What It Cost to Shop at the Grocery Store in 1836, and What Goods You Could Buy

in Books, Business, Economics, History | April 7th, 2017

Click here to view the image in a larger format.

Like many children in possession of a toy cash register, I was a big fan of playing store.

A short stint working retail in a 90’s era Chicago hippie clothing emporium cured me of that for the most part.

But looking over the above page from Roswell C. Smith’s 1836 Practical and Mental Arithmetic on a New Plan, I must admit, I feel some of the old stirrings, and not because I love math, even when it’s intended to be worked on a slate.

Coffee, 35 cents per pound. A self-sharpening plough, $3.50. A whip, a buck fourteen. And a gallon of gin, 60 cents, which was “about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the average non-farm white male worker.” (View the prices in a larger format here.)

But I’m less intrigued by the wholesale price of the various items Smith’s hypothetical country storekeeper would pay to stock his shelves in 1836, though I do love a bargain.

It’s more the type of goods listed on that inventory. They’re exactly the sort of items that figure in one of the most memorable chapters of Little House on the Prairie—“Mr Edwards Meets Santa Claus.”

Okay, so maybe not exactly the same. Author Laura Ingalls Wilder was pretty explicit about the simple pleasures of her 1870s and 80s childhood. Her family’s bachelor neighbor, Mr. Edwards, risked life and limb fording a near-impassable, late-December creek, a bundle containing his clothes, a couple of tin cups, some peppermint sticks, and two heart-shaped cakes, tied to his head. Without his kindly initiative, their stockings would have been empty that year.

Presumably, the Independence, Kansas general store where Neighbor Edwards did his Christmas shopping would’ve stocked a lot of the same merch’ that Smith alludes to in the above fragment of a bookkeeping-related story problem. Online bookseller John Ptak, on whose blog the page was originally reproduced, is keeping page 238 close to the vest (coincidentally the last item to be mentioned on the inventory, almost as an afterthought, just one, priced at 50¢.)

Childhood recollections aside, perhaps there was something else in Mr. Edward’s bundle, something the adult Laura chose not to mention. The sort of hostess gift that could’ve warmed Pa and Ma on those long, cold frontier nights…

Some gin, perhaps…or wine? Rum? Brandy?

Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve been well provisioned, laying the stuff in by the barrel, hogshead, and pipe-full.

As for that “bladder” of snuff, a post on the Snuffhouse forum suggests that it wasn’t a euphemism, but the actual bladder of a hog, paced with 4 pounds of snortin’ tobacco.

Of course, Smith’s shopkeeper would’ve also carried a healthy assortment of wholesome goods- hymnals, children’s shoes, calico, satin, whips…

Perhaps we should do the math.

via Slate/JF Ptak

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

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200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action

in History, Technology | March 27th, 2017

The robots, as we all know, are coming for our jobs. We might regard that particular anxiety as distinctive of the digital age, but the idea of machines that perform what we’ve long considered specifically human tasks has a long history — as does the reality of those machines. The BBC video above offers a look at “The Writer,” which the New York Times’ Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop describes as an “early humanoid robot of carved wood” who, “seated at a small mahogany table, could write on paper using a goosefeather quill.” The date of this impressive curiosity’s creation? The decidedly pre-digital year of 1768. The Writer has at his core a system of intricate clockwork, and so it stands to reason that its inventor Pierre Jaquet-Droz spent his career as a Swiss watchmaker.

“In the following years, working with the help of his son, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, and his fellow clockmaker Jean-Frédéric Leschot,” writes Kolesnikov-Jessop, “he also created The Musician, a mechanical young woman who could play five tunes on an organ, and The Draughtsman, a ‘child’ able to draw four separate images including that of a dog and a portrait of a man.”

But The Writer, with its ability to dip its quill in ink, its moving eyes, and the wheel that makes it “programmable” to write any short message, remains both Jaquet-Droz’s most intricate and most important mechanical achievement. You can see more pieces of his work, automatons and otherwise, put into context in the short film just above, a production of the Jaquet Droz luxury watch brand still in existence today.

Upon hearing word of such “automatons,” other inventors followed suit. Artificial writing remained a goal: more than forty years after The Writer, for instance, Henri Maillardet built one capable of “hand”-reproducing four drawings and three poems stored in its “brass memory.” But other automaton-builders had chosen to widen the field of mechanical capabilities: in 1784, the famed German cabinetmaker David Roentgen presented to King Louis XVI a dulcimer-playing automaton modeled after Queen Marie Antoinette. While the Queen thrilled to musical performances from her own miniature likeness, automata made another kind of progress on the other side of the world in Japan, a land that had almost no contact with the West until the mid-18th century but whose traditions of craft stretch even deeper into history than Europe’s.

You can witness in the video just above an unboxing, operation, and internal examination of the best-known such Japanese karakuri, a spring-powered archer that can load arrows into its bow and fire away. Its creator Tanaka Hisashige, also known as “the Thomas Edison of Japan,” built a fair few of these clockwork amusements that still impress today, but also many more useful things, including a pneumatic fire pump, a universal clock, and the first Japanese steam locomotive and warship. His company Tanaka Engineering Works, founded in 1875, would later evolve into the electronics firm called Toshiba — developers of Aiko Chihira, who in 2015 became the world’s first robotic department-store employee. Retail is one thing, but will her even more advanced descendants find it in themselves to pick up the quill, the dulcimer hammers, or the bow and arrow?

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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.

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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.

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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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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 ( None ) |

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

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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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