A Short Video Introduction to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), the First Female Film Director & Studio Mogul

in Film, History | March 24th, 2017

This year’s Women’s History Month theme is “Honoring Trailblazing Women in Labor and Business.” Before these lionesses are hustled offstage in order for us to refocus our attentions on Asian/Pacific Americans, Jewish-Americans, Autism Awareness, Multiple Births, Sexually Transmitted Disease Education, pecans and the myriad other calendar girls and boys that April brings, let’s join video essayist Catherine Stratton in celebrating the achievements of filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, above.

While not an officially recognized honoree, Guy-Blaché, who made over 1,000 films over two decades, definitely qualifies as a trailblazing woman.

At age 21, she became the first female director in cinema history with The Cabbage Fairy, below, a whimsical, if not particularly accurate vision of where babies come from. (It was shot in 1896, long before rules limiting the amount of time a newborn actor can spend on set, but only a handful of years before nurse Margaret Sanger took up the cause of women’s reproductive health.)

She tackled the Life of Christ with a passel of animals, special effects, and 300 extras.

She popped viewers eyes with candy-colored hand tinting.

She built a state-of-the-art film studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, pruning the terrain to serve as a variety of landscapes.

Viewed from the lens of 2017, one of her most startling achievements is 1912’s A Fool and His Money, an excerpt of which is below. The tale itself is an unremarkable crowdpleaser: a poor guy falls in love with a wealthy young woman. He goes to great lengths to woo her, outfitting himself with fancy duds and throwing a huge party, only to be bested by a flashy rival.

What is remarkable is that Guy-Blaché was white and the film’s cast is entirely African-American. According to essayist Stratton, the characters are portrayed with none of the explicit racism DW Griffith brought to The Birth of a Nation three years later.

As Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls site reports, Guy-Blaché passed from the public view after an expensive divorce from her philandering husband forced her to sell her studio. She struggled to gain public recognition for her pioneering contributions to film history with little success. A Fool and His Money was rediscovered when a flea market shopper bought a musty chest of old, unmarked reels.

Like that film, her reputation is slowly being restored to its former glory. She was awarded France’s Legion of Honor in 1955 and a Director’s Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.

Give this trailblazing woman another look!

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on A Short Video Introduction to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), the First Female Film Director & Studio Mogul ) |

Hitler Was ‘Blitzed’ On Cocaine & Opiates During World War II: Hear a Wide-Ranging Interview with Best-Selling Author Norman Ohler

in History | March 23rd, 2017

Historians have written an extraordinary amount about Hitler, the Third Reich, and World War II–so much, that it’s hard to imagine anyone could find something novel to say about this dark period of history. But German journalist Norman Ohler has done just that. In his new book, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, Ohler looks at how Hitler became increasingly dependent on a mixture of cocaine and opiates during the wartime years, all of which could have influenced his decision making. Meanwhile, despite Nazi propaganda against “degenerate” culture, German troops consumed large quantities of crystal meth during major military operations. Some 35 million meth tablets were ingested during the 1940 invasion of France alone.

Ohler gathered much of his evidence while reviewing the papers of Hitler’s private physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. And while some scholars have criticized Ohler’s account, Ian Kershaw, arguably the world’s leading authority on Hitler and Nazi Germany, has called Blitzed “a serious piece of scholarship” and “very well researched.”

Below you can hear Ohler talk about Nazi drug use in a 35-minute interview with Terry Gross.

If you want to download Blitzed as a free audiobook, you could always get it through Audible.com’s 30-day free trial. Find more details on that here. Audiobooks.com also offers a similar deal.

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An Animated Introduction to McCarthyism: What Is It? And How Did It Happen?

in History | March 20th, 2017

During the 1970s, a young Donald Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, a brash, take-no-prisoners lawyer, who first came to prominence during the 1950s, when he served as the consigliere to Joseph McCarthy and his campaign to expose suspected communists in the United States. In what’s known as the Second Red Scare, McCarthy led increasingly broad and paranoid investigations, trying to find Communists, sympathizers and spies, both inside and outside the federal government. Mostly on the basis of rumor, not fact, “thousands of individuals were aggressively investigated and questioned before government panels.” Blacklists were created. Some were jailed. Careers and livelihoods were destroyed.

Year later, playwright Arthur Miller recalled, “Suffice it to say, it was a time of great–no doubt unprecedented–fear.” “The air of terror was heavy.” “I was sure the whole thing would soon go away.” Eventually a sense of futility gave way to anger, and Miller responded by writing The Crucible, a commentary on McCarthyism wrapped in a drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692/93.

Above, you can watch above a six minute primer on McCarthyism, prepared by Ellen Schrecker, professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. An expert on the history of McCarthyism, she has been called “the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians.” Her books on the subject include: Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents.

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

Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present

in History, Media, Technology | March 17th, 2017

Buckling under information overload?

The long view can be soothing, as filmmaker Josh Begley proves in just under a minute, above. The data artist reduced 165 years worth of chronologically ordered New York Times front pages—every single one since 1852—to a grid of inky rectangles flashing past at lightning speed.

You won’t be able to make out the headlines as the front page news whips past to the somewhat ominous strains of composer Philip Glass’ ”Dead Things.”

Instead the impression is of watching something—or someone—steadily bearing witness.

Obviously, any reputable new source does more than simply note the unfolding of events. Its readers look to it as a source of analysis and critique, in addition to well-researched factual information.

The Gray Lady, as the Times has long been known, has recently weathered an uptick in slings and arrows from both the left and the right, yet her longevity is not easily dismissed.

Blogger Jason Kottke watched the video with an eye toward some of the paper’s most notable design changes. His findings also remind us of some of the historic events to appear on the Times’ front page—Lincoln’s assassination, Nixon’s resignation, and the election of our first Black president, which it described as a “national catharsis—a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies.”

How many of the over 50,000 front pages featured above were deemed personally significant enough to squirrel away in a trunk or an attic?

Have digital archives decreed that this practice will soon gasp its last, along with the print media that inspired it?

What will we use to wrap our fish and line our bird cages?

Read the New York Times 2012 (non-front page) coverage of Apple’s rejection of Josh Begley’s Drone+ app here.

via Kottke

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in New York City. Her play Zamboni Godot is playing at The Brick in Brooklyn through tomorrow night. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present ) |

New Interactive Map Visualizes the Chilling History of Lynching in the U.S. (1835–1964)

in History, Maps | March 16th, 2017

Whether we like to admit it or not, the history of the U.S. is in great degree a history of genocide and racist terror. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has demonstrated in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, the phrase “Manifest Destiny”—which we generally associate with the second half of the 19th century—accurately describes the nation’s ethos since well before its founding. The idea that the entire continent belonged by right of “Providence” to a highly specific group of European settlers is what we often hear spoken of now of as “white nationalism,” an ideology that has been as violent and bloody as certain other nationalisms, and in many ways much more so.

“Somehow,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “even ‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for what happened” to the Native American nations. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized this history as inseparable from the struggles of African-Americans and other groups, writing in 1963’s Why We Can’t Wait, “our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy.”

One striking commonality—or rather continuity—in the histories Dunbar-Ortiz and King tell is that a huge number of violent attacks on Native and Black people, slave and free, were carried out by ordinary settlers and citizens, unofficially deputized by the state as irregular enforcers of white supremacy. Especially in the century after the Civil War, white nationalism took the form of lynchings: brutal vigilante hangings, burnings, and mutilations meant to terrorize communities of color and enact the kind of frontier “justice” pioneered on the actual frontier. Most of the recorded victims were African-American, but “Native Americans, as well as Mexican, Chinese, and Italian workers were brutalized and murdered” as well, writes Laura Bliss at Citylab, and “although the rural South was by far the bloodiest region nationally, no area was really safe.”

Now, a new interactive map—named Monroe Work Today after the early 20th century historian (Monroe Nathan Work) who gathered much of the data—“aims to be the most comprehensive catalogue of proven lynchings that took place in the United States from 1835 to 1964.” The site calls its impressive map “a rebirth of one piece” of Monroe Work’s legacy, expanded to include many more sources and the post WWII period. “In the century after the Civil War,” write the map’s creators, “as many as 5000 people of color were executed—not by courts, but by mobs on the street who believed the cause of white supremacy.”

Lynchings became widespread in the early 1800s, “as a form of self-appointed justice in local communities… when townspeople made grave accusations first, but never bothered to gather proof.” In the postbellum U.S., such killings became more exclusively racialized in “very real crusades to change the United States to a place only for whites.” Local leaders “encouraged people to carry that idea onto the streets.” As you can see in the screenshots here from particularly violent periods in history, most, but by no means all of these extrajudicial killings took place in the South against African Americans.

In other areas of density in the Southwest, “Far West,” and “Left Coast” (as the project refers to these areas) the victims tended to be Latino/a, Chinese, or Native American. In New Orleans, a deep pool of blue marks the many Sicilian victims of lynching in the late 19th century.

For a number of reasons discussed on the site, the map’s creators caution against using their tool “to decide that some places suffered ‘more racism’ than others.” Many other forms of racist violence, from intimidation to rape, redlining, criminalization, and job discrimination have been widespread around the country and are not shown on the map. In anticipation of accusations of bias, Monroe Work Today encourages users to evaluate the source for themselves. (“You should always do this with anything you read online.”) A good place to start would be their extensive bibliography. As you scroll through the site, you’ll find other questions answered as well.

Writing at The Smithsonian, Danny Lewis calls the map “an important endeavor to help mark these dark parts of American history and make it more visible and accessible for all.” But Monroe Work Today is more than a research tool. The site bears witness to a continuing story. “The threat of violence for Americans of color is alive and real,” writes Bliss, “This is a good time to revisit its history.”

via The Smithsonian

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

What Did the Voice of Neanderthals, Our Distant Cousins, Sound Like?: Scientists Demonstrate Their “High Pitch” Theory

in History | March 16th, 2017

Scholars have made informed, educated guesses at what Shakespeare sounded like in the original pronunciation. The same applies to what Old Norse sounded like from the 9th through the 13th centuries. And even to Beowulf read in Old English, Homer’s Odyssey read in the original Ancient Greek, and The Epic of Gilgamesh read in Akkadian.

But could we push back much further in time? How about 40,000 years into deep history when our close cousins, the Neanderthals, populated the planet?

Above, you can watch a segment of a BBC documentary, Neanderthal: The Rebirth, where a team of scientists “examine the first full skeleton of a neanderthal ever to be discovered and uncover insights into the most likely sound our primitive cousins would have made.” Anatomists, biometric specialists, paleoanthropologists, and vocal experts–they all worked together to analyze the Neanderthal’s vocal apparatus and came to this conclusion: Homo neanderthalensis likely had a surprisingly high-pitched voice (the original High Pitch). It’s on display above.

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via Atlas Obscura

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on What Did the Voice of Neanderthals, Our Distant Cousins, Sound Like?: Scientists Demonstrate Their “High Pitch” Theory ) |

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action

in History, Politics | March 15th, 2017

Say, for example, that a gang of obscenely rich mercenaries with questionable ties and histories had taken power with the intent to destroy institutions so they could loot the country, further impoverish and disempower the citizenry, and prosecute, imprison, and demonize dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities. Such a scenario would cry out, one might think, for civil action on a never-before-seen scale. Millions, one might imagine, would either storm the castle or refuse to obey the commands of their new rulers. We might describe this situation as a topsy-turvy turn of events, should, say, such an awful thing come to pass.

Topsy-turvy is exactly the phrase Howard Zinn used in his characterization of the U.S. during the Vietnam War, when he saw a situation like the one above, one that had also obtained, he said, in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

“I start,” he said, opening a debate, in 1970, at Johns Hopkins University with philosopher Charles Frankel on the question of civil disobedience,

from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth.

And with this preamble, which you can hear read by Matt Damon in the video above, the historian and activist began to make his case that civil disobedience “is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience.”

We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.

But “America is different” than other world empires, says Zinn, anticipating the usual claims of exceptionalism. No, he says, it isn’t. “It is not that special. It really isn’t.” Later in his speech, Zinn calls the “voting process” a “sham.”

Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls and they register their approval. I know there is a difference—they have one party and we have two parties. We have one more party than they have, you see.

What is called for, he argued, is not a return to the past nor a rejiggering of the political machinery, but a political consciousness that recognizes common struggles across borders:

People in all countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.

Damon’s reading took place during the 2012 performance in Voices of a People’s History, a now-yearly event that since 2003 has dramatized “the extraordinary history of ordinary people who built the movements that made the United States what it is today, ending slavery and Jim Crow, protesting war and the genocide of Native Americans, creating unions and the eight hour work day, advancing women’s rights and gay liberation, and struggling to right wrongs of the day.”

The words of Howard Zinn feature prominently in all these events, and “The Problem is Civil Obedience”—which was published as an essay two years after the 1970 debate—has proven a popular choice. In 2004 at the second Voices of a People’s History, Wallace Shawn (above) read the text, and Zinn himself was in attendance. Shawn is best known for his comic turns in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre, and Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride, and he can’t help but bring his wry humor to the reading simply by sounding like himself.

In another reading of Zinn’s speech, Grey’s Anatomy actor and outspoken activist Jesse Williams takes on the text, introduced by a recording of the 2004 introduction to Shawn’s reading. These three different readings from three very different actors and personalities all have one thing in common: their audiences all seem to recognize the situation Zinn described in 1970 as entirely relevant to their own in 2004, 2012, 2014, and… perhaps, also in 2017.

Read Zinn’s full remarks here and see new performances from this year’s Voices of a People’s History at their website.

You can find Zinn’s essay published in the collection: The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Technology Behind Wi-Fi & Bluetooth During WWII

in Film, History, Technology | March 13th, 2017

A certain ideal of America holds that an immigrant who arrives in that land of opportunity can, with hard work and luck, completely remake themselves, even into an A‑list movie star or an inventor of heretofore unimagined new things. Hedy Lamarr, by this reckoning, ranks among the ideal Americans: born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, she arrived in Hollywood in 1938 and reigned, under her new name granted by movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, as perhaps the most beautiful face on the silver screen for the next dozen years.

A reluctant star since her early role in the scandalous Czech film Ekstase and in America never quite able to escape typecasting as the mysterious, exotic beauty opposite a “real” actor, the bored Lamarr occupied her mind by turning to invention.

Working away at her drafting table instead of making the nightly Hollywood party rounds, Lamarr came up with everything from dissolving soda tablets to improved traffic signals and tissue boxes to a “skin-tautening technique based on the principles of the accordion.”

But her place in the canon of American inventors rests on an idea that came out of a conversation with composer George Antheil. Married back in Austria to arms dealer Friedrich Mandl, she’d overheard conversations, according to her New York Times obituary, between her then-husband and many Nazi-higher ups “who seemed to place great value on creating some sort of device that would permit the radio control of airborne torpedoes and reduce the danger of jamming. She and Antheil got to discussing all this. The idea, they decided, was to defeat jamming efforts by sending synchronized radio signals on various wavelengths to missiles, which could then be directed to hit their mark.”

Lamarr filed this ingenious patent for a “frequency-hopping” communication system in 1942, but it raised no military interest until the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years later, when the Navy started using the technology on their ships. It evolved in the decades thereafter, ultimately becoming an indispensable element of such technologies in widespread use today as wi-fi and Bluetooth. Having signed her invention over to the military, Lamarr never made a dime from it herself, but in 1996, four years before she died, she did receive the Electronic Future Foundation’s Pioneer Award. “It’s about time,” she said when she heard the news.

More recently, historian Richard Rhodes told the story of Lamarr’s inventing life in full with the book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. “Hedy realized that what she came up with was important but I don’t think she knew how important it was going to be,” said her son Anthony Loder. “The definition of importance is the more people that it affects over the longer period of time. The longer this goes on and the more people it affects the more important she will be.” Lamarr herself, in response to praise for her contribution to communication technology received in her lifetime, explained it as merely the result of following her instincts: “Improving things comes naturally to me.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

A Short Video Introduction to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), the First Female Film Director & Studio Mogul

Hitler Was ‘Blitzed’ On Cocaine & Opiates During World War II: Hear a Wide-Ranging Interview with Best-Selling Author Norman Ohler

An Animated Introduction to McCarthyism: What Is It? And How Did It Happen?

Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present

New Interactive Map Visualizes the Chilling History of Lynching in the U.S. (1835–1964)

What Did the Voice of Neanderthals, Our Distant Cousins, Sound Like?: Scientists Demonstrate Their “High Pitch” Theory

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” a Call for Americans to Take Action

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Technology Behind Wi-Fi & Bluetooth During WWII

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