The Olympics in the 2020s Versus 1912: See Side-by-Side Comparisons of the Athletes’ Performance Then & Now

in History, Sports | August 1st, 2024

The Olympic Games have their origins in antiquity, but their modern revival has also been going on longer than any of us has been here. Even the fifth Summer Olympics, which took place in Stockholm in 1912, has passed out of living memory. But thanks to the technology of the twenty-first century, we can call up surprisingly crisp footage of its competitions any time we like, much as we’re doing with that of the currently ongoing thirty-third Summer Olympics in Paris. One especially fascinating use of these resources, for those invested in sporting history, is to compare the performances of Olympic athletes over time: we know they’ve improved, but it’s one thing to see the numbers, and quite another to see a side-by-side comparison.

Take the venerable men’s 100 meters, whose 1912 and 2020 finals both appear in the video above. 112 years ago, the United States of America’s Ralph Craig won the day (after seven false starts, and arguably an eighth as well) with a time of 10.8 seconds. Three years ago (Tokyo 2020 having been delayed by COVID-19 to 2021), the victor of that same event was Italy’s Marcell Jacobs, who crossed the finish line at 9.8 seconds.

An even greater evolution manifests in the javelin throw, in which the Swedish Eric Lemming’s 60.64 meters in 1912 becomes Neeraj Chopra’s 87.58 meters in 2020. (Nor has Chopra finished setting records, at least judging by the media fanfare in his homeland that attended his recent arrival in Paris’ Olympic village.)

Pole vaulting, too, has undergone a great leap forward, or rather, upward. Just above, you can see the 1912 record of 3.95 meters set by Henry S. Babcock of the United States, then the 2020 record of 6.02 meters set by Armand “Mondo” Duplantis of Sweden — or technically, of both Sweden and the U.S., having been born and raised in the latter, but able to represent the former due to his mother’s being Swedish. In recent decades, such cases of nationally mixed parentage (the American-born Italian Jacobs being another) have become more common in the Olympics, which in that and other respects has long reflected changes in the wider world. And though whether humanity is improving on the whole remains a matter of heated debate, we’ve undeniably been getting a lot better at running, throwing, and jumping with the aid of big sticks.

The Story Behind the Iconic Black Power Salute Photo at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City

Did Joe Strummer, Frontman of The Clash, Run the Paris and London Marathons?

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

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

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

in History, Psychology, Random | July 30th, 2024

What do you imagine when you hear the phrase “cat piano”? Some kind of whimsical furry beast with black and white keys for teeth, maybe? A relative of My Neighbor Totoro’s cat bus? Or maybe you picture a piano that contains several caged cats who shriek along an entire scale when keys are pressed that slam sharpened nails into their tails. If this is your answer, you might find people slowly backing away from you at times, or gently suggesting you get some psychiatric help.

But then, imagine that such a perverse oddity was in use by psychiatrists, like the 18th-century German physician Johann Christian Reil, who—reports David McNamee at The Guardian—“wrote that the device was intended to shake mental patients who had lost the ability to focus out of a ‘fixed state’ and into ‘conscious awareness.’”

So long, meds. See you, meditation and mandala coloring books.… I joke, but apparently Dr. Reil was in earnest when he wrote in an 1803 manual for the treatment of mental illness that patients could “be placed so that they are sitting in direct view of the cat’s expressions when the psychiatrist plays a fugue.”

A bafflingly cruel and nonsensical experiment, and we might rejoice to know it probably never took place. But the bizarre idea of the cat piano, or Katzenklavier, did not spring from the weird delusions of one sadistic psychiatrist. It was supposedly invented by German polymath and Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who has been called “the last Renaissance man” and who made pioneering discoveries in the fields of microbiology, geology, and comparative religion. He was a serious scholar and a man of science. Maybe the Katzenklavier was intended as a sick joke that others took seriously—and for a very long time at that. The illustration of a Katzenklavier above dates from 1667, the one below from 1883.

Kircher’s biographer John Glassie admits that, for all his undoubted brilliance, several of his “actual ideas today seem wildly off-base; if not simply bizarre” as well as “inadvertently amusing, right, wrong, half-right, half-baked, ridiculous….” You get the idea. He was an eccentric, not a psychopath. McNamee points to other, likely apocryphal, stories in which cats were supposedly used as instruments. Perhaps, cruel as it seems to us, the cat piano seemed no crueler in previous centuries than the way we taunt our cats today to make them perform for animated GIFs.

But to the cats these distinctions are meaningless. From their point of view, there is no other way to describe the Katzenklavier than as a sinister, terrifying torture device, and those who might use it as monstrous villains. Personally I’d like to give cats the last word on the subject of the Katzenklavier—or at least a few fictional animated, walking, talking, singing cats. Watch the short animation at the top, in which Nick Cave reads a poem by Eddie White about talented cat singers who mysteriously go missing, scooped up by a human for a “harpsichord of harm, the cruelest instrument to spawn from man’s gray cerebral soup.” The story has all the dread and intrigue of Edgar Allan Poe’s best work, and it is in such a milieu of gothic horror that the Katzenklavier belongs.

The Cat Piano narrated by Nick Cave will be added to our list of Free Animations, a subset of our meta collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More

Cats in Japanese Woodblock Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Animals Came to Star in Its Popular Art

Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

in History, Music, Television | July 29th, 2024

Howlin’ Wolf may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century. Certainly many people have said so, but there are other measurements than mere opinion, though it’s one I happen to share. The man born Chester Arthur Burnett also had a profound historical effect on popular culture, and on the way the Chicago blues carried “the sound of Jim Crow,” as Eric Lott writes, into American cities in the north, and into Europe and the UK. Recording for both Chess and Sun Records in the 50s (Sam Phillips said of his voice, “It’s where the soul of man never dies”), Burnett’s raw sound “was at once urgently urban and country plain… southern and rural in instrumentation and howlingly electric in form.”

He was also phenomenal on stage. His hulking six-foot-six frame and intense glowering stare belied some very smooth moves, but his finesse only enhanced his edginess. He seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf, letting the impulse give out in plaintive, ragged howls and prowls around the stage. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” he said, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” He played a very mean harmonica and did acrobatic guitar tricks before Hendrix, picked up from his mentor Charlie Patton. And he played with the best musicians, in large part because he was known to pay well and on time. If you wanted to play electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf was a man to watch.

This reputation was Wolf’s entrée to the stage of ABC variety show Shindig! in 1965, opening for the Rolling Stones. He had just returned from his 1964 tour of Europe and the UK with the American Folk Blues Festival, playing to large, appreciative crossover crowds. He’d also just released “Killing Floor,” a record Ted Gioia notes “reached out to young listeners without losing the deep blues feeling that stood as the cornerstone of Wolf’s sound.” The following year, the Rolling Stones insisted that Shindig!’s producers “also feature either Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf” before they would go on the show. Wolf won out over his rival Waters, toned down the theatrics of his act for a more prudish white audience, and “for the first time in his storied career, the celebrated bluesman performed on a national television broadcast.”

Why is this significant? Over the decades, the Stones regularly performed with their blues heroes. But this was new media ground. Brian Jones’ shy, starstruck introduction to Wolf before his performance above conveys what he saw as the importance of the moment. Jones’ biographer Paul Trynka may overstate the case, but in some degree at least, Wolf’s appearance on Shindig! “built a bridge over a cultural abyss and connected America with its own black culture.” The show constituted “a life-changing moment, both for the American teenagers clustered round the TV in their living rooms, and for a generation of blues performers who had been stuck in a cultural ghetto.” One of these teenagers described the event as “like Christmas morning.”

Eric Lott points to the show’s formative importance to the Stones, who “sit scattered around the Shindig! set watching Wolf in full-metal idolatry” as he sings “How Many More Years,” a song Led Zeppelin would later turn into “How Many More Times.” (See the Stones do their Shindig! performance of jangly, subdued “The Last Time,” here.) The performance represents more, however, than the “British Invasion embrace” of the blues. It shows Wolf’s mainstream breakout, and the Stones paying tribute to a founding father of rock and roll, an act of humility in a band not especially known or appreciated for that quality.

“It was altogether appropriate,” says music writer Peter Guralnick, “that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet… that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.” Guralnick, notes John Burnett at NPR, calls it “one of the greatest cultural moments of the 20th century.” At minimum, Burnett writes, it’s “one of the most incongruous moments in American pop music”—up until the mid-sixties, at least.

Whether or not the moment could live up to its legend, the people involved saw it as groundbreaking. The venerable Son House sat in attendance—“the man who knew Robert Johnson and Charley Patton,” remarked Brian Jones in awe. And the Rolling Stone positioning himself in deference to “Chicago blues,” Trynka writes, “uncompromising music aimed at a black audience, was a radical, epoch-changing step, both for baby boomer Americans and the musicians themselves. Fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids… hardly understood the growth of civil rights; but they could understand the importance of a handsome Englishman who described the mountainous, gravel-voiced bluesman as a ‘hero’ and sat smiling at his feet.”

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Muddy Waters

The Story of the Rolling Stones: A Selection of Documentaries on the Quintessential Rock-and-Roll Band

Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe & Other American Blues Legends Perform in the UK (1963–66)

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

in Art, Books, History, Nature | July 29th, 2024

When Konrad von Megenberg published his Buch der Natur in the mid-fourteenth century, he won the distinction of having assembled the very first natural history in German. More than half a millennium later, the book still fascinates — not least for its depictions of cats, previously featured here on Open Culture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuterbuch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria’s personal physician Johannes Hartlieb adapts a section of the Buch der Natur with its own full complement of 160 illustrations.

“Hartlieb’s subject is plants, mostly herbs, and their medical uses,” says the Library of Congress, on whose site you can view and download the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch special is the side-by-side presentation of text and images. The high cost of such a richly decorated book makes it unlikely that it was actually used by doctors or pharmacists of the time.”

But even if they lack a certain scientific practicality, these botanical presentations have a bright, simple boldness that, in some respect, suits our visual aesthetics here in the early twenty-first century; you could call it a renaissance equivalent of flat design.

“Each chapter of the Kräuterbuch follows a traditional system of botanical classification derived from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Public Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illustrations. “Animals are portrayed as pharmacologically knowledgeable, such as in an account of deer rubbing themselves on pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium) to remove hunters’ arrows”; another section holds that “deadly carrots (Thapsia) aid beggars in their deceptions — rubbed on the face, they will produce signs of leprosy, which can also be cured with vinegar.” Discussing the poisonous mandrake (see image immediately above), Hartlieb carries forward von Megenberg’s suggestion “that its magical properties should be kept secret from commoners,” who, naturally, would never be in possession of such a lavish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuterbuch — and most of us know that we’d be better off not messing around with mandrake at all.

via the Public Domain Review

Hortus Eystettensis: The Beautifully Illustrated Book of Plants That Changed Botanical Art Overnight (1613)

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

The Surprising Map of Plants: A New Animation Shows How All the Different Plants Relate to Each Other

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

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

Watch the 1896 Film The Pistol Duel, a Startling Re-Creation of the Last Days of Pistol Dueling in Mexico

in Film, History | July 25th, 2024

One sometimes hears lamented the tendency of movies to depict Mexico — and in particular, its capital Mexico City — as a threatening, rough-and-tumble place where human life has no value. Such concerns turn out to be nearly as old as cinema itself, having first been raised in response to a roughly thirty-second-long film called Duel au pistolet from 1896. The French title owes to its having a French director: Gabriel Veyre, a contemporary of the cinema-pioneering Lumière brothers who first left France for Latin America in order to screen their early films there.

On his travels, Veyre both exhibited Lumière films and made his own. “Between 1896 and 1897, he directed and produced 35 films in Mexico,” writes Jared Wheeler at Moviegoings. “Many of those films feature the Mexican president Porfirio Díaz in daily activities.” The action captured in Duel au pistolet is “most probably a recreation of a famous duel that had taken place in September 1894, between Colonel Francisco Romero and Jose Verástegui, the postmaster general.” It seems that Romero had overheard Verástegui accusing him of not only sleeping with a mutual friend’s wife, but also of having pulled strings to get that same friend a post in the government.

His honor insulted, Romero demanded that Verástegui settle the matter with pistols in Chapultepec Park. By that time, dueling was a technically illegal but still-common practice, one “governed by a complex system of social norms that were, for some, a source of national pride as a sign of Mexico’s modernity, and of its kinship with other European nations like France.” But if a duel were to be re-created and screened on film out of its cultural context, “would other nations recognize it as an honorable, dignified ritual, or simply see it as a sign that everyday life in Mexico was characterized by violence and barbarism?”

What still impresses about Duel au pistolet (a colorized version of which appears above), nearly 130 years after its debut, is less the impression it gives of Mexico than its startling realism, which has given even some modern-day viewers reason to wonder whether it’s really a re-enactment. Many “have commented on the naturalism of the duelist’s death,” Wheeler writes, “one of the first to be depicted on screen and very much in contrast to the melodramatic style that was more typical of this time.” In real life, it was Verástegui who lost, and Romero’s subsequent trial and imprisonment meant that Mexico’s days of dueling were well and truly numbered — but the history of onscreen violence had only just begun.

Drunk History: An Intoxicated Look at the Famous Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr Duel

Watch a Witty, Gritty, Hardboiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton Duel

Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)

Dueling as a Film Trope: Pretty Much Pop #109 Considers The Last Duel and Its Genre

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

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

Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages

in Food & Drink, History | July 24th, 2024

Playing video games, road-tripping across America, binge-listening to podcasts, chatting with artificial intelligence: these are a few of our modern pleasures not just unknown to, but unimaginable by, humanity in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval people were, after all, people, and as Terence put it more than a millennium before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us moderns, it’s a common blunder to regard distant eras through the lens of our own standards and expectations, which prevents us from truly understanding how our listeners lived and thought. But perhaps we can begin from a considerable patch of common ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.

Such are the points emphasized by medieval historian Eleanor Janega in these episodes of History Hit, which examine the more-than-age-old enjoyments in which people indulged between antiquity and modernity. Our received image of Europe in the Middle Ages may be one of Church-dominated, dankly pleasure-free societies, but Janega and historian of sexuality Kate Lister point out that, strict though the religious dictates may have been about sexual activity and other matters besides, many simply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to daily hot showers, we can rest assured that they were much more concerned with how they smelled than we might imagine.) In any case, reproduction was one thing, and courtly love — or indeed commercial love — quite another.

As Billy Crystal famously joked, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Middle Ages, the place was often a problem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as commoners (though some royalty did enjoy the benefit of a curtain around their four-poster bed, which afforded at least the illusion of privacy). It seems to have been much easier to find somewhere to drink, according to Janega’s episode about alcohol. In it, she visits a fine example of “the humble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet having been invented — and to tell their stories, a practice that would become so deeply ingrained in the culture as to provide a formal foundation for the Canterbury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-owner interviewee reminds us, invented English literature as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hardly began with Wife of Bath.

An Animated Introduction to Medieval Taverns: Learn the History of These Rough-and-Tumble Ancestors of the Modern Pub

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

How Toilets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval England

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

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

Meet Madame Inès Decourcelle, One of the Very First Female Taxi Drivers in Paris (Circa 1908)

in History | July 23rd, 2024

If you can read this, you almost certainly know the French word for a professional automobile driver. That’s because we use the same word in English: chauffeur. French nouns, unlike English ones, come in masculine and feminine varieties, and that -eur ending unmistakably indicates one of the former. What, then, to call a woman who works behind the wheel? Chauffeuse would be the natural option, if it didn’t already refer to a kind of fireside lounge chair. One could also feminize cocher, another word for driver, but cochère, too, is already taken by an arched entryway (which architectural detail, notably, meets the vehicular realm in the form of the porte-cochère).

As often, the difficulty of pinning down the right term here reflects the scarcity of the underlying concept. In much of the world today, driving isn’t considered the most feminine of occupations. That was even truer in the Paris of the early twentieth century, when the first woman to get her taxi license made history — or rather, when the first women to get their taxi licenses made history. A 1908 dispatch from the Motor-Car Journal’s Paris correspondent describes a certain Mademoiselle Gaby Pohlen as having “obtained her driver’s license to drive a motor taxicab from the Prefecture of Police.” Even at the time of writing, “her example has already been followed by Madame Decourcelle.”

According to Jeroen Booij at PreWarCar.com, however, “three ladies supposedly began an apprenticeship in 1906 to drive a motorized carriage in the City of Light. A lady named Madame Dufaut-Charnier supposedly got her degree as early as February 1907.” But Madame Inès Decourcelle “is believed to be the first to receive her full taxi licence in April 1908, making her the first woman in history to drive a taxi in the streets of Paris. The fact is that she became the subject of a number of daily newspaper articles claiming this, as she was seen on so many postcards from Paris naming her the first ‘femme chauffeur.’ ” After seeing one such story in Le Journal, another woman “wrote to the paper in a particularly irritated way, claiming that not Madame Decourcelle but she, Mademoiselle Gaby Pohlen, earned the title,” having started driving back in 1906.

The commenters at PreWarCar.com have put some thought toward clarifying the matter. Given the era, when the automobile itself was still a novelty, one of them suspects confusion about “whether all those named were licensed horse-drawn or motor cab drivers,” explaining that Pohlen and Decourcelles “both reportedly obtained licenses to drive motor taxi-cabs in spring 1908.” While the photogenic and somewhat eccentric Pohlen may have started out first, “Mme. Decourcelles’ claim to fame was that she was the first to get “diplomas” as both a horse ‘cochère’ and a motor ‘chauffeuse.’ ” This, another commenter adds, was “an incredible achievement at the time,” no matter which word — or words — the Académie Française approves to describe it.

via MessyNessy

Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action

The Timeless Beauty of the Citroën DS, the Car Mythologized by Roland Barthes (1957)

Take a Virtual Drive through London, Tokyo, Los Angeles & 45 Other World Cities

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Prepare for Taxi Driver (1976)

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

When the Grateful Dead Played at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)

in History, Music | July 23rd, 2024

In September of 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt and played three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the Great Sphinx looking over their shoulders. It wasn’t the first time a rock band played in an ancient setting. Pink Floyd performed songs in the middle of the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in October 1971. But Floyd performed to an “empty” house, playing to no live fans, only ghosts. (Watch footage here.) The Dead’s shows, on the other hand, were real gigs, attended by Deadheads who made the journey over, and they could thank Phil Lesh for putting it all in motion. Lesh later said, “it sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that’s been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids.”

Logistically speaking, the concerts weren’t the easiest to stage. Rolling Stone reported that an “equipment truck got stuck in sand and had to be towed by camels.” Because the electricity in Egypt was an “a winkin’, blinkin’ affair,” Bob Weir later recalled, the jetlagged band had difficulties recording the first of the three shows. But, as with most adventures, the inconveniences were offset by the wondrous nature of the experience.

Weir captured it well when he said: “I got to a point where the head of the Sphinx was lined up with the top of the Great Pyramid, all lit up. All of a sudden, I went to this timeless place. The sounds from the stage — they could have been from any time. It was as if I went into eternity.” The Sphinx and Great Pyramid date back to roughly 2560 BC.

The Dead were joined on this trip by the counterculture author Ken Kesey (not to mention Bill Graham and Bill Walton) who apparently captured footage on Super‑8 reels. (Watch it above.) Kesey himself later tried to explain the symbolism of the visit, saying: “The people who were there recognized this as a respectful and holy event that went back to something we can all just barely glimpse, them and us both. Our relationship to ancient humans. To this place on the planet. To the planet’s place in the universe. All that cosmic stuff is what the Dead are based on. The Egyptians could understand that.”

At the very top of the post, you can see the Dead performing “Ollin Arageed,” with Egyptian oudist Hamza el-Din and other local musicians, before seguing into “Fire on the Mountain.” The clip gives you a good feel for the awe-inspiring scene. Just above, we have a longer playlist of performances that took place on September 16, 1978 — the same night there was a lunar eclipse. The complete 9/16/78 show can be streamed on Archive.org, as can the shows from 9/14 and 9/15. A 2CD/1 DVD package (Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978) captures the Dead’s visit and can be purchased online.

To get more on the Pyramid concerts, read Chapter 43 of Dennis McNally’s book, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. And here you can see Dead & Co’s homage to the Egypt adventure at the Sphere in Vegas. Enjoy.

A Walking Tour Around the Pyramids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

Louis Armstrong Plays Trumpet at the Egyptian Pyramids; Dizzy Gillespie Charms a Snake in Pakistan

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

Who Built the Egyptian Pyramids & How Did They Do It?: New Archeological Evidence Busts Ancient Myths

Isaac Newton Theorized That the Egyptian Pyramids Revealed the Timing of the Apocalypse: See His Burnt Manuscript from the 1680s

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

The Olympics in the 2020s Versus 1912: See Side-by-Side Comparisons of the Athletes’ Performance Then & Now

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965)

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

Watch the 1896 Film The Pistol Duel, a Startling Re-Creation of the Last Days of Pistol Dueling in Mexico

Sex and Alcohol in Medieval Times: A Look into the Pleasures of the Middle Ages

Meet Madame Inès Decourcelle, One of the Very First Female Taxi Drivers in Paris (Circa 1908)

When the Grateful Dead Played at the Egyptian Pyramids, in the Shadow of the Sphinx (1978)

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search