der­ing of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Map

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

The Strik­ing­ly Beau­ti­ful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imag­i­na­tion of Stu­dents in the 1880s

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

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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Watch a Screen Test of 21-Year-Old Orson Welles (1937)

in Film, History | May 5th, 2020

We remem­ber Orson Welles as a film direc­tor, and giv­en the influ­ence of Cit­i­zen Kane, we do it with good rea­son. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t hurt the image of Welles-as-auteur that he was only 25 years old when he made that movie, now con­sid­ered one of the great­est of all time. Not only did he direct, he co-wrote, pro­duced, and starred, show­cas­ing a set of act­ing skills he’d been hon­ing on radio and the stage since child­hood. If any man was ever born to give com­mand­ing per­for­mances, it was Welles; when silent film gave way to “talkies,” which favored actors with strong pres­ences and strong voic­es both, Hol­ly­wood stu­dios should have beat­en a path to his door. And yet, when he came to Hol­ly­wood, one of its biggest stu­dios turned him down.

These clips show a 21-year-old Welles doing a screen test for Warn­er Broth­ers in ear­ly 1937, by which time he had already estab­lished him­self as a radio and the­atre per­former. What­ev­er spark of genius we feel we can rec­og­nize in Welles’ line-read­ings today, the peo­ple at Warn­ers’ evi­dent­ly could­n’t see it then — or more char­i­ta­bly, they did­n’t know how to sell his preter­nat­ur­al grav­i­tas.

As his­to­ry shows, Welles could in any case make more of a mark with projects under his own con­trol. Lat­er that same year he would co-found the Mer­cury The­atre, the reper­to­ry com­pa­ny now best remem­bered for its radio broad­casts, specif­i­cal­ly the 1938 adap­ta­tion of H.G. Wells’ alien-inva­sion nov­el War of the Worlds that, so the leg­end goes, proved a lit­tle too real for many lis­ten­ers across Amer­i­ca.

Mas­ter­ing the dra­mat­ic arts is one thing, but set­ting off nation­wide con­tro­ver­sy — now that’s the way to get the enter­tain­ment indus­try’s atten­tion. Welles found him­self able to par­lay the inter­est gen­er­at­ed by War of the Worlds into a his­tor­i­cal­ly gen­er­ous three-pic­ture deal with RKO Pic­tures, one that allowed him total cre­ative con­trol as well as the use of his actors from the Mer­cury The­atre. After com­ing to grips with the art of film­mak­ing as well as the art of putting togeth­er projects, Welles came up with the sto­ry of the rise and fall of char­ac­ter mod­eled on William Ran­dolph Hearst, Howard Hugh­es, and oth­er Amer­i­can tycoons. Released in 1941, Cit­i­zen Kane would mark the zenith of Welles’ fame, though over the next 44 years he would labor over many oth­er cin­e­mat­ic visions — efforts more acclaimed now than they were in his life­time, and all finan­cial­ly sup­port­ed by the act­ing skills that nev­er desert­ed him.

via Eyes on Cin­e­ma

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Orson Welles’ First Ever Film, Direct­ed at Age 19

Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Clas­sic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Dark­ness & More

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Orson Welles’ Last Inter­view and Final Moments Cap­tured on Film

Warhol’s Screen Tests of Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, Nico & More

Mar­lon Bran­do Screen Tests for Rebel With­out A Cause (1947)

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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The Art of the New Deal: Why the Federal Government Funded the Arts During the Great Depression

in Art, Health, History | May 4th, 2020

It’s odd to think that the gray-faced, gray-suit­ed U.S. Cold War­riors of the 1950s fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism and left-wing lit­er­ary mag­a­zines in a cul­tur­al offen­sive against the Sovi­et Union. And yet they did. This seem­ing his­tor­i­cal irony is com­pound­ed by the fact that so many of the artists enlist­ed (most­ly unwit­ting­ly) in the cul­tur­al Cold War might not have had careers were it not for the New Deal pro­grams of 20 years ear­li­er, denounced by Repub­li­cans at the time as com­mu­nist.

The New Deal faced fierce oppo­si­tion, and its pas­sage involved some very unfor­tu­nate com­pro­mis­es. But for artists, it was a major boon. Pro­grams estab­lished under the Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion in 1935 helped thou­sands of artists sur­vive until they could get back to ply­ing trades, work­ing as pro­fes­sion­als, or build­ing world-famous careers. Artists and art work­ers once sup­port­ed by the WPA include Dorothea Lange, Langston Hugh­es, Orson Welles, Ralph Elli­son, Zora Neale Hurston, Gor­don Parks, Alan Lomax, Mark Rothko, Jack­son Pol­lock, James Agee, and dozens more famous names.

There were also thou­sands of unknown painters, pho­tog­ra­phers, sculp­tors, poets, dancers, play­wrights, etc. who received fund­ing in their local areas to put their skills to work. “Through the WPA,” the Nation­al Gallery of Art writes, artists “par­tic­i­pat­ed in gov­ern­ment employ­ment pro­grams in every state and coun­ty in the nation.” As to the ques­tion of whether their work deserved to be paid, “Har­ry Hop­kins,” Jer­ry Adler writes at Smith­son­ian, “whom Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt put in charge of work relief, set­tled the mat­ter, say­ing, ‘”Hell, they’ve got to eat just like oth­er peo­ple!”

He turns the ques­tion about who “deserves” relief on its head. Dance may not be nec­es­sary by some people’s lights but eat­ing most cer­tain­ly is. Why shouldn’t artists use their tal­ent to beau­ti­fy the coun­try, col­lect and archive its cul­tur­al his­to­ry, and pro­vide qual­i­ty enter­tain­ment in uncer­tain times? And why should­n’t the coun­try’s artists doc­u­ment the enor­mous build­ing projects under­way, and the major shifts hap­pen­ing in peo­ple’s lives, for pos­ter­i­ty?

Roo­sevelt, tak­ing many of his cues from Eleanor, spoke of fund­ing the arts in much grander terms than the prag­mat­ic Hop­kins. He elab­o­rat­ed on his belief in their “essen­tial” nature in a speech at the ded­i­ca­tion of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s new build­ing in 1939:

Art in Amer­i­ca has always belonged to the peo­ple and has nev­er been the prop­er­ty of an acad­e­my or a class. The great Trea­sury projects, through which our pub­lic build­ings are being dec­o­rat­ed, are an excel­lent exam­ple of the con­ti­nu­ity of this tra­di­tion. The Fed­er­al Art Project of the Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion is a prac­ti­cal relief project which also empha­sizes the best tra­di­tion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic spir­it. The W.P.A. artist, in ren­der­ing his own impres­sion of things, speaks also for the spir­it of his fel­low coun­try­men every­where. I think the W.P.A. artist exem­pli­fies with great force the essen­tial place which the arts have in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety such as ours.

In the future we must seek more wide­spread pop­u­lar under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of the arts. Many of our great cities pro­vide the facil­i­ties for such appre­ci­a­tion. But we all know that because of their lack of size and rich­es the small­er com­mu­ni­ties are in most cas­es denied this oppor­tu­ni­ty. That is why I give spe­cial empha­sis to the need of giv­ing these small­er com­mu­ni­ties the visu­al chance to get to know mod­ern art.

As in our democ­ra­cy we enjoy the right to believe in dif­fer­ent reli­gious creeds or in none, so can Amer­i­can artists express them­selves with com­plete free­dom from the stric­tures of dead artis­tic tra­di­tion or polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. While Amer­i­can artists have dis­cov­ered a new oblig­a­tion to the soci­ety in which they live, they have no com­pul­sion to be lim­it­ed in method or man­ner of expres­sion.

He began the address with sev­er­al airy phras­es about free­dom and lib­er­ty; here, he defines what that looks like for the artist—the abil­i­ty to have dig­ni­fied work and liveli­hood, and to oper­ate with full cre­ative free­dom. Of course, artists, espe­cial­ly those employed in dec­o­rat­ing pub­lic build­ings, were con­strained by cer­tain “Amer­i­can” themes. But they could inter­pret those themes broad­ly, and they did, pic­tur­ing scenes of hard­ship and leisure, recov­er­ing the past and imag­in­ing bet­ter futures.

It could­n’t last. “The WPA-era art pro­grams reflect­ed a trend toward the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the arts in the Unit­ed States and a striv­ing to devel­op a unique­ly Amer­i­can and broad­ly inclu­sive cul­tur­al life,” the Nation­al Gallery explains. Art from this peri­od “offers a win­dow through which to explore the social con­di­tions of the Depres­sion, the main­stream­ing of art and birth of ‘pub­lic art,’ and the open­ing of gov­ern­ment employ­ment to women and African Amer­i­cans.” Oppo­nents of the pro­grams pushed back with red bait­ing. Arts fund­ing under the WPA was end­ed in 1943 by a Con­gress, says schol­ar of the peri­od Fran­cis O’Connor, who could “look at two blades of grass and see a ham­mer and sick­le.”

See much more New Deal art–including plays, pho­tog­ra­phy, art posters and more–at the Nation­al Gallery of Art, the Nation­al Archives, Smith­son­ian, and at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Strik­ing Poster Col­lec­tion from the Great Depres­sion Shows That the US Gov­ern­ment Once Sup­port­ed the Arts in Amer­i­ca

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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500+ Beautiful Manuscripts from the Islamic World Now Digitized & Free to Download

in Archives, Books, History, Religion | May 1st, 2020

Math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, his­to­ry, law, lit­er­a­ture, archi­tec­ture: in these fields and oth­ers, the Mus­lim world came up with major inno­va­tions before any oth­er civ­i­liza­tion did. This Islam­ic cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al flow­er­ing last­ed from the 11th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, and many of the texts the peri­od left as its lega­cy have gone most­ly unre­searched. So say the cre­ators of Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World, a project of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, the Free Library of Philadel­phia, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Bryn Mawr Col­lege, and Haver­ford Col­lege aimed at cre­at­ing an online archive of “more than 500 man­u­scripts and 827 paint­ings from the Islam­i­cate world broad­ly con­strued.”

As UPenn Libraries Senior Cura­tor of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Mitch Fraas tells Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah Rose Sharp, “The aim of this project was to find and dig­i­tize all the Islam­i­cate man­u­scripts in Philadel­phia col­lec­tions and along the way we part­nered with Colum­bia on a grant to take a mul­ti-city approach.”

To the sources of its man­u­scripts it also takes a mul­ti-cul­ture approach, includ­ing “texts relat­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty (Cop­tic and Syr­i­ac mss. galore), Hin­duism (epics trans­lat­ed into Per­sian in Mughal India), sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, music, etc. but which were pro­duced in the his­toric Mus­lim world.” There are also texts, he adds, “in Per­sian, Ara­bic, and Turk­ish of course but also in Cop­tic, Tamazight, Aves­tan, etc.”

If you can read those lan­guages, Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World obvi­ous­ly amounts to a gold mine. (You may also find some­thing of inter­est in the dig­i­tal archives of 700 years of Per­sian man­u­scripts and 10,000 books in Ara­bic we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) But even if you don’t, you’ll find in the col­lec­tion mar­vels of book design that will appeal to any­one with an appre­ci­a­tion of the lush aes­thet­ics, both abstract and fig­u­ra­tive, of these places and these times. Some of them aren’t even as old as they may seem: take the man­u­script at the top of the post, “over­paint­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry to mim­ic Mughal style.” Or the one below that, whose colophon “says the copy was com­plet­ed in 1121 A.H. (1709 or 1710 CE),” which “does not make sense giv­en the author like­ly lived in the 19th cen­tu­ry.”

The oth­er pages here come from a set of “illus­tra­tions from Qur’ānic sto­ries” (this one depict­ing “Abra­ham sac­ri­fic­ing his son”) and a “Per­sian cal­lig­ra­phy and illus­tra­tion album.” You’ll find much more in Man­u­scripts of the Mus­lim World, host­ed on OPENN, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s online repos­i­to­ry of “high-res­o­lu­tion archival images of man­u­scripts” accom­pa­nied by “machine-read­able TEI P5 descrip­tions and tech­ni­cal meta­da­ta,” all released into the pub­lic domain or under Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es. Though each man­u­scrip­t’s entry comes with basic notes, the col­lec­tion is, in the main, not yet a thor­ough­ly stud­ied one. If you have an inter­est in the Islam­ic world at its peak of cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al influ­ence so far, you may just find your next big research sub­ject here — or at the very least, mate­r­i­al for a few hours’ admi­ra­tion. Enter the col­lec­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Down­load 10,000+ Books in Ara­bic, All Com­plete­ly Free, Dig­i­tized and Put Online

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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Bertrand Russell Remembers His Face-to-Face Encounter with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

in History, Philosophy | April 30th, 2020

When the Bol­she­viks seized con­trol of Rus­sia in the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, Bertrand Rus­sell saw it as “one of the great hero­ic events of the world’s his­to­ry.”

A renowned philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian, Rus­sell was also a com­mit­ted social­ist. As he would write in his 1920 book The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism:

By far the most impor­tant aspect of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion is as an attempt to real­ize Com­mu­nism. I believe that Com­mu­nism is nec­es­sary to the world, and I believe that the hero­ism of Rus­sia has fired men’s hopes in a way which was essen­tial to the real­iza­tion of Com­mu­nism in the future. Regard­ed as a splen­did attempt, with­out which ulti­mate suc­cess would have been very improb­a­ble, Bol­she­vism deserves the grat­i­tude and admi­ra­tion of all the pro­gres­sive part of mankind.

But despite his ear­ly admi­ra­tion for the “splen­did attempt,” Rus­sell found much in Sovi­et Rus­sia to be con­cerned about. Specif­i­cal­ly, he was appalled by the rigid­ly doc­tri­naire mind­set of the Bol­she­viks — their zeal for quot­ing Marx like it was Holy gospel — and the cru­el tyran­ny they were will­ing to impose.

In May of 1920, a few months before fin­ish­ing The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism, Rus­sell vis­it­ed Pet­ro­grad (Saint Peters­burg) and Moscow with a British Labour del­e­ga­tion. As he says in the book:

I went to Rus­sia a Com­mu­nist; but con­tact with those who have no doubts has inten­si­fied a thou­sand­fold my own doubts, not as to Com­mu­nism in itself, but as to the wis­dom of hold­ing a creed so firm­ly that for its sake men are will­ing to inflict wide­spread mis­ery.

As Rus­sell would lat­er write in the sec­ond vol­ume of his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, his time in Sovi­et Rus­sia was one of “con­tin­u­al­ly increas­ing night­mare:”

Cru­el­ty, pover­ty, sus­pi­cion, per­se­cu­tion, formed the very air we breathed. Our con­ver­sa­tions were con­tin­u­al­ly spied upon. In the mid­dle of the night one would hear shots, and know that ide­al­ists were being killed in prison. There was a hyp­o­crit­i­cal pre­tence of equal­i­ty, and every­body was called ‘tovarisch’ [com­rade], but it was amaz­ing how dif­fer­ent­ly this word could be pro­nounced accord­ing as the per­son who was addressed was Lenin or a lazy ser­vant.

Soon after arriv­ing in Moscow, Rus­sell had a one-hour talk with Sovi­et leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his spar­tan office in the Krem­lin. “Lenin’s room is very bare,” writes Rus­sell in The Prac­tice and The­o­ry of Bol­she­vism; “it con­tains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cas­es, and one com­fort­able chair for vis­i­tors in addi­tion to two or three hard chairs. It is obvi­ous that he has no love of lux­u­ry or even com­fort.”

In the audio clip above, tak­en from a 1961 inter­view by John Chan­dos at Rus­sel­l’s home in north Wales, the old philoso­pher relates a pair of obser­va­tions of what he saw as Lenin’s two defin­ing traits: his rigid ortho­doxy, and what Rus­sell would lat­er call his “dis­tinct vein of imp­ish cru­el­ty.”

By the time of the inter­view, Rus­sel­l’s ear­ly ambiva­lence toward Sovi­et com­mu­nism had hard­ened into antipa­thy. “Marx’s doc­trine was bad enough, but the devel­op­ments which it under­went under Lenin and Stal­in made it much worse,” he writes in his 1956 essay “Why I am Not a Com­mu­nist.” “I am com­plete­ly at a loss to under­stand how it came about that some peo­ple who are both humane and intel­li­gent could find some­thing to admire in the vast slave camp pro­duced by Stal­in.”

Lenin died on Jan­u­ary 21, 1924 — less than four years after his meet­ing with Rus­sell. A few days lat­er, Rus­sell pub­lished an essay, “Lenin: An Impres­sion,” in The New Leader. And although Rus­sell once again men­tions the man’s nar­row ortho­doxy and ruth­less­ness, he paints a rather glow­ing pic­ture of Lenin as a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure:

The death of Lenin makes the world poor­er by the loss of one of the real­ly great men pro­duced by the war [World War I]. It seems prob­a­ble that our age will go down to his­to­ry as that of Lenin and Ein­stein — the two men who have suc­ceed­ed in a great work of syn­the­sis in an ana­lyt­ic age, one in thought, the oth­er in action. Lenin appeared to the out­raged bour­geoisie of the world as a destroy­er, but it was not the work of destruc­tion that made him pre-emi­nent. Oth­ers could have destroyed, but I doubt whether any oth­er liv­ing man could have built so well on the new foun­da­tions. His mind was order­ly and cre­ative: he was a philo­soph­ic sys­tem-mak­er in the sphere of prac­tice.… States­men of his cal­iber do not appear in the world more than about once in a cen­tu­ry, and few of us are like­ly to live to see his equal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekov, the Romanovs & More

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When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

in History, Music, Technology | April 29th, 2020

When we con­sid­er the many iden­ti­ties of David Bowie — Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — we often neglect to include his trans­for­ma­tion into an inter­net entre­pre­neur. In line with Bowie’s rep­u­ta­tion for being ahead of his time in all endeav­ors, it hap­pened sev­er­al tech booms ago, in the late 1990s. Fore­see­ing the inter­net’s poten­tial as a cul­tur­al and com­mer­cial force, he got ahead of it by launch­ing not just his own web site (which some major artists lacked through the end of the cen­tu­ry), but his own inter­net ser­vice provider. For $19.95 a month (£10.00 in the UK), BowieNet offered fans access not just to “high-speed” inter­net but to “David Bowie, his world, his friends, his fans, includ­ing live chats, live video feeds, chat rooms and bul­letin boards.”

So announced the ini­tial BowieNet press release pub­lished in August 1998, which also promised “live in-stu­dio video feeds,” “text, audio and video mes­sages from Bowie,” “Desk­top themes includ­ing Bowie screen­savers, wall­pa­per and icons,” and best of all, a “david­bowie e‑mail address (your na**@********ie.com).” While the dial-up of the inter­net con­nec­tions of the day was­n’t quite equal to the task of reli­ably stream­ing video, many of BowieNet’s approx­i­mate­ly 100,000 mem­bers still fond­ly remem­ber the com­mu­ni­ty cul­ti­vat­ed on its mes­sage boards. “This was in effect a music-cen­tric social net­work,” writes The Gar­dian’s Kei­th Stu­art, “sev­er­al years before the emer­gence of sec­tor lead­ers like Friend­ster and Myspace.”

Unlike on the the vast social net­works that would lat­er devel­op, the man him­self was known to drop in. Under the alias “Sailor,” writes Newsweek’s Zach Schon­feld, “Bowie would some­times share updates and rec­om­men­da­tions or respond to fan queries.” He might endorse an album (Arcade Fire’s debut Funer­al earned a rave), express increduli­ty at rumors (of, say, his play­ing a con­cert with Paul McCart­ney and Michael Jack­son to be beamed into out­er space), crack jokes, or tell sto­ries (of, say, the time he and John Lennon sat around call­ing into radio sta­tions togeth­er). As Ars Tech­ni­ca’s inter­view with BowieNet co-founder Ron Roy con­firms, Bowie did­n’t just lend the enter­prise his brand but was “tremen­dous­ly involved from day one.” As Roy tells it, Bowie kept BowieNet fresh “by explor­ing new tech­nolo­gies to keep fans engaged and excit­ed. He always preached [that] it’s about the expe­ri­ence, the new.”

It helped that Bowie was­n’t sim­ply look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the rise of the inter­net. As the 1999 ZDTV inter­view at the top of the post reveals, he was already hooked on it him­self. “The first thing I do is get e‑mails out of the way,” he says, describ­ing the aver­age day in his online life. “I’m e‑mail crazy. And then I’ll spend prob­a­bly about an hour, maybe more, going through my site.” Even in the ear­ly days of “the con­tro­ver­sial mp3 for­mat,” he showed great enthu­si­asm for putting his music online. He con­tin­ued doing so even after tech­nol­o­gy sur­passed BowieNet, which dis­con­tin­ued its inter­net ser­vice in 2006. Now, as the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic keeps much of the world at home, many high-pro­file artists have tak­en to the inter­net to keep the show going. David Bowie fans know that, were he still with us, he’d have been the first to do it — and do it, no doubt, the most inter­est­ing­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1999, David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good and Bad of the Inter­net: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Com­mer­cials from the 1960s Through 2013

How David Bowie Deliv­ered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Zig­gy Star­dust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

John Tur­tur­ro Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Inter­net

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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