Napoleon’s Disastrous Invasion of Russia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visualization: It’s Been Called “the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn”

in Data, Design, History | July 11th, 2019

It’s tempt­ing to asso­ciate data visu­al­iza­tions with Pow­er­Point and online graph­ics, which have enabled an unheard-of capac­i­ty for dis­sem­i­nat­ing full-col­or images. But the form reach­es much fur­ther back in his­to­ry. Fur­ther back, even, than the front pages of USA Today and glossy side­bars of Time and
Newsweek. In 1900, for exam­ple, W.E.B. Du Bois made impres­sive use of sev­er­al full-col­or data visu­al­iza­tions for the First Pan-African Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, with no access what­so­ev­er to desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware or a laser print­er.

Almost fifty years before Du Bois turned sta­tis­tics into swirls of col­or and shape, Flo­rence Nightin­gale used her lit­tle-known graph­ic design skills to illus­trate the caus­es of dis­ease in the Crimean War and John Snow (not Jon Snow) illus­trat­ed his rev­o­lu­tion­ary Broad Street Pump cholera the­o­ry with a famous info­graph­ic street map.

Around this same time, anoth­er data visu­al­iza­tion pio­neer, Charles Joseph Minard, pro­duced some of the most high­ly-regard­ed info­graph­ics ever made, includ­ing the 1869 illus­tra­tion above of Napoleon’s march to, and retreat from, Moscow in the War of 1812. View it in a large for­mat here.

Made fifty years after the event, when Minard was 80 years old, the map has been called by the bible of data visu­al­iza­tion studies—Edward Tufte’s The Visu­al Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion—“prob­a­bly the best sta­tis­ti­cal graph­ic ever drawn.” Over at thoughtbot.com, Joanne Cheng sums up the con­text, if you need­ed a his­tor­i­cal refresh­er: “The year is 1812 and Napoleon is doing pret­ty well for him­self. He has most of Europe under his con­trol, except for the UK.”

Angered by Czar Alexander’s refusal to sup­port a UK trade embar­go to weak­en their defens­es, Napoleon “gath­ers a mas­sive army of over 400,000 to attack Rus­sia.” The cam­paign was dis­as­trous: over­con­fi­dent advances on Moscow turned into dev­as­tat­ing win­ter­time retreats dur­ing which the Grande Armée only “nar­row­ly escaped com­plete anni­hi­la­tion.” So, how does Minard’s 1869 Tableau Graphique tell this grand sto­ry of hubris and icy car­nage? And, Cheng asks, “what makes it so good?”

Cheng breaks Minard’s series of jagged lines and shapes down into more con­ven­tion­al XY axis line graphs to show how he coor­di­nat­ed a huge amount of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the loca­tions (by lon­gi­tude) of dif­fer­ent groups of Napoleon’s troops at dif­fer­ent points in time, their direc­tion, and the pre­cip­i­tous­ly falling tem­per­a­tures in the stages of retreat. He drew from a list of the best his­tor­i­cal sources he could con­sult at the time, turn­ing dense prose into the spare, clean lines that set data sci­en­tists’ hearts a‑flutter.

Minard began his career in a much more rec­og­niz­ably 19-cen­tu­ry design field, build­ing bridges, dams, and canals across Europe for the first few decades of the 1800s. As a civ­il engi­neer “he had the good for­tune to take part in almost all the great ques­tions of pub­lic works which ush­ered in our cen­tu­ry,” not­ed an obit­u­ary pub­lished in Annals of Bridges and Roads the year after Minard’s death in 1870. “And dur­ing the twen­ty years of retire­ment, always au courant of the tech­ni­cal and eco­nom­ic sci­ences, he endeav­ored to pop­u­lar­ize the most salient results.”

He did so by ven­tur­ing out­side the sub­ject of engi­neer­ing, while using the “inno­v­a­tive tech­niques he had invent­ed for the pur­pose of dis­play­ing flows of peo­ple” on paper, writes Michael Sand­berg at DataViz. In order to tell the trag­ic tale” of Napoleon’s crush­ing defeat “in a sin­gle image,” Minard imag­ined the event as a dynam­ic phys­i­cal struc­ture.

Minard’s chart shows six types of infor­ma­tion: geog­ra­phy, time, tem­per­a­ture, the course and direc­tion of the army’s move­ment, and the num­ber of troops remain­ing. The widths of the gold (out­ward) and black (return­ing) paths rep­re­sent the size of the force, one mil­lime­tre to 10,000 men. Geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures and major bat­tles are marked and named, and plum­met­ing tem­per­a­tures on the return jour­ney are shown along the bot­tom.

This was hard­ly Minard’s first info­graph­ic. In fact, he made “scores of oth­er graph­ics and charts,” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic writes, “as well as near­ly 50 maps. He pio­neered sev­er­al impor­tant the­mat­ic map­ping tech­niques and per­fect­ed oth­ers, such as using flow lines on a map.” (See oth­er exam­ples of his work at Nation­al Geographic’s site.) Minard may not be much remem­bered for his infra­struc­ture, but his abil­i­ty, as his obit­u­ar­ist wrote, to turn “the dry and com­pli­cat­ed columns of sta­tis­ti­cal data” into “images math­e­mat­i­cal­ly pro­por­tioned” has made him a leg­end in data sci­ence his­to­ry cir­cles.

Again, view Minard’s visu­al­iza­tion of Napoleon’s failed inva­sion in a large for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

W.E.B. Du Bois Cre­ates Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tions Show­ing the Eco­nom­ic Plight of African-Amer­i­cans (1900)

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

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

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David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Turn 50 This Month: Celebrate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

in History, Music | July 10th, 2019

One might call the explo­sion of “space rock” in the late 60s anoth­er kind of escapism, a turn from the heav­i­ness on plan­et Earth when the Age of Aquar­ius start­ed to get seri­ous­ly dark. Assas­si­na­tions, riots, ille­gal wars, blunt state repres­sion, coun­ter­cul­ture frag­men­ta­tion, vio­lence every­where, it seemed. Hal­lu­cino­gens played their part in guid­ing the music’s direc­tion, but who could blame bands and fans of bands like the Grate­ful Dead, Pink Floyd, Hawk­wind, or Hen­drix for turn­ing their gaze sky­wards and con­tem­plat­ing the stars?

One might also make the case that so-called “space rock”—psych-rock that direct­ly or indi­rect­ly ref­er­enced out­er space, space trav­el, and sci-fi themes, while sound­ing itself like the music of the spheres on acid—in fact, turned square­ly toward the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-advanced, ambi­tious proxy bat­tle of the entire Cold War. The very earth­ly space race made a fit­ting sub­ject for rock opera—a per­fect stage set for imag­i­na­tive songs about alien­ation, iso­la­tion, and tech­no­log­i­cal inhu­man­i­ty.

All of these themes come togeth­er in a celes­tial har­mo­ny in David Bowie’s 1969 sin­gle, “Space Odd­i­ty,” released on July 11th 1969 and inspired by Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, both cul­tur­al arti­facts that antic­i­pat­ed the dra­ma of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. The excite­ment Kubrick’s film and Bowie’s song helped gen­er­ate is odd, how­ev­er, con­sid­er­ing that both nar­ra­tives end with their pro­tag­o­nists lost in out­er space for­ev­er.

This didn’t stop the BBC from using “Space Odd­i­ty” to sound­track their Apol­lo cov­er­age, “despite its chill­ing con­clu­sion,” writes Jason Heller, author of Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Explod­ed. The song’s sce­nario “couldn’t have been fur­ther from the typ­i­cal cheer­lead­ing of the astro­nauts that was being con­duct­ed by the media. No one was more sur­prised than Bowie,” who com­ment­ed:

I’m sure they real­ly weren’t lis­ten­ing to the lyrics at all. It wasn’t a pleas­ant thing to jux­ta­pose against a moon land­ing…. Obvi­ous­ly, some BBC offi­cial said, ‘Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that’ll be great.’ ‘Um, but he gets strand­ed in space, sir.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the pro­duc­er that.

“Of course,” says Bowie, ”I was over­joyed that they did” run with the song. It had been his label’s intent to gar­ner this kind of expo­sure when they rushed the record’s release to “cap­i­tal­ize on the Apol­lo craze.” “Space Odd­i­ty” made it to num­ber five on the UK charts. But if Bowie was mak­ing any com­ment on the moon mis­sion, at first it seems he did so only indi­rect­ly, inspired more by cin­e­ma than cur­rent events. He found 2001 “amaz­ing,” he com­ment­ed, adding, “I was out of my gourd any­way, I was very stoned when I went to see it, sev­er­al times, and it was real­ly a rev­e­la­tion to me.”

The song, he says, came out of that enhanced view­ing expe­ri­ence. Heller writes of sev­er­al more of Bowie’s lit­er­ary sci-fi influ­ences, but not of a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet Bowie, who record­ed the first “Space Odd­i­ty” demo in Jan­u­ary of 1969, did say he want­ed the song “to be the first anthem of the Moon.” The lyrics also “came from a feel­ing of sad­ness,” he said, about the space pro­gram’s direc­tion. “It has been dehu­man­ized,” he said. “Space Odd­i­ty” rep­re­sent­ed a delib­er­ate “anti­dote to space fever,” which is maybe why the song did­n’t catch on in the U.S. until the ‘70s.

This was not a song about plant­i­ng a flag of con­quest. Jour­nal­ist Chris O’Leary remem­bers Bowie mak­ing even more point­ed com­men­tary, con­sid­er­ing “the fate of Major Tom to be the tech­no­crat­ic Amer­i­can mind com­ing face-to-face with the unknown and blank­ing out.” The song her­ald­ed not only a piv­otal sci­en­tif­ic achieve­ment but a cul­tur­al break: “It was prob­a­bly not hyper­bole to assert that the Age of Aquar­ius end­ed when man walked on the Moon,” writes soci­ol­o­gist Philip Ennis. Or as Camille Paglia inter­pret­ed events in Bowie’s song, “we sense that the ‘60s coun­ter­cul­ture has trans­mut­ed into a hope­less­ness about polit­i­cal reform.”

This may seem like a lot of inter­pre­ta­tion to lay on what Bowie him­self called a “song-farce,” but when we’re talk­ing about Bowie’s song­writ­ing, even throw­away lines seem filled with por­tent. And when it comes to that supreme­ly ambiva­lent cou­plet “Plan­et Earth is blue / And there’s noth­ing I can do,” we find our­selves legit­i­mate­ly ask­ing along with Heller, is this “anthem or requiem? Cel­e­bra­tion or decon­struc­tion?” It has been all these things—the “defin­ing song of the Space Age,” sung by astro­nauts them­selves while float­ing in the tin can of the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, and soon to be broad­cast at the Kennedy Cen­ter in a new video cel­e­brat­ing the 50th anniver­sary of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing.

The video at the NASA event on July 20th will com­mem­o­rate the event with “footage of David Bowie per­form­ing Space Odd­i­ty at his 50th birth­day con­cert at Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1997.” At the top of the post, see a lat­er video for the song (the first film Bowie made, in 1969, would not emerge until 1984); fur­ther up, see an excel­lent live per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars; and just above, see a young, fresh, bell-bot­tomed, pre-glam Bowie play “Space Odd­i­ty” live on TV in 1969.

As we remem­ber the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing this month, we also cel­e­brate the release of “Space Odd­i­ty” just nine days ear­li­er, the song that first launched Bowie’s career as a space­far­ing rock star. He couldn’t have pre­dict­ed the suc­cess of the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion, but now it seems we can­not prop­er­ly remem­ber it with­out also reflect­ing on his pre­scient pop critique—an attempt, he said, “to relate sci­ence and emo­tion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

How “Space Odd­i­ty” Launched David Bowie to Star­dom: Watch the Orig­i­nal Music Video From 1969

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

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

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When MAD Magazine Ruffled the Feathers of the FBI, Not Once But Three Times

in Comedy, History, Magazines | July 9th, 2019

Many of us grew up read­ing MAD, the soon-to-be-late illus­trat­ed satir­i­cal mag­a­zine. But only the gen­er­a­tions who went through their MAD peri­ods in the pub­li­ca­tion’s first cou­ple of decades, from the 1950s through the 1970s, enjoyed it at the height of its sub­ver­sive pow­ers. As hard as it may be to imag­ine in the 21st cen­tu­ry, there was even a time when MAD came under scruti­ny by no less pow­er­ful an orga­ni­za­tion than the Unit­ed States Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion, and faced the wrath of its first and most feared direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover at that. But did the heat stop its cre­ators from doing their nec­es­sary work of irrev­er­ence? Most cer­tain­ly not.

“In a memo dat­ed Novem­ber 30, 1957,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Jake Rossen, “an agent with the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion iden­ti­fied as ‘A. Jones.’ raised an issue of crit­i­cal impor­tance.” That issue had to do with what the FBI file on the case described as sev­er­al com­plaints made “con­cern­ing the ‘Mad’ com­ic book,” and specif­i­cal­ly “a tongue-in-cheek game about draft dodg­ing. Play­ers who earned such sta­tus were advised to write to FBI Direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover and request a mem­ber­ship card cer­ti­fy­ing them­selves as a ‘full-fledged draft dodger.’ At least three read­ers, the agent report­ed, did exact­ly that.” Agent Jones also weighed in with a judg­ment of MAD itself: “It is rather unfun­ny.”

You can see all this for your­self in the doc­u­ments from the FBI file, excerpts of which are avail­able to down­load at thesmokinggun.com. “Crit­i­ciz­ing or lam­poon­ing the FBI has become stan­dard media fare,” says that site, “but when J. Edgar Hoover ran the joint, the bureau would­n’t stand for such swipes — and often retal­i­at­ed by inves­ti­gat­ing its foes. So that’s why it’s great to see that MAD mag­a­zine was­n’t intim­i­dat­ed by Hoover and seemed to take plea­sure in needling the Direc­tor.” It did it again in 1960, two years after pub­lish­er William Gaines promised nev­er to men­tion Hoover’s name in the pages of MAD, when it made fun of the FBI’s top man twice in a sin­gle issue, once in a faux adver­tise­ment for a vac­u­um clean­er called “The Hon­or­able J. Edgar Elec­trolux.”

The exchanges that ensued, says thesmokinggun.com, reveal the FBI’s pos­ses­sion of “one lousy sense of humor.” But they also reveal no small degree of courage on the part of a still-new humor mag­a­zine in the face of an intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion more than empow­ered to seri­ous­ly dis­rupt lives and careers. Not long there­after, MAD would become a rec­og­nized Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion in its own way, pok­ing fun at seem­ing­ly every phe­nom­e­non to pass, how­ev­er ephemer­al­ly, through the nation­al zeit­geist. But now that its own run, which adds up to a high­ly non-ephemer­al 67 years, has come to an end, we’d do well to reflect on what its his­to­ry tells us about satire and the state. The con­di­tion of that dynam­ic today may cause some of us to do just what MAD mas­cot Alfred E. Neu­man nev­er did — wor­ry.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The End of an Era: MAD Mag­a­zine Will Pub­lish Its Last Issue With Orig­i­nal Con­tent This Fall

Every Cov­er of MAD Mag­a­zine, from 1952 to the Present: Behold 553 Cov­ers from the Satir­i­cal Pub­li­ca­tion

FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declas­si­fied Files on Hem­ing­way, Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn & Oth­er Icons

Read 113 Pages of Charles Bukowski’s FBI File From 1968

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

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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Hear Wade in the Water: An Unprecedented 26-Hour-Long Exploration of the African American Sacred Music Tradition

in History, Music | July 3rd, 2019

Pho­to of Mahalia Jack­son by Dave Brinkman, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It may well be a tru­ism to say that Amer­i­can music is African Amer­i­can music, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And when we reduce truths down to tru­isms they lose the gran­u­lar detail that makes them inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant. Every­one knows, for exam­ple, that there would be no rock and roll with­out Robert John­son at the cross­roads and Lit­tle Richard in his sequined jack­et and pom­padour. But how many peo­ple know that with­out North Car­oli­na-born Les­ley Rid­dle, A.P. Carter’s one­time musi­cal part­ner, folk and coun­try music as we know it might not exist?

Like­wise, Negro Spir­i­tu­als and the black gospel tra­di­tion are legendary—birthing such tow­er­ing fig­ures as Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke. But that his­to­ry has often been turned into stereo­type, an easy ref­er­ence for down-home authen­tic­i­ty. Divorced from their roots, easy evo­ca­tions of African Amer­i­can gospel glide over a com­plex tapes­try of syn­cretism and syn­chronic­i­ty, inno­va­tion and preser­va­tion, and the build­ing of local and nation­al com­mu­ni­ties with a glob­al scope and pres­ence.

Black sacred music touch­es every part of U.S. his­to­ry. To hear this his­to­ry in gran­u­lar detail, you need to hear NPR’s just-re-released audio series Wade in the Water: African Amer­i­can Sacred Music Tra­di­tions. First released in 1994 by NPR and the Smith­son­ian, the 26-part doc­u­men­tary details “the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can gospel music and its impact on soul, jazz and R&B.” The series begins with a con­cep­tu­al overview and car­ries us all the way through to the con­tem­po­rary gospel scene.

Along the way, we learn about region­al scenes, the growth and world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty of the Jubilee singers who so inspired W.E.B. Du Bois, the lined hymn and shaped-note tra­di­tions, and the use of gospel as a doc­u­men­tary medi­um itself, chron­i­cling the sink­ing of the Titan­ic, the Depres­sion, World Wars I and II, and more. Sacred music sup­port­ed Civ­il Rights strug­gles, and move­ment lead­ers like Fan­nie Lou Hamer sang as they marched and orga­nized, a pow­er­ful sound folk singers like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan picked up and emu­lat­ed.

Talk­ing about music can only take us so far. Wade in the Water suc­ceed­ed by keep­ing music at the cen­ter, even releas­ing a four-CD set, with exten­sive lin­er notes. This time around, the dig­i­tal release comes with Spo­ti­fy playlists like the one above in which you can hear a sam­pling of songs from the series. Here you’ll find the usu­al crossover gospel greats—Aretha, the Sta­ple Singers, Bil­ly Pre­ston, Mahalia Jack­son, BeBe and Cece Winans. You’ll also hear unknown com­mu­ni­ty groups like a Demopo­lis, Alaba­ma Con­gre­ga­tion singing “Come and Go with Me” and the Gatling Funer­al Home singing “Gatling Devo­tion­al.”

The series was researched, pro­duced, and pre­sent­ed by Ber­nice John­son Reagon, who is both a liv­ing exam­ple and a his­to­ri­an of the African Amer­i­can musi­cal tra­di­tion. A founder of the SNCC Free­dom Singers dur­ing the Civ­il Rights move­ment, she went on to found and direct Sweet Hon­ey in the Rock, who appear in Wade in the Water and the playlist above. Reagon earned her Ph.D. from Howard Uni­ver­si­ty and pub­lished sev­er­al schol­ar­ly books on the his­to­ry she explores in the doc­u­men­tary series. Learn more about her (and hear more of her music) here, and hear all 26 episodes of Wade in the Water at NPR.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford) 

Hear the First Record­ed Blues Song by an African Amer­i­can Singer: Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920)

Eliz­a­beth Cot­ten Wrote “Freight Train” at 11, Won a Gram­my at 90, and Changed Amer­i­can Music In-Between

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

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Segregated By Design: An Animated Look at How African-American Enclaves in U.S. Cities Is Hardly an Accident

in Animation, History | July 2nd, 2019

From his­to­ri­an Richard Roth­stein comes a sober­ing ani­mat­ed video called “Seg­re­gat­ed by Design.”  Author of the 2017 book The Col­or of Law: A For­got­ten His­to­ry of How Our Gov­ern­ment Seg­re­gat­ed Amer­i­ca, Roth­stein has cre­at­ed a video that’s as infor­ma­tive as it is visu­al­ly cap­ti­vat­ing. Here’s what ground it cov­ers:

Exam­ine the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

‘Seg­re­gat­ed By Design’ exam­ines the for­got­ten his­to­ry of how our fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly seg­re­gat­ed every major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in Amer­i­ca through law and pol­i­cy.

Prej­u­dice can be birthed from a lack of under­stand­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate details of the past. With­out being aware of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al res­i­den­tial poli­cies the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment enact­ed dur­ing the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, one might have a neg­a­tive view today of neigh­bor­hoods where African Amer­i­cans live or even of African Amer­i­cans them­selves.

We can com­pen­sate for this unlaw­ful seg­re­ga­tion through a nation­al polit­i­cal con­sen­sus that leads to leg­is­la­tion. And this will only hap­pen if the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans under­stand how we got here. Like Jay‑Z said in a recent New York Times inter­view, “you can’t have a solu­tion until you start deal­ing with the prob­lem: What you reveal, you heal.” This is the major chal­lenge at hand: to edu­cate fel­low cit­i­zens of the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al inequal­i­ty that we’ve woven and, on behalf of our gov­ern­ment, accept respon­si­bil­i­ty to fix it.

Learn more about the film at the web­site, Seg­re­gat­ed by Design. And find it added to our list of Free Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca 

How Zora Neale Hurston & Eleanor Roo­sevelt Helped Cre­ate the First Real­is­tic African Amer­i­can Baby Doll (1951)

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

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The First Museum Dedicated Exclusively to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

in Art, Design, History, Museums | July 1st, 2019

How times have changed since our late 80s col­lege days. Under­grads do research online, upload assign­ments to a serv­er, stream music, down­load affir­ma­tive sex­u­al con­sent con­tracts, and turn to Face­book when it’s time to find a ride home for the hol­i­days.

But one aspect of the col­le­giate lifestyle remains unchanged.

They still fes­toon their dorm rooms with posters—the actu­al paper arti­cle, affixed to the walls with blue put­ty, a care­ful­ly curat­ed col­lec­tion of taste and aspi­ra­tion.

As Cait Munro writes in Refin­ery 29:

Fresh­man, already scram­bling to find and loud­ly artic­u­late an iden­ti­ty, can leave the poster sale with two or three plas­tic tubes hous­ing scrolls that rep­re­sent the very essence of their new, par­ent-free, on-cam­pus selves. Posters become an afford­able, demon­stra­ble expres­sion of who they are as a per­son — or, in the tra­di­tion of peo­ple eager to leave behind their home­town selves, who they want to be.

Legions of style blogs have decreed that these posters should be giv­en the heave-ho along with the plas­tic milk crate shelv­ing, come grad­u­a­tion.

Per­son­al­ly, I would rather gaze upon the tat­tered repro­duc­tion of the first paint­ing that spoke to me at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go than any­thing the design experts float as an accept­ably grown up alter­na­tive.

Is Alphonse Mucha’s Byzan­tine 1896 ad for Job rolling papers some­how unwor­thy because legions of dewy eyed under­grads have giv­en it a peren­ni­al place of unframed hon­or?

The dri­ving forces behind the new­ly opened Poster House in New York City would say no. The first Amer­i­can muse­um ded­i­cat­ed exclu­sive­ly to poster art, its cura­tors cast a wide net through the form’s 160 year his­to­ry, whether the end goal of the work was war bond sales, pub­lic health edu­ca­tion, or straight-up box office sales. As the Poster House writes:

For a poster to suc­ceed, it must com­mu­ni­cate. By com­bin­ing the pow­er of images and words, posters speak to audi­ences quick­ly and per­sua­sive­ly. Blend­ing design, adver­tis­ing, and art, posters clear­ly reflect the place and time in which they were made.

What did the best-sell­ing poster of actress Far­rah Faw­cett in a red tank suit say to—and about—teenage boys in 1976? What did it say about Amer­i­can val­ues and gen­der norms in that Bicen­ten­ni­al year? Why no posters of Bet­sy Ross?

How does the offi­cial poster for Juras­sic Park, above, com­pare to the hand-paint­ed, pre­sum­ably unau­tho­rized image used to mar­ket it to audi­ences in Ghana?

(End­less grat­i­tude to illus­tra­tor and mon­ster movie fan Aeron Alfrey for bring­ing this and oth­er Ghan­ian spins on Amer­i­can film releas­es to our atten­tion.)

Some posters have remark­able stay­ing pow­er, reap­pear­ing in a num­ber of guis­es. Wit­ness Rosie the Riv­et­er and James Mont­gomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam-themed WWI recruit­ment poster, to say noth­ing of the Barack Oba­ma “Hope” poster by Shep­ard Fairey, the poster that launched a thou­sand par­o­dies, most­ly dig­i­tal, but even so.

To learn more about vis­it­ing Poster House, its inau­gur­al Alphonse Mucha exhib­it and upcom­ing events such as Drink and Draw, click here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film Posters of the Russ­ian Avant-Garde

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

Chill­ing and Sur­re­al Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the NSA Are Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

The Library of Con­gress Makes Thou­sands of Fab­u­lous Pho­tos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

100 Great­est Posters of Film Noir

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

 

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Meet Emma Willard, the First Female Map Maker in the U.S., and Her Brilliantly Inventive Maps (Circa 1826)

in History, Maps | June 27th, 2019

Amer­i­cans have nev­er like the word “empire,” hav­ing seced­ed from the British Empire to osten­si­bly found a free nation. The founders blamed slav­ery on the British, nam­ing the king as the respon­si­ble par­ty. Three of the most dis­tin­guished Vir­ginia slave­hold­ers denounced the prac­tice as a “hideous blot,” “repug­nant,” and “evil.” But they made no effort to end it. Like­wise, accord­ing to the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the British were respon­si­ble for excit­ing “domes­tic insur­rec­tions among us,” and endeav­our­ing “to  bring on the inhab­i­tants of our fron­tiers, the mer­ci­less Indi­an Sav­ages.”

These denun­ci­a­tions aside, the new coun­try nonethe­less began a course iden­ti­cal to every oth­er Euro­pean world pow­er, wag­ing per­pet­u­al war­fare, seiz­ing ter­ri­to­ry and vast­ly expand­ing its con­trol over more and more land and resources in the decades after Inde­pen­dence.

U.S. impe­r­i­al pow­er was assert­ed not only by force of arms and coin but also through an ide­o­log­i­cal view that made its appear­ance and growth an act of both divine and sec­u­lar prov­i­dence. We see this view reflect­ed espe­cial­ly in the mak­ing of maps and ear­ly his­tor­i­cal info­graph­ics.

In 1851, three years after war with Mex­i­co had halved that coun­try and expand­ed U.S. ter­ri­to­ry into what would become sev­er­al new states, Emma Willard, the nation’s first female map­mak­er, cre­at­ed the “Chrono­g­ra­ph­er of Ancient His­to­ry” above, a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion to “teach stu­dents about the shape of his­tor­i­cal time,” writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate. The Chrono­g­ra­ph­er is a “more spe­cial­ized off­shoot of Willard’s mas­ter Tem­ple of Time, which tack­led all of history”—or all six thou­sand years of it, any­way, since “Cre­ation BC 4004.”

Willard made sev­er­al such maps, illus­trat­ing an idea pop­u­lar among 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry his­to­ri­ans, and illus­trat­ed in many sim­i­lar ways by oth­er artists: cast­ing his­to­ry as a suc­ces­sion of great empires, one tak­ing over for anoth­er. View­ers of the map stand out­side the temple’s sta­ble fram­ing, assured they are the inher­i­tors of its his­tor­i­cal largesse. Oth­er visu­al metaphors told this sto­ry, too. Willard, as Ted Wid­mer points out at The Paris Review. Willard was an “inven­tive visu­al thinker,” if also a very con­ven­tion­al his­tor­i­cal one.

In an ear­li­er map, from 1836, Willard visu­al­ized time as a series of branch­ing impe­r­i­al streams, flow­ing down­ward from “Cre­ation.” Curi­ous­ly, she sit­u­ates Amer­i­can Inde­pen­dence on the periph­ery, end­ing with the “Empire of Napoleon” at the cen­ter. The U.S. was both some­thing new in the world and, in oth­er maps of hers, the fruition of a seed plant­ed cen­turies ear­li­er. Willard’s map­mak­ing began as an effort to sup­ple­ment her mate­ri­als as “a pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” founder of the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and a “ver­sa­tile writer, pub­lish­er and yes, map­mak­er,” who “used every tool avail­able to teach young read­ers (and espe­cial­ly young women) how to see his­to­ry in cre­ative new ways.”

In anoth­er “chrono­g­ra­ph­er” text­book illus­tra­tion, she shows the “His­to­ry of the U. States or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca” as a tree which had been grow­ing since 1492, though no such place as the Unit­ed States exist­ed for most of this his­to­ry. Maps, writes Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscu­ra, “have the pow­er to shape his­to­ry” as well as to record it. Willard’s maps told grand, uni­ver­sal stories—imperial stories—about how the U.S. came to be. In 1828, when she was 41, “only slight­ly old­er than the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca itself,” Willard pub­lished a series of maps in her His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca.

This was “the first book of its kind—the first atlas to present the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Willard’s maps show the move­ment of Indige­nous nations in plates like “Loca­tions and Wan­der­ings of The Abo­rig­i­nal Tribes… The Direc­tion of their Wan­der­ings,” below—these were part of “a sto­ry about the tri­umph of Anglo set­tlers in this part of the world. She helped solid­i­fy, for both her peers and her stu­dents, a nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can des­tiny and inevitabil­i­ty, writes Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver his­to­ri­an Susan Schul­ten. Willard was “an exu­ber­ant nation­al­ist,” who gen­er­al­ly “accept­ed the removal of these tribes to the west as inevitable.”

Willard was a pio­neer in many respects, includ­ing, per­haps, in her adop­ta­tion of Euro­pean neo­clas­si­cal ideas about his­to­ry and time in the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of a new Amer­i­can empire. Her snap­shots of time col­lapse “cen­turies into a sin­gle image,” Schul­ten explains, as a way of map­ping time “in a dif­fer­ent way as a pre­lude to what comes to next.” See many more of Willard’s maps from The His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca, the first his­tor­i­cal atlas of the Unit­ed States, at Boston Rare Maps.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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Watch Battered & Bruised Vintage Toys Get Mesmerizingly Restored to Near Mint Condition

in Design, History, K-12 | June 26th, 2019

They say that toys were once built to last. But though met­al and wood did­n’t break quite so eas­i­ly in the hands of chil­dren in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry as plas­tic does in the hands of their great- or great-great-grand­chil­dren today, time still has­n’t been espe­cial­ly kind to the play­things of yes­ter­year. Enter the toy restor­er, who can return even the most fad­ed, rust­ed, beat­en-up spec­i­mens to a bur­nished, gleam­ing con­di­tion that would turn the head of even the most smart­phone-addled young­ster. At least the toy restor­er behind the Youtube chan­nel Res­cue & Restore seems to pos­sess skills of this kind, and in its chan­nel’s videos you can see them put to use.

Over the past two months, Res­cue & Restore has tak­en on such projects as a 1960s Ton­ka Jeep, a 1930s Wyan­dotte air­plane, a 1920s Day­ton train, and oth­er such minia­tures as a piano, a cash reg­is­ter, and even a func­tion­al oven. Most of them start out look­ing like lost caus­es, and some bare­ly resem­ble toys at all.

For­tu­nate­ly, Res­cue & Restore pos­sess­es all the spe­cial­ized tools need­ed to not just dis­as­sem­ble and (to the amaze­ment of many a com­menter) reassem­ble every­thing, but to clean, resur­face, and repaint each and every part, and in some cas­es fab­ri­cate new ones from scratch. Apart from the occa­sion­al explana­to­ry sub­ti­tle, the “host” does all this work with­out a word.

Despite their sim­plic­i­ty, the videos of Res­cue & Restore have drawn mil­lions upon mil­lions of views in a rel­a­tive­ly short time. This sug­gests that the num­ber of peo­ple dream­ing of a bet­ter future for their clos­ets full of long-dis­used toys might be large indeed, though we should nev­er under­es­ti­mate the appeal of see­ing the old made new again — an expe­ri­ence whose audio­vi­su­al sat­is­fac­tion seems to be height­ened by high-res­o­lu­tion shots and clear­ly cap­tured sounds of all the dremel­ing, sand­blast­ing, and buff­ing involved.

Toys orig­i­nal­ly opened six­ty, sev­en­ty, eighty Christ­mases ago have gone through a lot in their long lives, but after Res­cue & Restore gets done with them, they could well find their way under the tree again this year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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