The History of the World in 20 Odd Minutes
Last year, we flagged Bill Wurtz’s “History of Japan,” an idiosyncratic video that covered 40,000 years of Japanese history in 9 minutes–everything from the rise of technology and religion, to the influence of China on Japan’s language and brand of buddhism, the emergence of the samurai, the country’s vexed relationship with the West, and the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Although quantity isn’t everything, the video clocked more than 25 million views on YouTube–pretty impressive considering that Wurtz created the video as “a prototype to see if I could do a long video in the first place.”
Now comes his new, more expansive video–History of the World in 20 minutes. Released on Wednesday, the video has already surpassed 4.5 millions views (surely more by the time you read this), and it may teach you a thing … or two … about world history. Have fun with it. And if you’re looking for meatier media that covers the big sweep of history, check out the items in the Relateds below.
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Timelapse Film Shows How the British Library Digitized the World’s Largest Atlas, the 6‑Foot Tall “Klencke Atlas” from 1660
As a way of currying favor with a monarch, Johannes Klencke’s gift to Charles II (1630–1685) was one of the most audacious and beautiful objects ever offered. Klencke was a Dutch sugar merchant and knew that the king loved maps, and hoped that his gift would land him a favorable trading deal. (It did. He got knighted.)
The gift, the 1660 Klencke Atlas, is one of the world’s biggest books at nearly six feet tall and nearly seven and a half feet wide when open, and it contains 41 wall maps of various accuracy. We first posted about the Klencke Atlas back in 2015, where you can see a short BBC doc on the British Library’s care of the book. But only recently has the library been able to scan the maps so the public can now access them for free in high resolution.
The above video, which the British Library posted by way of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, shows a time-lapse of the multiple day shoot, which took several people, a very large room, several lights, and a specially designed stand to hold the heavy volume.
The public domain images are now part of the Library’s Picturing Places website, which holds many examples of rare maps, landscapes, and large scale technical drawings.
The book itself, as huge as it might be, is actually very fragile, so now the public and scholars can fully explore these maps at leisure while the original goes back into storage.
via Hyperallergic
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
The notorious four-year affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger has occasioned many a bitter academic debate, for reasons with which you may already be familiar. If not, Alan Ryan sums it up succinctly in a 1996 New York Review of Books essay:
She was a Jew who fled Germany in August 1933, a few months after Hitler’s assumption of power. He was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, and in a notorious inaugural address hailed the presence of the brown-shirted storm-troopers in his audience, claimed that Hitler would restore the German people to spiritual health, and ended by giving the familiar stiff-armed Nazi salute to cries of “Sieg Heil.” The thought that these two were ever soulmates is hard to swallow.
Arendt went on to write The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she used the phrase “banality of evil” for the Nazi functionary on trial at Nuremberg. Heidegger refused to discuss his collaboration publicly and “remained silent about the extermination of the Jews, about the terrorism of Hitler’s regime.” But as we’ve learned from his recently published journals, the so-called Black Notebooks, he was privately a “convinced Nazi,” as Peter Gordon observes, who “did not awaken from his philosophical-political fantasies. They only grew more extreme.”
But indeed, Arendt and Heidegger were in love, during an affair that began when she was an 18-year-old student and he her married 36-year-old professor. Their letters show an illicit relationship developing from caution to infatuation. Heidegger waxed romantically philosophical:
.…we become what we love and yet remain ourselves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find nothing that suffices.
We can only thank with our selves. Love transforms gratitude into loyalty to our selves and unconditional faith in the other. That is how love steadily intensifies its innermost secret.
But both of them knew the relationship could not last, and Heidegger suggested that moving on from him would be in her best interest as a young scholar. In 1929, Arendt met and became engaged to a German journalist and classmate in Heidegger’s seminar. She sent her professor a note on her wedding day which begins, “Do not forget me, and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life.”
Before his Nazi appointment, Arendt wrote to her former lover and mentor in 1932 or 33 upon hearing rumors “about Heidegger’s sympathy with National Socialism.” (Her letter has been lost.) He replied with a number of excuses for specific acts—such as refusing to supervise Jewish students—and assured her of his feelings, but “nowhere in the letter is there any denial of Nazi sympathies,” writes Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker. The two met after the war in Freiburg, and Heidegger later sent Arendt a passionate, poetic letter in 1950, extolling the “exciting, still almost unspoken understanding” between them, “emerging from an affinity that was created so quickly, that comes from so far away, that has not been shaken by evil and confusion.”
Later, in a 1969 birthday tribute essay “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Arendt penned what has generally been taken as an exoneration of Heidegger. In it, she “compared Heidegger to Thales,” writes Gordon, “the ancient philosopher who grew so absorbed in contemplating the heavens that he stumbled into the well at his feet.” The truth is quite a bit more complicated than that, and quite a bit less lofty. But as Maria Popova eloquently writes, their relationship “exposes the complexity and contradiction of which the human spirit is woven, its threads nowhere more ragged than in love.” Read many more excerpts from their letters at Brain Pickings. And find complete letters collected in the volume, Letters: 1925–1975 — Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt.
via Brain Pickings
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made
Paper, books, wooden joints, tea whisks — Japanese culture has, for seemingly all of its long recorded history, greatly esteemed the making of objects. But no one object represents the Japanese dedication to craftsmanship, and within that the eternal pursuit of approachable but never quite attainable perfection, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the traditional Japanese sword of the kind carried by the armed military class of the samurai between roughly the 8th and 19th centuries, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the swordmaking process: the Shinto blessing of the forge, the hammering of the red-hot metal, the tempering of the freshly shaped blade, the construction of the scabbard and hilt, the final assembly, and every painstaking step in between.
Originally produced for the United Kingdom’s National Museum of Arms and Armour and Portland Art Museum’s collaborative 2013 special exhibition “Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection,” the video’s wordless but certainly not silent portrayal of this ancient and continuing practice has a kind of hypnotic quality.
But if you’d like a more verbal explanation to accompany your views of the making of a traditional Japanese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute documentary above, The Secret World of the Japanese Swordsmith, a portrait of the highly respected Yoshindo Yoshihara, one of only thirty full-time swordsmiths currently practicing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japanese swordsmithing triple-bill, give Samurai Sword: Making of a Legend a watch as well.
This 50-minute program tells the story of the katana itself, beginning with this breathless narration: “For over one thousand years, one weapon has dominated the battlefields of Japan, a weapon so fearsome that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entirely new art form and spiritual way of life. A sword so technologically perfect in structure, so beautiful in creation, that it gave rise to an aristocratic warrior creed.” It also gave rise to no small number of samurai movies, a tradition that many a cinephile among us can certainly appreciate. Though inextricably tied to a specific time and place in history, and an even more specific class that arose from the peculiar political circumstances of that time and place, the katana continues to fascinate — and in this digital, hands-free age, its makers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever.
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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 Facebook.
A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civil War
If there’s a silver lining to the Trump administration, it’s that it provides some teachable moments for historians and students. Just days after the inauguration, Trump commented at a celebration of Black History Month, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Enter the historians, who quickly reminded us that the great abolitionist, orator and writer had died back in 1895. There’s no present tense here, only past.
And now there’s this: Yesterday, the president speculated in an odd interview that the Civil War could have been averted if Andrew Jackson had been there to stop it:
I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why?
Historians were quick to point out that Jackson ended his presidency in 1837 and died in 1845–respectively, 24 and 16 years before the start of the Civil War. How Jackson would have handled the lead up to the Civil War is pure speculation. Just as it would be speculation to say how FDR or Truman would have dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
David Blight, a Yale historian and expert on slavery and the Civil War, had a bit stronger reaction to Trump’s comments, telling Mother Jones:
So he really said this about Jackson and the Civil War? All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Donald Trump’s greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse.
Today, as with the past, Trump seems to be figuring out (the hard way) that one person can’t change the course of a nation by force of will–not when there are so many other forces and players that shape things. A lot of hubris and inflated rhetoric came into White House in January. Whether Trump is actually learning the physics of politics remains to be seen.
But here’s one thing you don’t have to wait for. David Blight has made available a free course on the Civil War. In 27 lectures, his course “explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877,” looking at how the United States was transformed on multiple levels: racially, socially, politically, constitutionally and morally. You can access the 27 free lectures, presented in audio and video, via YouTube, iTunes, and the Yale web site (plus a syllabus). We also have it on the list of our Free History Courses, a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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The First 100 Days of Fascist Germany: A New Online Project from Emory University
From Emory University comes The First 100 Days of Fascist Germany, an attempt to document online what happened on each day–from January 30, 1933 through May 9, 1933–when Hitler was named Reichskanzler of Germany.
As you can perhaps imagine, the motivation for the project isn’t entirely divorced from current events. The grad students behind The First 100 Days explain:
During the highly contentious political climate in this country, the terms “fascism” and “Nazi Germany” have been tossed around quite freely by both sides of the political spectrum. As a response to this and in an effort to provide some clarity of what fascism in Nazi Germany actually looked like, we at the Emory University German Department initiated a research project that aims to document the first 100 days of National Socialism- from the day that Adolf Hitler was named Reichskanzler on January 30, 1933 until May 9, 1933.
They continue:
The general plan for our project is that our research team will work its way through the 100 days, investigating and documenting the events of each day and then posting the findings on a daily basis for public consumption.
As the daily calendar shows, Hitler didn’t waste a lot of time. By Day 51, Dachau–one of the first concentration camps–opened and received its first prisoners, notes Emory News. By Day 60, all new stories critical of the government were censored. And, by Day 88, the press expelled from its ranks all Marxists and Jews. That was just the beginning.
Meanwhile, on Day 88 over here, Trump’s initiatives (some relatively innocuous, some alarming) have met civil, judicial and political resistance, or collapsed under their own weight. The concern of January has given way to comedy in April. So far, it’s more farce than fascism:
But don’t get complacent, terror might be the operative word in May.
You can learn more about Emory’s historical project here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like: A Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Language
As scholars of ancient texts well know, the reconstruction of lost sources can be a matter of some controversy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Christian Biblical texts, for example, critics find the remnants of many previous texts, seemingly stitched together by occasionally careless editors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any physical form, complete or otherwise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preoccupations….
So it is with the study of ancient languages, but since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.
The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.
To provide an example of what the language might have been like Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”
And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”
See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.
Note: The wonderful image that accompanies this post on Facebook and Twitter comes from this post in our archive: The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic. It was created by Minna Sundberg and can be purchased as a poster here.
via io9
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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