From ESRI, the maker of geographic software, comes the London Time Machine, an interactive map that lets you see how London has changed over the past 330+ years, moving from a city left in ruins by the Great Fire of 1666, to the sprawling metropolis that it is today. Here’s how ESRI describes the map:
On Sunday the 2nd of September 1666, the Great Fire of London began reducing most of the capital to ashes. Among the devastation and the losses were many maps of the city itself.
The Morgan Map of 1682 was the first to show the whole of the City of London after the fire. Produced by William Morgan and his dedicated team of Surveyors and Cartographers it took 6 years to produce, and displayed a brighter perspective on city life for a population still mourning their loved ones, possessions, and homes.
But how much of this symbolised vision of a hoped-for ideal city remains today? What now lies on the lush green fields to the south of the river Thames? And how have the river’s banks been eaten into by the insatiable appetite of urban development? Move the spyglass to find out, and remember to zoom-in to fully interrogate finer details!
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On his way to sainthood as an avatar of love and justice, Martin Luther King, Jr. lost too much of his complexity. Whether deliberately sanitized or just drawn in broad strokes for easy consumption, the Civil Rights leader we think we know, we may not know well at all. King himself ruefully noted the tendency of his audiences to box him in when he began publicly and forcefully to challenge U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the perpetuation of widespread poverty in the wealthiest country on earth. “I am nevertheless greatly saddened,” he remarked in 1967, “that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.”
As WBUR notes in its introduction to a discussion on King’s political philosophy, the “specifics of his radical politics often go unexamined when celebrating his legacy…. His political and economic ideas are clear in his speeches against the Vietnam War and his call to work toward economic equality.”
His radical stances did not sit well with the FBI, nor with many of his former supporters, but their roots are evident in his most-published work, the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he coined the famous phrase, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
We know of King’s indebtedness to the thought of Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, and of his theological education. He was also steeped in the political philosophy of the West, from Plato to John Stuart Mill. In his graduate work at Boston University and Harvard in the 50s, he read and wrote on Hegel, Kant, Marx, and other philosophers. And as a visiting professor at Morehouse College—one year before his arrest in Birmingham and the composition of his letter—King taught a seminar in “Social Philosophy,” examining the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill.
At the top of the post, you can see his handwritten syllabus (view in a larger format here), a sweeping survey of the European tradition in political philosophy. Further up (or here in a larger format) see a typewritten exam with seven questions from the reading (students were to answer any five). King not only asked his students to connect these thinkers in the abstract to present concerns for justice, but, in question 3, he specifically asks them to “appraise the Student Movement in its practice of law-breaking in light of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Law” (referring to the Catholic theologian/philosopher’s distinctions between human and natural law).
The syllabus and exam give us a sense of how King situated his own radical politics both within and against a long tradition of philosophical thought. For more on King’s political philosophy, listen to Harvard professors Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry discuss their new collection of essays—To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.—in the WBUR interview above.
In 2016, Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp, was tried and convicted for being an accessory to at least 170,000 deaths. In making their case, prosecutors did something novel–they relied on a virtual reality version of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which helped undermine Hanning’s claim that he wasn’t aware of what happened inside the camp. The virtual reality headset let viewers see the camp from almost any angle, and established that “Hanning would have seen the atrocities taking place all around him.”
The high-tech prosecution of Hanning gets well documented in “Nazi VR,” the short documentary above. It comes from MEL Films, and will be added to our collection of online documentaries.
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“In 1977, Armistead Maupin wrote a letter to his parents that he had been composing for half his life,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Adams. “He addressed it directly to his mother, but rather than send it to her, he published it in the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper in which he had made his name with his loosely fictionalised Tales of the City, the daily serial written from the alternative, gay world in which he lived.” The late 1970s saw a final flowering of newspaper-serialized novels, the same form in which Charles Dickens had grown famous nearly a century and a half before. But of all the zeitgeisty stories then told a day at a time in urban centers across America, none has had anything like the lasting impact of San Francisco as envisioned by Maupin.
Much of Tales of the City’s now-acknowledged importance comes from the manner in which Maupin populated that San Francisco with a sexually diverse cast of characters — gay, straight, and everything in between — and presented their lives without moral judgment.
He saved his condemnation for the likes of Anita Bryant, the singer and Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman who inspired Maupin to write that veiled letter to his own parents when she headed up the anti-homosexual “Save Our Children” political campaign. When Michael Tolliver, one of the series’ main gay characters, discovers that his folks back in Florida have thrown in their lot with Bryant, he responds with an eloquent and long-delayed coming-out that begins thus:
Dear Mama,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be OK, if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.
I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who love and trust them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.
I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief — rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.
You can hear Michael’s, and Maupin’s, full letter read aloud by Sir Ian McKellen in the Letters Live video above. In response to its initial publication, Adams writes, “Maupin had received hundreds of other letters, nearly all of them from readers who had cut out the column, substituted their own names for Michael’s and sent it verbatim to their own parents. Maupin’s Letter to Mama has since been set to music three times and become ‘a standard for gay men’s choruses around the world.’ ”
Those words come from a piece on Maupin’s autobiography Logical Family, published just last year, in which the Tales of the City author tells of his own coming out as well as his friendships with other non-straight cultural icons, one such icon being McKellen himself. “I have many regrets about not having come out earlier,” McKellen told BOMB magazine in 1998, “but one of them might be that I didn’t engage myself in the politicking.” He’d come out ten years before, as a stand in opposition to Section 28 of the Local Government Bill, then under consideration in the British Parliament, which prohibited local authorities from depicting homosexuality “as a kind of pretended family relationship.”
McKellen entered the realm of activism in earnest after choosing that moment to reveal his sexual orientation on the BBC, which he did on the advice of Maupin and other friends. A few years later he appeared in the television miniseries adaptation of Tales of the City as Archibald Anson-Gidde, a wealthy real-estate and cultural impresario (one, as Maupin puts it, of the city’s “A‑gays”). In the novels, Archibald Anson-Gidde dies closeted, of AIDS, provoking the ire of certain other characters for not having done enough for the cause in life — a charge, thanks in part to the words of Michael Tolliver, that neither Maupin nor McKellen will surely never face.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
“Where are you from?” a character at one point asks Babe, the hapless protagonist of the Firesign Theatre’s classic comedy album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. “Nairobi, ma’am,” Babe replies. “Isn’t everybody?” Like most of that psychedelic radio troupe’s pieces of apparent nonsense, that memorable line contains a truth: trace human history back far enough and you inevitably end up in east Africa, a point illustrated in reverse by the video above, “A History of the World: Every Year,” which traces the march of humanity between 200,000 BCE and the modern day.
To a dramatic soundtrack which opens and closes with the music of Hans Zimmer, video creator Ollie Bye charts mankind’s progress out of Africa and, ultimately, into every corner of all the continents of the world.
Real, documented settlements, cities, empires, and entire civilizations rise and fall as they would in a computer game, with a constantly updated global population count and list of the civilizations active in the current year as well as occasional notes about politics and diplomacy, society and culture, and inventions and discoveries.
All that happens in under 20 minutes, a pretty swift clip, though not until the very end does the world take the political shape we know today, including even the late latecomer to civilization that is the United States of America. Bye’s many other videos tend to focus on the history of other parts of the world, such as India, the British Isles, and that cradle of our species, the African continent, all of which we can now develop first-hand familiarity with in this age of unprecedented human mobility. Though the condition itself takes the question “Where are you from?” to a degree of complication unknown not only millennia but also centuries and even decades ago, at least now you have a snappy answer at the ready.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Aristotelian notion of “man” as a “rational animal” has seen its share of detractors, from the Cynics to Bertrand Russell to nearly the whole of Poststructuralist thought. Leave it up to Oscar Wilde to compress the debate between intellect and passion into a pithy aphorism: “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.”
We no longer need clever verbal barbs to refute too-optimistic assessments of human behavior. Economics is catching up: we have the language of neuroscience and psychology, which consistently tells us that humans decidedly do not behave rationally very often, but are driven by bias and biology in inexplicable ways. And for over a hundred years now, we’ve known that the clockwork Newtonian view of the physical universe turns out be a much messier and indeterminate affair, as does the universe of the human mind.
Why, then, has so much economic theory operated with a kind of dogged Aristotelianism, insisting that the units of capitalist society, the workers, managers, investors, consumers, owners, renters, speculators, etc. behave in predictable ways? We have case after case showing that intelligence and critical reasoning often have little to do with success or failure in the market. In such cases, however, one often hears the “madness of crowds” or other cliches invoked as an explanation.
To illustrate, market reporters and business writers have seized upon the story of Isaac Newton’s spectacular rise and fall in the so-called “South Sea Bubble” of 1720. We find the story in Benjamin Graham’s 1949 classic The Intelligent Investor, a widely-read book that attributes the irrationality of market systems to an anthropomorphic entity named “Mr. Market.”
Graham writes,
Back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he ‘could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.’ Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusiasm of the market, Newton jumped back in at a much higher price — and lost £20,000 (or more than $3 million in [2002–2003’s] money. For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words ‘South Sea’ in his presence.
The quotation in bold may or may not have been uttered by Newton, but the events Graham describes did indeed happen. As the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zwieg relates, University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko found that “Newton had shifted from a prudent investor with his money spread across several securities to a speculator who had plunged essentially all of his capital into a single stock. The great scientist was chasing hot performance as desperately as a day trader in 1999 or many bitcoin buyers in 2017.” (Odlyzko estimates Newton’s losses closer to $4 million.) Perhaps it was not a metaphorical “Mr. Market” who cost Newton up to 77% “on his worst purchases,” nor was it widespread “wild enthusiasm”—the mass movement of passion that Enlightenment philosophers so feared.
Perhaps it was Newton himself who, Elena Holodny writes at Business Insider, “let his emotions get the best of him, and got swayed by the irrationality of the crowd.” Maybe it’s more accurate to say Newton succumbed to greed when the bubble expanded. “Throughout history,” Barbara Kollmeyer writes at Market Watch in her interview with author Richard Dale, “people—especially those at the top rung of society—have been greedy and gullible participants in financial bubbles. And Sir Isaac Newton was only human, after all.” (How many at the top rung of society fell prey to Bernie Madoff’s schemes? And a century before the South Sea Bubble, hundreds of wealthy investors lost their shirts in the Dutch Tulip Bulb craze.)
Some business writers, like investment editor Richard Evans at The Telegraph, recommend a calculable formula to avoid losing a fortune in bubbles, advice that takes rational agency for granted. Perhaps it should not. In addition to citing the contagion of crowds, nearly every discussion of Newton’s folly allows that a failure of emotional discipline played a significant role. Benjamin Graham invokes another Aristotelian notion—the idea that “character” counts as much or more than intelligence when it comes to investing. “The investor’s chief problem,” he writes, “and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.”
Far fewer commenters note that the South Sea venture was itself a failure of character from its inception. The company had secured an exclusive monopoly on trade with South America; much of that trade involved selling slaves. It is also the case that the company artificially inflated its stock prices, and colluded with several MPs in insider trading schemes. The so-called “Bubble Act” of Parliament in 1720, presumably passed to prevent crashes like the one that devastated Newton, turned out to be corporate giveaway. The terms of the act had been dictated by the South Sea Company in order to prevent other companies from poaching their investors. Although these circumstances are well-known to economic historians, they rarely make their way into commentary on Newton’s great loss.
Economists instead tend to blame abstractions for economic events like the South Sea Bubble, or they blame the overreaching profit-seeking of investors, and maybe for good reason. The other explanations haunt the margins: the inherently exploitative nature of most forms of corporate capitalism, and the corruption and collusion between the state and private enterprise that inhibits fair competition and makes it impossible for investors to evaluate the situation transparently. For all of his scientific and mathematical genius, Isaac Newton was no exception—he was just as subject to irrational greed as the next investor, and to the predatory machinations of “market forces.”
The title of Walker Evans and James Agee’s extraordinary work of literary photojournalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, may have lost some of its ironic edge with subsequent acclaim and the fame of its writer and photographer. First begun in 1936 as a project documenting the largely invisible lives of white sharecropping families in rural Alabama, when the book appeared in print in 1941 it only sold about 600 copies. But over time, writes Malcolm Jones at Daily Beast, “it has established itself as a unique and enduring mashup of reporting, confession, and oracular prose.” As essential as Agee’s documentary prose poetics is to the book’s appeal, Evans’ photographs, like those of his many Depression-era contemporaries, have served as models for generations of photographers in decades hence.
Evans “photographs are not illustrative,” wrote Agee in the Preface. “They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.” If “the text was written with reading aloud in mind,” and Agee wanted us to hear, not simply see the language, perhaps we are also meant to see the individuals Evans captured, rather than just gaze at weathered faces and battered clothing, and view their bearers collectively as forlorn objects of pity.
Moreover, we shouldn’t look at these individuals only as members of a particular national group. In the book’s first paragraph, Agee writes:
The world is our home. It is also the home of many, many other children, some of whom live in far-away lands. They are our world brothers and sisters….
We are meant to see the subjects of Evans’ photographs and Agee’s exquisite descriptions as distinctive parts who make up the whole of humanity—or, more precisely, the world’s laboring people. Agee opens with a famous epigraph from The Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite and fight. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win.” (With a canny qualifying footnote explaining these words and their author as potentially “the property of any political party, faith, or faction”).
Several photographers employed, like Evans, by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression shared these sensibilities. The sympathies of Dorothea Lange, for example, lay with working people, not with the noblesse oblige of middle-class audiences who might support relief efforts but who had little desire to mingle with the great American unwashed. Many viewers—disconnected from rural life—stared at the photographs, writes Carrie Melissa Jones, “in issues of the now-defunct Life magazine, Time, Fortune, Forbes, and more,” and “took a paternalistic view of the south, asking: ‘How do we save them from themselves?’”
Can viewers of Depression-era photographs today put aside their implicit or explicit sense of moral superiority? Perhaps seeing photos of the era in color brings their subjects more immediacy and vividness, and you can see them by the hundreds at the Library of Congress’s online collection of work commissioned by the federal government during the Depression and World War II. Evans himself may have thought color photography “garish” and “vulgar,” Jordan G. Teicher notes at Slate (though Evans began taking his own color images in 1946). But contemporaries like Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, and John Vachon proved him wrong.
Once the U.S. entered the war, many Farm Security Administration photographers were reassigned to make propaganda for the Office of War Information (and a few, like Lange, also received commissions to photograph the Japanese Internment Camps). The nature of documentary photography began to change, largely reflecting small town American industriousness and civic pride, rather than rural desperation and struggle. Images like Fenno Jacobs’ patriotic demonstration in Southington Connecticut (1942) above, are typical. Quaint rows of houses and storefronts dominate during the war years. We also find interesting images like that of the woman below working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber in Tennessee, taken by Alfred T. Palmer in 1943. Aside from the dated clothing and machinery, her photograph seems as fresh and compelling as the day it first appeared.
“In color,” writes Emory University’s Jesse Karlsberg, “these images present themselves as relevant to the present, rather than consigned to the past. By displaying the problems they depict—such as segregation, poverty, and environmental degradation—in a contemporary form, the images imply that such problems may continue to be critical today.” They are indeed critical today. And may become even more so. And one hopes that writers, photographers, and artists, though they will not do so under the aegis of New Deal agencies, can find ways to document what is happening as they did decades ago. Such work carries global significance. And, as a recent Taschen book that collects New Deal photography from 1935 to 1943 describes it, photographs like those you see here “introduced America to Americans.” They also introduced Americans—who have been as divided in the past as they are today—to each other.
When you have a little time, you can drop in on a free course that revisits a seminal moment in U.S. history–the American Revolution. Taught by Yale historian Joanne Freeman, the course explores how the Revolution brought about “some remarkable transformations–converting British colonists into American revolutionaries, and a cluster of colonies into a confederation of states with a common cause.” You can access the 25 lectures above, or on YouTube and iTunes. Also find a syllabus for the course on this Yale web site.
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