As an American living outside America, I’m often asked how best to see my homeland by people wanting to visit it. I always suggest the same method: road-tripping, preferably across the entire continent — a way of experiencing the U.S. of A guaranteed to at once to confirm and shatter the visitor’s pre-existing perceptions of the country. But even under the best possible conditions, such road trips have their arduous stretches and even their dangers, a fact understood by nobody better than by the black travelers of the Green Book era. Published between 1936 and 1967, the guide officially known as The Negro Motorist Green Book informed such travelers of where in America (and later other countries as well) they could have a meal, stay the night, and get their car repaired without prejudice.
Though the Green Book ceased publication not long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, interest in the America they reflect hasn’t vanished, and has in fact grown in recent years. Academia has produced more studies of Jim Crow-era travel over the past decade or two, and this Thanksgiving will see the wide release of Green Book, Peter Farrelly’s feature film about the friendship between black pianist Don Shirley and the chauffeur who drove him through the Deep South in the 1960s. “To flip through a Green Book is to open a window into history and perhaps to see, the tiniest amount, through the eyes of someone who lived it,” writes K Menick on the NYPL’s blog. “Read these books; map them in your mind. Think about the trips you could take, can take, will take. See how the size of the world can change depending on the color of your skin.”
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.
Look at a medieval knight in armor and you can’t help but wonder how he got the stuff on. Then follows a question with an even more complicated answer: how did the armor get made in the first place? Luckily, we in the 21st century have medievalists who have dedicated their lives to learning and explaining just such pieces of now-obscure knowledge (as well as the ever-growing legion of medieval battle enthusiasts doing their utmost to both demand that knowledge and hold the scholars who possess it to account). You can see what went into the making of a knight’s armor — and still goes into it, for those inclined to learn the craft — in the video above, a live presentation of the real tools and techniques by armorer Jeffrey D. Wasson at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
With narration by Dirk Breiding, Assistant Curator of its Arms and Armor Department, the video reveals every step of Wasson’s process, beginning with research into how 500-year-old components of armor looked and work, and ending with pieces that, while newly made, could easily have fit into the suit worn by a knight of those days.
Wasson’s next demonstration, in the second video just above, shows the process of getting dressed in armor, one a knight could hardly execute by himself. Much like the videos about how women got dressed in the 14th and 18th centuries previously featured here on Open Culture, it required an assistant, but in both cases the result is supposed to have been less restrictive and cumbersome than we today might expect — or somewhat less restrictive and cumbersome, anyway.
Though we associate this kind of plate armor with the Middle Ages, it actually developed fairly late in that era, around the Hundred Years’ War that lasted from the mid-14th to the mid-15th century. As a form, it peaked in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, spanning the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; the image of the knight we all have in our heads is probably wearing a suit of 16th-century armor made for jousting. That practice continued even as the use of armor declined on the battlefield, the development of firearms having greatly lessened its protective value and put a high premium on agility. Yet armor remains an impressive historical artifact and, at its best, an achievement in craftsmanship as well. But now that we know how to make it and put it on, how best to keep it shining?
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.
In the early United States, devout Christians who would impose their beliefs on others were in the minority among the country’s founders. Thomas Jefferson’s views on the subject are well-known. Much more conservative than Jefferson, fellow Virginian George Washington made frequent statements on religion as part of the essential texture of public life. But while Washington discussed religion as a communal affair with important social and political dimensions, like Jefferson he endorsed religious liberty and freedom of conscience and belief.
But the idea was usually taken to mean that “non-Christians were to be ‘tolerated’ for their beliefs” in a paternalist sense, “with the hope that ‘Jews, Turks, and Infidels” would become Christian.” Washington, however, declared:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
These words come from Washington’s short 1790 letter to the “the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island,” the first in a series of letters written to citizens of Newport after he and then-secretary of state Jefferson made a visit. The address responds directly to a letter of welcome read to him on his arrival in the city by Moses Seixas, an official of the first Jewish congregation in Newport, which states:
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine….
As did many such proclamations, the document glosses the brutal contradiction of slavery, indigenous slaughter, and actual discrimination religious minorities faced. Nonetheless, the democratic principles Seixas outlined so accorded with Washington’s ideals that the first president repeated key phrases verbatim. This is no mere pandering. When Washington arrived in Newport in 1790, state legislatures were in the process of ratifying what was then the Third Amendment to the Constitution, which we know as the First, prohibiting the establishment of state religion and granting freedom of the press.
Arguments over religious liberty were fierce, and toleration had strict limits. In some states “the rights of minority groups such as Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Quakers were restricted,” notes Touro. “In most states, non-Christians were denied the rights of full citizenship, such as holding public office. Even in religiously liberal Rhode Island, Jews were not allowed to vote.” While the First Amendment “did little to erase these injustices,” Washington’s letter set out ideal conditions in which the country’s “enlarged and liberal policy” granted “liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship” to all.
That Washington would make such claims in Rhode Island bears particular significance given that the state is “most noted as the place where religious freedom was actually born,” writes former Ambassador and UN Delegate John Loeb. The colony’s 1663 charter “set forth the first political entity in the world to separate the church from the state.” Washington’s statement one hundred and twenty-seven years later “applied—and continues to apply—to every American,” Loeb argues, despite its specific address “to a small group of Jewish citizens.” But that specific address matters. It promised inclusion and protection to a community that had faced centuries of terror.
As historian Melvin Urofsky writes, the letter “to the Hebrew Congregation,” like many other such statements made by the founders, “is a treasure to the entire nation”—a nation that “recognized,” at least in words, “diversity for what it was, one of the country’s greatest assets, and took as its motto E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One. The separation of church and state, and with it the freedom of religion enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, has made the United States a beacon of hope to oppressed peoples everywhere.”
Whenever a technology develops just enough to become interesting, someone inevitably pushes it to extremes. In the case of that reliable and long-lived technology known as the book, writers and artists were looking for ways to maximize its potential as a device for conveying the written word and the drawn image as far back as the 16th century. One particularly glorious example, The Model Book of Calligraphy, has come available online, to view or download, thanks to the Getty. This decades-spanning collaboration shows off not just the artistic writing implied by the title but illustrations whose vividness and detail remain striking even today.
“In the 1500s, as printing became the most common method of producing books, intellectuals increasingly valued the inventiveness of scribes and the aesthetic qualities of writing,” says the Getty’s site.
“From 1561 to 1562, Georg Bocskay, the Croatian-born court secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created this Model Book of Calligraphy in Vienna to demonstrate his technical mastery of the immense range of writing styles known to him.”
Three decades later, “Emperor Rudolph II, Ferdinand’s grandson, commissioned Joris Hoefnagel” — a Flemish artist well known at the time for his specialization in subjects to do with natural history — “to illuminate Bocskay’s model book. Hoefnagel added fruit, flowers, and insects to nearly every page, composing them so as to enhance the unity and balance of the page’s design. It was one of the most unusual collaborations between scribe and painter in the history of manuscript illumination.”
What we see when we flip through (or zoom in to great levels of digital detail on) The Model Book of Calligraphy’s 184 pages may look like a unified work executed all at once (see them all at the bottom of this page), but it actually combines the sensibilities of not just two creators separated by not just the art forms in which they specialized but more than thirty years of time. Hoefnagel, however, didn’t stay entirely out of the realm of the textual: though most of what he brought to the manuscript takes the form of illuminations, he also added an entirely new section on writing the alphabet. He understood the importance of not just well-crafted pictures and text but their appealing integration, a concept familiar to any designer working in today’s forms of cutting-edge media — as books were four centuries ago. You can purchase print editions that reproduce portions or the entirety of The Model Book of Calligraphy.
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.
Two of the books that most shaped American culture both happened to bear the nickname “The Big Book.” While the second of these, the A.A. Manual, published in 1939, changed the country with 12-Step recovery groups, the first of these, the Sears Catalog, transformed America with mass consumption, offering customers in every part of the country access to modern conveniences and retail goods of all kinds at unheard of prices. Beginning in 1908, Sears started selling entire houses, in approximately 25-ton kits transported by railroad, consisting of 30,000 pre-cut parts, plumbing and electrical fixtures, and up to 750 pounds of nails.
“In an era before commercial aviation and long-haul trucking,” Curbed marvels, “Sears, Roebuck & Co. set up an operation that would package and ship more than 400 different types of homes and buildings to anybody who had the cash and access to a catalog.”
They started small, and just as they didn’t come up with the concept of the mail order catalog, Sears didn’t invent the kit house, though they suggest as much in their telling of the story. Instead they may have taken the idea from another company called Aladdin. Aladdin houses have been forgotten, however, and even Sears’ main competitor, Montgomery Ward, didn’t catch up until 1921 and only lasted ten years in the kit house business.
Sears houses, on the other hand, are celebrated and sought out as models of the early 20th century American home, and for good reason. Between 1908 and 1939, Sears sold 70–75,000 houses in 447 different styles all over the country. “From Craftsman to Cape Cods, they offered a custom home at budgets and sizes that could accommodate any size family,” writes Popular Mechanics.
These Sears homes weren’t cheap low-end houses. Many of them were built using the finest quality building materials available during that time. It’s not uncommon to find Sears homes today with oak floors, cypress siding, and cedar shingles.
What’s even more extraordinary is that 50% of these were built by the homeowners themselves, usually, as in a barn-raising, with the generous help of family, friends, and neighbors. The other half sold were built professionally. “Often,” writes Messy Nessy, “local builders and carpentry companies purchased homes from Sears to build as model homes and market their services to potential customers.”
These houses could have a significant effect on the character of a neighborhood. Not only could potential buyers see firsthand, and participate in, the construction. They could order the same or a similar model, customize it, and even—as the company tells us in its own short history of the “Sears Modern Home”—design their own homes and “submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship off the appropriate precut and fitted materials.”
Sears sounds modest about its impact. The company writes it was not “an innovative home designer” but instead “a very able follower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifying houses and hardware according to buyer tastes.” Yet Sears houses aren’t beloved for their forward-looking designs, but for their sturdiness and variety, as well as for their impact on “the emotional lives of rural folk,” as Messy Nessy puts it.
“The Sears mail-order catalogues were sitting on kitchen countertops inside millions of American homes, allowing potential homeowners to both visualize their new home and purchase it as easily as they might have bought a new toaster.” Building a house required a little more investment than plugging in a toaster, and required a 75-page instruction book, but that’s another part of why Sears house hunters are such a dedicated bunch, awestruck at each still-standing model they’re able to photograph and match up with its catalog illustrations and floor plans.
In its first year of production, 1908, Sears sold only one model, number 125, an Eight-Room Bungalow Style House for $945, advertised as “the finest cottage ever constructed at a price less than $1500.” In 1918, the company moved from a numbering system to named models, most of which sound like the names of cozy small towns and bedroom communities: Adeline, Belmont, Maplewood, Avalon, Kilbourne, Del Ray, Stone Ridge…. (See a full list of these models at The Arts & Crafts Society website.)
In the years Sears sold houses, between 54 and 44 percent of Americans lived in rural areas, and these constituted Sears’ most loyal customers, given that the catalog allowed them to purchase things they could buy nowhere else, including ten room colonial mansions like The Magnolia, available from 1913 to 1922 for $6,488, or roughly $88,000—a steal if you can put in the work. This was the largest and most expensive model the company offered, “a three-story, eight room neo-Georgian with a two-story columned portico, porte-cochere, and sleeping porches.” (Mint juleps and servants’ quarters not included.)
Sears eventually offered three build qualities, Honor Bilt, Standard Built, and Simplex Sectional. At the lowest end of the price and build spectrum, the company notes, “Simplex houses were frequently only a couple of rooms and were ideal for summer cottages.” Many of its low-end and early models did not include bathrooms, and the company sold outhouses separately. But due to innovative construction methods, even the least expensive houses held up well.
Because the company lost most of the records after its kit house business folded, it can be difficult to identify a Sears house. And because even the “youngest of Sears homes,” Popular Mechanics points out, is now going on eight decades old, they all require a significant amount of care.” The blog Kit House Hunters has found over 10,000 Sears Houses still standing across the country, most of them in the Northeast and Midwest, where they sold best. (One community in Elgin, IL has over 200 verified Sears homes.)
In the video at the top, you can see a few of those well-built Sears houses still lived in today. The short How to Architect short video above points out that “Sears had a massive impact on the business of home-building, and… the business of pre-fabrication, is alive and well today.” For a look at the variety and intricacy of the Sears Modern Home designs, see this Flickr gallery with over 80 images of catalog pages, illustrated homes, and floor plans. And if you think you might be living in one of these houses, many of which have been granted historic status, find out with this handy 9‑step guide for identifying a Sears Kit Home.
If you grew up in certain decades of the 20th century, you almost certainly spent your childhood wearing striped socks, and you may even have returned to the practice in recent years as they’ve regained their sartorial respectability. But new research has revealed that this sort of multicolored hosiery has a more distant historical precedent than we may imagine, one going all the way back to ancient Egypt. The subject of that research, the small sock pictured above, evidences the fashionability of striped socks among the Egyptian youth of more than 1700 years ago, though its own stripes have only recently been revealed by the most modern imaging technology.
“Scientists at the British Museum have developed pioneering imaging to discover how enterprising Egyptians used dyes on a child’s sock, recovered from a rubbish dump in ancient Antinoupolis in Roman Egypt, and dating from 300AD,” writes The Guardian’s Caroline Davies. “New multispectral imaging can establish which dyes were used – madder (red), woad (blue) and weld (yellow) – but also how people of the late antiquity period used double and sequential dying and weaving, and twisting fibers to create myriad colors from their scarce resources.”
This and other similarly advanced research, such as the use of ultraviolet light and infrared and x‑ray spectroscopy that found the bright colors of ancient Greek sculpture, no doubt has us all rethinking the broadly monochromatic fashion in which we’ve long envisioned the ancient 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.
If you haven’t played video games in a long time, you might feel a certain trepidation at the idea of picking them up again. So rapidly have they evolved in the 21st century that they now resemble less the electronic entertainments we once knew than full-fledged alternate realities. The sudden rise of the word immersive to describe the very kind of experiences they constitute says it all. If you enter one of the elaborate worlds built by modern video game developers, how do you extract yourself again — especially if the world is one as fascinating as ancient Greece, recreated elaborately and to great acclaim in this year’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey?
Even non-gamers will have heard of the Assassin’s Creed series, which began in 2007 and has had a major release (in addition to as many minor ones, as well as ventures into other media) each and every year since. It has previously taken as its settings such chapters of human history as Victorian England, the Italian Renaissance, and Ptolemaic Egypt, but its latest installment goes farther back in time than any other. Players will find themselves dropped “into 431 BCE in Ancient Greece, at the start of the Peloponnesian War predominantly fought between Athens and Sparta,” writes Hyperallergic’s Zachary Small. “For a video game that includes bloody mercenaries, extraterrestrial beings, and time travel, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is shockingly faithful to our contemporary historical understanding of what Ancient Greece looked like during its golden age.”
The very idea might startle those of us who remember the settings of video games as perfunctory at best, mere backgrounds to run past while we blasted enemies, jumped from platform to platform, and collected power-ups. Assassin’s Creed takes its historical world-building so seriously that the previous game in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, even came with an “educational mode” that allowed players to freely explore ancient Egypt — a far cry indeed from the dull, purpose-built educational games of yore. But Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey takes it to another level, incorporating seemingly everything known about ancient Greece at the time of its development. “The Ubisoft development team behind the game even hired a historical advisor to help them recreate a meticulous version of the Ancient World,” writes Small, “one that includes hundreds of polychromatic statues, temples, and tombs.”
Though nobody claims that the game recreates ancient Greece perfectly in every detail — even apart from the gaps in human knowledge of the period, the developers seem to have had to cut a corner here and there to meet the series’ famously demanding release schedule — it succeeds in ways that no one Hellenically inclined, professionally or otherwise, had dared hope before. “I have played about 5 minutes of the game and I’m ready to cry from joy,” tweeted classicist Christine Plastow, a sentiment one can hardly imagine any academic expressing about, say, Golden Axe.
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.
We tend to think of electronic music as a modern phenomenon, dating back only to the 20th century, but the invention of the first instrument made to use electricity occurred a couple centuries deeper than that. The man pictured above, Czech theologian and scientist Václav Prokop Diviš, “is now regarded as the earliest visionary of electronic music,” writes Motherboard’s Becky Ferreira, owing to the fact that “his dual interests in music and electricity had merged into a single obsession with creating an electrically enhanced musical instrument.” Around the year 1748, that obsession produced the “Denis d’or,” or “Golden Dionysus,” a “keyboard-based instrument outfitted with 790 iron strings that were positioned to be struck like a clavichord rather than plucked like a guitar.” Through the electromagnetic excitation of the piano strings, the monk could “imitate the sounds of a whole variety of other instruments.”
“Diviš was an interesting character, having also invented the lightning rod at the same time as, but independently of, Benjamin Franklin,” says the Cambridge Introduction to Electronic Music. He designed the Denis d’or with “an ingenious and complex system of stops” that reportedly allowed it to “imitate an astonishing array of instruments, including, it was claimed, aerophones.” The same applied to “chordophones such as harpsichords, harps and lutes, and even wind instruments.”
The term aerophone (which denotes any musical instrument that makes a body of air vibrate) might not sound familiar to many of us, but the functionality of Diviš’ invention will. Don’t we all remember the thrill of sitting down to our first synthesizer and discovering how many different instrumental sounds it could make, vague though the sonic approximation might have been?
Whether the Denis d’or counts as the founding instrument of all electronic music or a mere early curiosity, you can learn more about it at 120 Years of Electronic Music and Electrospective Music. The pre-history of electronic music (since its history proper begins around 1800) has remembered it as a practical-joke device as much as an instrument. “Diviš devised a novel method of temporarily charging the strings with electricity in order to ‘enhance’ the sound,” says the Cambridge Introduction. “What effect this had is unclear (unfortunately only one instrument was made and this did not survive), but it apparently allowed Diviš to deliver an electric shock to the performer whenever he desired.” Nobody ever said a polymath couldn’t also be a prankster.
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.
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