Almost anything can be preserved in alcohol, except health, happiness and money…
Roderick Phillips’ Ted-Ed lesson, a Brief History of Alcohol, above, opens with a bon mot from early 20th-century quote maven Mary Wilson Little, after which, an unwitting chimpanzee quickly discovers the intoxicating effects of overripe plums.
His eyes pinwheel, he falls off a branch, and grins, drunk as a monkey’s uncle.
And though the subject is alcohol, this primate is the only character in Anton Bogaty’s 5‑minute animation who could be hauled in on a drunk and disorderly charge.
The others take a more sober, industrious approach, illustrating alcohol’s prominent role in early medicine, religious rituals, and global trading.
Ancient Egyptians harvest the cereal grains that will produce beer, included as part of workers’ rations and available to all classes.
A native of South America stirs a kettle of chicha, a fistful of hallucinogenic herbs held at the ready.
A Greek physician tends to a patient with a goblet of wine, as a nearby poet prepares to deliver an ode on its creative properties.
Students with an interest in the science of alcohol can learn a bit about the fermentation process and how the invention of distillation allowed for much stronger spirits.
Alcohol was a welcome presence aboard seafaring vessels. Not only did this valuable trading commodity spark lively parties on deck, it sanitized the sailors’ drinking water, making longer voyages possible.
If any one of us ran our own country, we’d surely drive no small amount of resources toward building an impressive national library. That would be true even if we ran a country the size of the Vatican, the smallest sovereign state in the world — but one that, unsurprisingly, punches well above its weight in terms of the size and historical value of its holdings. “It was in 1451 when Pope Nicholas V, a renowned bibliophile himself, attempted to re-establish Rome as an academic center of global importance,” writes Aleteia’s Daniel Esparza. That formidable task involved first “building a relatively modest library of over 1,200 volumes, including his personal collection of Greek and Roman classics and a series of texts brought from Constantinople.”
The Vatican Apostolic Library, known as “VAT,” has grown a bit over the past five and a half centuries. Today it contains around 75,000 codices and 85,000 incunabula (which Esparza defines as “editions made between the invention of the printing press and the 16th century”) amid a total of over one million volumes.
And in the case of increasingly many of these documents, you no longer have to make the journey to Vatican City to see them. Thanks to an ongoing digitization project launched a decade ago, increasingly many have become searchable and downloadable on DigiVatLib, a databaseof the Vatican Library’s digitized collections including not just the aforementioned codices and incunabula but “archival materials and inventories as well as graphic materials, coins and medals.”
Back in 2016 we featured a digital collection of 5,300 rare manuscripts digitized by the collection, including the Iliad and Aeneid as well as Japanese and Aztec illustrations. The VAT’s scanning, uploading, and organizing has continued apace since, and though it prioritizes manuscripts “from the Middle Age and Humanistic period,” its materials taken together have a wider historical and indeed cultural sweep, one that only gets wider with each page added. You can get started exploring this wealth of documents by scrolling down a little on DigiVatLib’s front page, in the middle of which you’ll find the latest digitized materials as well as a host of selected manuscripts, a few of whose pages you see above. The VAT has enjoyed its status as one of the chief repositories of Western civilization longer than any of us has been alive, but we can count ourselves in the first generation of humanity to see it open up to the world.
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 or on Facebook.
The successes of the Freedman’s Bureau, initiated by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and first administered under Oliver Howard’s War Department, are all the more remarkable considering the intense popular and political opposition to the agency. Under Lincoln’s successor, impeached Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, the Bureau at times became a hostile entity to the very people it was meant to aid and protect—the formerly enslaved, especially, but also poor whites devastated by the war. After years of defunding, understaffing, and violent insurgency the Freedman’s Bureau was officially dissolved in 1872.
In those first few years after emancipation, however, the Bureau built several hospitals and over a thousand rural schools in the South, established the Historically Black College and University system, and “created millions of records,” notes the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), “that contain the names of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved individuals and Southern white refugees.” Those records have enabled historians to reconstruct the lives of people who might otherwise have disappeared from the record and helped genealogists trace family connections that might have been irrevocably broken.
As we noted back in 2015, those records have become part of a digitization project named for the Bureau and spearheaded by the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. “Using modern, digital and web-based technology and the power of [over 25,000!] volunteers,” says Hollis Gentry, a genealogical specialist at the NMAAHC, the Freedman’s Bureau Project “is unlocking information from a transformative era in the history of African American families and the American nation.”
That information is now available to the general public, “globally via the web” here, as of June 20th, 2016, allowing “all of us to enlarge our understanding of the past.” More specifically, the Freedman’s Bureau Project and FamilySearch allows African Americans to recover their family history in a database that now includes “the names of nearly 1.8 million men, women and children” recorded by Freedman’s Bureau workers and entered by Freedman’s Bureau Project volunteers 150 years later. This incredible database will give millions of people descended from both former slaves and white Civil War refugees the ability to find their ancestors.
There’s still more work to be done. In collaboration with the NMAAHC, the Smithsonian Transcription Center is currently relying on volunteers to transcribe all of the digital scans provided by FamilySearch. “When completed, the papers will be keyword searchable. This joint effort will help increase access to the Freedmen’s Bureau collection and help the public learn more about the United States in the Reconstruction Era,” a critical time in U.S. history that is woefully underrepresented or deliberately whitewashed in textbooks and curricula.
“The records left by the Freedmen’s Bureau through its work between 1865 and 1872 constitute the richest and most extensive documentary source available for investigating the African American experience in the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras,” writes the National Archives. Soon, all of those documents will be publicly available for everyone to read. For now, those with roots in the U.S. South can search the Freedman’s Bureau Project database to discover more about their family heritage and history.
And while the Smithsonian’s transcription project is underway, those who want to learn more can visit the Freedman’s Bureau Online, which has transcribed hundreds of documents, including labor records, narratives of “outrages committed on freedmen,” and marriage registers.
If you’re a regular reader of Open Culture, you know we like to bring you the latest attempts to decipher the legendary Voynich Manuscript, a strange medieval book whose language has baffled scholars for centuries. Like many other early 15th century texts, the Voynich seems to combine medicine, alchemy, herbology, botany, zoology, astrology, and other forms of folk knowledge in a compendium. But it’s filled with bizarre illustrations (see an online version here) and written in a language no one can read. Is it a lost ancestor tongue? The secret code of a cult? Is it a hoax? Why was it made and by whom?
Researchers have tried to translate the Voynich language as variant forms Latin, Arabic, and Sino-Tibetan. An AI identified it as Hebrew. This year a father and son team convincingly made the case for Old Turkic. No Voynich translation has been definitively accepted by a scholarly consensus, and perhaps none ever will. This may say as much about the mysterious Voynich as it does about the niche research area, in which academic linguists, codicologists, and all manner of amateur sleuths try to make a name for themselves as Jean-François Champollions of Voynich studies.
The hour-long documentary above tells the story of both the manuscript’s enigmas and the cult of fascination that has grown up around them. We first learn the origin of the name: Acquired by Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, the manuscript passed into the care of his wife Ethel, an Irish artist and novelist, upon his death in 1930. Ethel died 30 years later in New York, leaving the manuscript behind, sealed in a bank vault. “Its fate had troubled both Mrs. Voynich and her husband before her.”
Wilfred Voynich has often been suspected as the manuscript’s true author, but its materials have been carbon dated to the early 1400s, and its first confirmed owner, an alchemist from Prague named George Baresch, lived in the 17th century. Other proposed authors have included Queen Elizabeth I’s advisor John Dee, an alchemist and occult philosopher, and Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon, who was renowned as a wizard almost two centuries before the extant Voynich could have been produced.
Evidence for these claims is often tenuous, but the wealth of speculation to which the Voynich has given rise only deepens the mystery of its creation. As more Voynich scholars undertake frustrating, and often fruitless, investigations, they add to the manuscript’s lore, itself so rich as to occasion another, two-hour, follow-up video from our documentarian, who goes by the name The Histocrat on YouTube. See the further “Deep Dive” on the Voynich manuscript’s many historical owners—both confirmed and rumored—just above.
Where did art begin? In a cave, most of us would say — especially those of us who’ve seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams — and specifically on the walls of caves, where early humans drew the first representations of landscapes, animals, and themselves. But when did art begin? The answer to that question has proven more subject to revision. The well-known paintings of the Lascaux cave complex in France go back 17,000 years, but the paintings of that same country’s Chauvet cave, the ones Herzog captured in 3D, go back 32,000 years. And just two years ago, Griffith University researchers discovered artwork on a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that turns out to be about 44,000 years old.
Here on Open Culture we’ve featured the argument that ancient rock-wall art constitutes the earliest form of cinema, to the extent that its unknown painters sought to evoke movement. But cave paintings like the one in Sulawesi’s cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which you can see in the video above, also shed light on the nature of the earliest known forms of storytelling.
The “fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment,” writes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, depicts “about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo.” This first known narrative“tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast.”
Like other ancient cave art, the painting’s characters are therianthropes, described by the Griffith researchers’ Nature article as “abstract beings that combine qualities of both people and animals, and which arguably communicated narrative fiction of some kind (folklore, religious myths, spiritual beliefs and so on).” Given the apparent importance of their roles in early stories, how much of a stretch would it be to call these figures the first superheroes? “Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today — the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries,” writes Gopnik.
If you haven’t followed this struggle for the soul of storytelling in the 21st century, Scorsese wrote a piece in The New York Times claiming that today’s kind of blockbuster superhero picture isn’t cinema, in that it shrinks from “the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” (“He didn’t say it’s despicable,” Coppola later added, “which I just say it is.”) And yet, as Gopnik puts it, “our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s.” If we just imagine how those therianthropes — “A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile!” — must have thrilled their contemporary viewers, we’ll understand these cave paintings for what they are: early art, early storytelling, early cinema, but above all, early spectacle.
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 or on Facebook.
Last Christmas, we featured Charles Dickens’ hand-edited copy of his beloved 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. He did that hand editing for the purposes of giving public readings, a practice that, in his time, “was considered a desecration of one’s art and a lowering of one’s dignity.” That time, however, has gone, and many of the most prestigious writers alive today take the reading aloud of their own work to the level of art, or at least high entertainment, that Dickens must have suspected one could. Some writers even do a bang-up job of reading other writers’ work: modern master storyteller Neil Gaiman gave us a dose of that on Monday when we featured his recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from memory. Today, however, comes the full meal: Gaiman’s telling of A Christmas Carolstraight from that very Dickens-edited reading copy.
Gaiman read to a full house at the New York Public Library, an institution known for its stimulating events, holiday-themed or otherwise. But he didn’t have to hold up the afternoon himself; taking the stage before him, BBC researcher and The Secret Museumauthor Molly Oldfield talked about her two years spent seeking out fascinating cultural artifacts the world over, including but not limited to the NYPL’s own collection of things Dickensian. You can hear both Oldfield and Gaiman in the recording above. But perhaps the greatest gift of all came in the form of the latter’s attire for his reading: not only did he go fully Victorian, he even went to the length of replicating the 19th-century literary superstar’s own severe hair part and long goatee. And School Library Journal has pictures.
The nature of marketing in the nearly-over 2010s, with all its unexpected brand crossovers and collaborations, gave rise to many strange commercial bedfellows. But for sheer artistic shock value, did any of them surpass Christmas of 1960, when Salvador Dalí designed holiday greeting cards for Hallmark? It was the rare intersection of the kind of company that has built an empire on broadly appealing, inoffensive expressions of love and festivity and an artist who once said, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”
“Hallmark began reproducing the paintings and designs of contemporary artists on its Christmas cards in the late 1940s, an initiative that was led by company founder Joyce Clyde Hall,” writes the Washington Post’s Ana Swanson.
“The art of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe all took a turn on Hallmark’s Christmas cards.” And so, Swanson quotes Hall as writing in his autobiography, “through the ‘unsophisticated art’ of greeting cards, the world’s greatest masters were shown to millions of people who might otherwise not have been exposed to them.”
Hallmark signed Dalí on in 1959. The painter of The Persistence of Memoryand Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)asked the greeting-card giant for “$15,000 in cash in advance for 10 greeting card designs, with no suggestions from Hallmark for the subject or medium, no deadline and no royalties.” The designs Dalí came up with included “Surrealist renditions of the Christmas tree and the Holy Family,” as well as some “vaguely unsettling” images, such as a headless angel playing a lute and the three wise men atop some insane-looking camels. Ultimately, Hallmark only produced two of the Dalí cards, a nativity scene and a depiction of the Madonna and Child. Alas, even those relatively tame images didn’t go over well.
Dalí’s “take on Christmas,” as Patrick Regan writes in Hallmark: A Century of Caring, was “a bit too avant garde for the average greeting card buyer,” and the negative public response soon convinced Hallmark to drop Dalí’s cards from their product line — thus ensuring their future as sought-after collector’s items. As inauspicious as the marriage of Dalí and Hallmark might seem, the artist did possess a commercial sense more in line with Joyce Clyde Hall’s than not: in his lifetime Dalí created a range of products ranging from prints to books (including a cookbook) to tarot decks, and even appeared in television commercials. Not all of his ventures were successful, but as with his Hallmark Christmas cards — about which you can learn more at the site of Spanish language and literature professor Rebecca M. Bender — sometimes the failures are more memorable than the successes.
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 or on Facebook.
Softness is perhaps not the first quality that springs to mind when one imagines recreating the chaos and anguish of Picasso’s Guernica in a 3‑dimensional representation.
Though how else to describe the primary medium of the urban knitting group Sul filo dell’arte?
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