Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

in History, Life, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | December 6th, 2019

Those of us who are deeply disappointed to learn we won’t be seeing Harriet Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tubman tea towel… or could if the revered abolitionist and activist wasn’t one of the family-owned Radical Tea Towel’s hottest selling items.

The popular design, based on one of Charles Ross’ murals in Cambridge, Maryland’s Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden is currently out of stock.

Fortunately, the company has immortalized plenty of other inspirational feminists, activists, civil rights leaders, authors, and thinkers on cotton rectangles, suitable for all your dish drying and gift giving needs.

Or wave them at a demonstration, on the creators’ suggestion.

The need for radical tea towels was hatched as one of the company’s Welsh co-founder’s was searching in vain for a practical birthday present that would reflect her 92-year-old father’s progressive values.

Five years later, bombarded with distressing post-election messages from the States, they decided to expand across the pond, to highlight the achievements of “amazing Americans who’ve fought the cause of freedom and equality over the years.”

The description of each towel’s subject speaks to the passion for history, education and justice the founders—a mother, father, and adult son—bring to the project. Here, for example, is their write up on Muhammad Ali, above:

He was born Cassius Clay and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, but the name the world knew him by was simply, ‘The Greatest.’ Through his remarkable boxing career, Ali is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century and was an inspiring, controversial and polarising figure both inside and outside the ring.

Ali started boxing as a 12-year-old because he wanted to take revenge on the boy who stole his bike, and at 25, he lost his boxing licence for refusing to fight in Vietnam. (‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam when so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?’ He demanded.) It was perhaps the only time he surrendered: millions of dollars, the love of his nation, his career… but it was for what he believed in. And although his views on race were often confused, this was just example of his Civil Rights activism.

Ali became a lightning rod for dissent, setting an example of racial pride for African Americans and resistance to white domination during the Civil Rights Movement. And he took no punch lying down – neither inside the boxing ring nor in the fight for equality: after being refused service in a whites-only restaurant in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, he reportedly threw the Olympic gold medal he had just won in Rome into the Ohio River. So, here’s an empowering gift celebrating the man who never threw in the (tea) towel.

The Radical Tea Towel blog is such stuff as will bring a grateful tear to an AP US History teacher’s eye. The Forebears We Share: Learning from Radical History is a good place to start. Other topics include Abigail Adam’s American Revolution advocacy, the bridge designs of revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine, and Bruce Springsteen’s love of protest songs.

(The Radical Tea Towel design team has yet to pay tribute to The Boss, but until they do, we can rest easy knowing author John Steinbeck’s towel embodies Springsteen’s sentiment. )

Lest our educational dishcloths lull us into thinking we know more about our country than we actually do, the company’s website has a radical history quiz, modeled on the US history and government naturalization test which would-be Americans must pass with a score of at least 60%. This one is, unsurprisingly, geared toward progressive history. Test your knowledge to earn a tea towel discount code.

Begin your Radical Tea Towel explorations here, and don’t neglect to take in all the rad designs celebrating the upcoming centennial of women’s suffrage.

11 Essential Feminist Books: A New Reading List by The New York Public Library

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What the Great Pyramid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleaming, Reflective White

in History | December 5th, 2019

The Great Pyramid at Giza—the oldest and most intact of the seven ancient wonders of the ancient world—became a potent symbol of the sublime in the 19th century, a symbol of power so absolute as to eclipse human understanding. After Napoleon’s first expedition to Giza, “Egytomania… swept through European culture and influenced the plastic arts, fashion, and design,” writes Miroslav Verner in The Pyramids: The Mystery, Culture, and Science of Egypt’s Great Monuments.

At the end of the century, Herman Melville satirized the trend that would eventually give rise to Ancient Aliens, asking in an 1891 poem, “Your masonry—and is it man’s? More like some Cosmic artisan’s.” Egyptomaniacs saw otherworldly magic in the pyramid. For Melville, it “usurped” nature’s greatness, standing as “evidence of humankind’s monumental will to power,” as Dawid W. de Villiers writes.

The ancient Greeks believed the pyramids were built with a massive slave labor force, a theory that has persisted. As Verner exhaustively argues in his book, however, they were not only built by humans—instead of aliens or gods—but they were constructed by tradesmen and artisans whose skills were in high demand and who were paid wages and organized under a complex bureaucracy.

And as you can see reconstructed in the Smithsonian video at the top, one of those artisanal tasks was to polish the monument’s outer limestone to a gleaming white finish that reflected “the powerful Egyptian sun with a dazzling glare.” Once the pyramid was completed, “it must have truly added to the impression of Giza as a magical port city, bathed in sunlight,” says archaeologist Mark Lehner in the clip.

In addition to its glowing, polished limestone sides, “the structure would have likely been topped with a pyramidion, a capstone made of solid granite and covered in a precious metal like gold,” writes Kottke. “No wonder they thought their rulers were gods.” Or did ancient Egyptians see the Great Pyramid as a masterpiece of human engineering, built with the skill and sweat of thousands of their compatriots?

Who can say. But it’s likely that 19th-century European explorers and artists might have characterized things differently had the Great Pyramid still scattered the sun over the desert like an ancient beacon of light instead of sitting “dumb,” as Melville wrote, stripped of its facade, waiting to have all sorts of mysterious meanings wrapped around it.

via Kottke

Human All Too Human: A Roman Woman Visits the Great Pyramid in 120 AD, and Carves a Poem in Memory of Her Deceased Brother

The Grateful Dead Play at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)

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

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A New Digitized Menu Collection Lets You Revisit the Cuisine from the “Golden Age of Railroad Dining”

in Archives, Food & Drink, History | December 4th, 2019

The coming of the railroad in the U.S. of the 19th century meant unprecedented opportunity for millions—a triumph of transportation and commerce that changed the country forever. For many more—including millions of American bison—it meant catastrophe and near extinction. This complicated history has provided a rich field of study for scholars of the period—who can tie the railroad to nearly every major historical development, from the Civil War to presidential campaigns to the spread of the Sears merchandising empire from coast to coast.

But as time wore on, passenger trains became both more commonplace and more luxurious, as they competed with air and auto travel in the early 20th century. It is this period of railroad history that most attracted Ira Silverman as a graduate student at Northwestern University in the 1960s. While enrolled at Northwestern’s Transportation Center in Evanston, Illinois, Silverman and his classmates found endless “opportunities for research, adventure, and unparalleled feasting,” writes Claire Voon at Atlas Obscura.

Silverman especially took to the dining cars—and more to the point, to the menus, which he collected by the dozens, “eventually amassing an archive of 238 menus and related pamphlets. After a long career in transit, he donated the collection to his alma mater’s Transportation Library, which recently digitized it in its entirety.” Silverman’s collection represents “35 United States and Canadian railroads,” points out Northwestern, and its contents mostly date from the early 60s to the 1980s—from his most active years riding the rails in style, that is.

But Silverman was also able to acquire earlier examples, such as a 1939 menu “once perused by passengers aboard the famed 20th Century Limited train,” Voon writes, “which traveled between New York City and Chicago.” Twenty years after this menu’s appearance, Cary Grant, “playing an adman in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, orders a brook trout with his Gibson” while riding the same line. The Art Deco menu for the “new streamlined” line features such delicacies as “genuine Russian caviar on toast and grilled French sardines.”

Even kids’ menus—now reliably dominated by chicken fingers, pizza, PB&Js, and mac & cheese—offered far more sophisticated dining than we might expect to find, with “items such as grilled lamb chops, roast beef, and seasonal fish” on the North Coast Limited menu below. “The mid-20th century seems to have been a golden age of railroad dining,” remarks Northwestern Transportation Librarian Rachel Cole. “It was never something that railroads profited on, but they used it to compete against each other and attract passengers,” taking pride in “selections that would be rivaled in restaurants.”

The fine dining-car experience might also include novelty items passengers would be unlikely to find anywhere else, such as Northwestern Pacific’s Great Baked Potato, “a monstrous spud,” Voon explains, “that could weigh anywhere between two to five pounds” and came served with “an appropriately sized butter pat.” One can see the appeal for a food and travel enthusiast like Silverman, who had the privilege of trying dishes on most of these menus for himself.

The rest of us will have to rely on our gustatory imaginations to conjure what it might have been like to eat prime rib on the Western Star in the Pacific Northwest in the early 60s, or braised smoked pork loin on an Amtrak train in 1972. If your memories of dining on a train mostly consist of pulling soggy, microwaved “food” from steaming hot plastic bags, or munching on packaged, processed salty snacks, expand your sense of what railroad dining could be at the Ira Silverman Railroad Menu Collection here.

via Atlas Obscura

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What Prisoners Ate at Alcatraz in 1946: A Vintage Prison Menu

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

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160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

in Archives, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | December 3rd, 2019

We might think we have a general grasp of the period in European history immortalized in theme restaurant form as “Medieval Times.” After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tattoos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconography has long inspired fascination, imitation and veneration.” The market for swordplay, armor, quests, and sorcery has never been so crowded.

But whether the historical period we call medieval (a word derived from medium aevum, or “middle age”) resembled the modern interpretations it inspired presents us with another question entirely—a question independent and professional scholars can now answer with free, easy reference to “high-resolution images of more than 160,000 pages of European medieval and early modern codices”: richly illuminated (and amateurishly illustrated) manuscripts, musical scores, cookbooks, and much more.

The online project, called Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, houses its digital collection at the Internet Archive and represents “virtually all of the holdings of PACSCL [Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries],” a wealth of documents from Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Villanova, Swarthmore, and many more college and university libraries, as well as the American Philosophical Society, National Archives at Philadelphia, and other august institutions of higher learning and conservation.

Lehigh University “contributed 27 manuscripts amounting to about 5,000 pages,” writes White, including “a 1462 handwritten copy of Virgil’s Aeneid with penciled sketches in the margins” (see above). There are manuscripts from that period like the Italian Tractatus de maleficiis (Treatise on evil deeds), a legal compendium from 1460 with “thirty-one marginal drawings in ink” showing “various crimes (both deliberate and accidental) being committed, from sword-fights and murders to hunting accidents and a hanging.”

The Tractatus’ drawings “do not appear to be the work of a professional artist,” the notes point out, though it also contains pages, like the image at the top, showing a trained illuminator’s hand. The Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis archive includes 15th and 16th-century recipes and extracts on alchemy, medical texts, and copious Bibles and books of prayer and devotion. There is a 1425 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English (lacking the prologue and several tales).

These may all seem of recent vintage, relatively speaking, for a medieval archive, but the collection reaches back to the 9th century, with hundreds of documents, like the 1000 AD music manuscript above, from a far earlier time. “Users can view, download and compare manuscripts in nearly microscopic detail,” notes White. “It is the nation’s largest regional online collection of medieval manuscripts,” a collection scholars can draw on for centuries to come to learn what life was really like—at least for the few who could read and write—in Medieval Times.

via Medievalists.net

800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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A Free Yale Course on Medieval History: 700 Years in 22 Lectures

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

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The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): The Truly Weird Origin of Modern Stop-Motion Animation

in Animation, Film, History | November 27th, 2019

These days, ever more ambitions computer-animated spectacles seem to arrive in theaters every few weeks. But how many of them capture our imaginations as fully as works of the thoroughly analog art of stop-motion animation? The uncanny effect (and immediately visible labor-intensiveness) of real, physical puppets and objects made to move as if by themselves still captivates viewers young and old: just watch how the Wallace and Gromit series, Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python shorts, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and even the original King Kong as well as Ray Harryhausen’s monsters in Jason and the Argonauts and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad have held up over the decades.

The filmmakers who best understand the magic of cinema still use stop-motion today, as Wes Anderson has in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. They all owe something to a Polish-Russian animator of the early-to-mid-20th century by the name of Ladislas Starevich. Longtime Open Culture readers may remember the works of Starevich previously featured here, including the Goethe adaptation The Tale of the Fox and the much earlier The Cameraman’s Revenge, a tale of infidelity and its consequences told entirely with dead bugs for actors. Starevich, then the Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kaunas, Lithuania, pulled off this cinematic feat “by installing wheels and strings in each insect, and occasionally replacing their legs with plastic or metal ones,” says Phil Edwards in the Vox Almanac video above.

“How Stop Motion Animation Began” comes as a chapter of a miniseries called Almanac Hollywouldn’t, which tells the stories of “big changes to movies that came from outside Hollywood.” It would be hard indeed to find anything less Hollywood than a man installing wheels and strings into insect corpses at a Lithuanian museum in 1912, but in time The Cameraman’s Revenge proved as deeply influential as it remains deeply weird. Starevich kept on making films, and singlehandedly furthering the art of stop-motion animation, until his death in France (where he’d relocated after the Russian Revolution) in 1965.

And though Starevich may not be a household name today, Edwards reveals while tracing the subsequent history of stop-motion animation that cinema hasn’t entirely failed to pay him tribute: Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox is in a sense a direct homage to The Tale of the Fox, and Gilliam has called Starevich’s work “absolutely breathtaking, surreal, inventive and extraordinary, encompassing everything that Jan Svankmajer, Walerian Borowczyk and the Quay Brothers would do subsequently.” He suggests that, before we enter the “mind-bending worlds” of more recent animators, we “remember that it was all done years ago, by someone most of us have forgotten about now” — and with little more than a few dead bugs at that.

The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladislas Starevich’s Animation of Goethe’s Great German Folktale (1937)

The Mascot, a Pioneering Stop Animation Film by Wladyslaw Starewicz

The History of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Spanning 116 Years, Revisited in a 3‑Minute Video

Ray Harryhausen’s Creepy War of the Worlds Sketches and Stop-Motion Test Footage

Spike Jonze’s Stop Motion Film Hauntingly Animates Paris’ Famed Shakespeare and Company Bookstore

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.

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

Doris Kearns Goodwin Teaches U.S. Presidential History & Leadership

in History, Online Courses | November 26th, 2019

FYI: Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin–author of Leadership: In Turbulent Times, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt–has just released a new online course on MasterClass. Here’s the ground that the course covers:

Altogether, she’s spent more than 50 years studying great American presidents and leaders of the past, writing several award-winning, bestselling biographies, including No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History. Now she’s sharing her knowledge and teaching you to lead like a president.

In Doris’s MasterClass, you can learn to develop the characteristics and human skills of exceptional American leadership, from Lincoln to Obama. Doris brings to life the stories and experiences of four presidents she knows by heart—Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ—and shares a template of human skills that make great leaders: humility, empathy, resilience, self-awareness, self-reflection, the ability to create a team and communicate through stories, and sharing your ambition for the greater good. She also uses examples from other historical figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr., to teach effective leadership qualities and practical wisdom for every day. Learn how to make better decisions, manage a crisis, and get a message across, whether you’re interacting with the media, communicating to a team at work, or delivering a speech meant to inspire and empower thousands of people.

In this class, you’ll learn about:
• Developing emotional intelligence
• Experiences and stories of U.S. presidents
• Building resilience
• Building and leading a team
• Making better decisions, big or small
• Navigating a crisis
• Delivering a message and considering an audience
• The power of speeches
• Replenishing your energy
• Civic engagement

You can sign up for Kearns Goodwin’s course here.

As a free unrelated bonus, you can stream Kearns Goodwin’s long interview with Tim Ferris. There, she takes an engaging look at the leadership skills of four American presidents–Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ. It’s well worth a listen…

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How to Behave in a British Pub: A World War II Training Film from 1943, Featuring Burgess Meredith

in Film, History, Life, Travel | November 25th, 2019

Forewarned is forearmed, so in 1943, the United States Office of War Information created a training film to prevent soldiers bound for Great Britain from earning their Ugly American stripes.

The excerpt above concentrates on pub etiquette, casting actor and Army Air Corps captain Burgess Meredith in the role of a discreet military Virgil, explaining in hushed tones the British penchant for non-chilled beer and smoking or reading the paper unmolested.

He also cautions incoming GIs against throwing their money around or making fun of kilt-wearing Scotsmen—commonsense advice that still applies.

To ensure the message sticks, he conjures a cringeworthy, semi-sloshed bad apple, who struts around in uniform, braying insults at the locals, until he disappears in a puff of smoke.

No wonder the reception’s a bit frosty, when Meredith, ventures forth, also in uniform. But unlike the brash baddie who went before, Meredith has vetted his hosts, approaching as one might a skittish animal. He offers cigarettes, enjoys a game of darts as a spectator, and buys his new friends drinks, being careful to choose something in their price range, knowing that they will insist on reciprocating in kind.

The film is primarily concerned with teaching restraint.

In another section of the not-quite-38-minute film officially called A Welcome to Britain (see below), Meredith cautions young recruits to take small portions of food, knowing how restricted their hosts’ rations are.

The most uncomfortable teachable moment comes when an elderly Englishwoman spontaneously invites a black GI to tea, after thanking him for his service:

Now look men, you heard that conversation, that’s not unusual here. It’s the sort of thing that happens quite a lot. Now let’s be frank about it, there are colored soldiers as well as white here, and there are less social restrictions in this country. An English woman asking a colored boy to tea, he was polite about it, and she was polite about it. Now, that might not happen at home, but the point is, we’re not at home, and the point is too, if we bring a lot of prejudices here, what are we going to do about them?

(No advice to young black soldiers on whether they’re honor bound to accept, should an elderly Englishwoman invite them to tea, when they were perhaps en route to the pub.)

Watch the entirety of A Welcome to Britain, including a cameo by Bob Hope at the 30 minute mark, here.

For an updated guide to British pub etiquette, check out the American expats of Postmodern Family reaction video here.

via Daniel Holland

1,000,000 Minutes of Newsreel Footage by AP & British Movietone Released on YouTube

How the Fences & Railings Adorning London’s Buildings Doubled (by Design) as Civilian Stretchers in World War II

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, December 9 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Dennison’s Christmas Book (1921). Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

in History | November 21st, 2019

From Kronos Media comes a pretty astounding montage of video showing Berlin in July 1945 — just two months after the Nazis lost The Battle of Berlin and Hitler committed suicide, and a month after the allies signed the Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Powers.

The nearly 75-year-old footage shows a city in shambles. You see the wounded, and buildings reduced to piles of rubble. The Reichstag makes an appearance, as does the worn-out Brandenburg Gate, through which residents passed from British-controlled Berlin to Soviet-controlled Berlin. And mostly you see everyday people trying to get on with their lives. Most chilling is the final scene, where an aerial shot carries you over miles and miles of desolation. To see Berlin during an earlier, certainly better time, visit our 2013 post: Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film Between 1900 and 1914.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in May 2015.

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!

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 14 ) |

Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course in Progressive American History

What the Great Pyramid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleaming, Reflective White

A New Digitized Menu Collection Lets You Revisit the Cuisine from the “Golden Age of Railroad Dining”

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912): The Truly Weird Origin of Modern Stop-Motion Animation

Doris Kearns Goodwin Teaches U.S. Presidential History & Leadership

How to Behave in a British Pub: A World War II Training Film from 1943, Featuring Burgess Meredith

Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

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