The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Recordings: World & Classical Music, Interviews, Nature Sounds & More

in Archives, History, Literature, Media, Music | May 26th, 2016

Online archives, gal­leries, and libraries offer Vegas-sized buf­fets for the sens­es (well two of them, any­way). All the art and pho­tog­ra­phy your eyes can take in, all the music and spo­ken word record­ings your ears can han­dle. But per­haps you’re still miss­ing some­thing? “Geordies bang­ing spoons” maybe? Or “Tawang lamas blow­ing conch shell trum­pets… Ton­gan tribes­men play­ing nose flutes…,” the sound of “the Assamese wood­worm feast­ing on a win­dow frame in the dead of night”?

No wor­ries, the British Library’s got you cov­ered and then some. In 2009, it “made its vast archive of world and tra­di­tion­al music avail­able to every­one, free of charge, on the inter­net,” amount­ing to rough­ly 28,000 record­ings and, The Guardian esti­mates “about 2,000 hours of singing, speak­ing, yelling, chant­i­ng, blow­ing, bang­ing, tin­kling and many oth­er verbs asso­ci­at­ed with what is a unique­ly rich sound archive.”

But that’s not all, oh no! The com­plete archive, titled sim­ply and author­i­ta­tive­ly “Sounds,” also hous­es record­ings of accents and dialects, envi­ron­ment and nature, pop music, “sound maps,” oral his­to­ry, clas­si­cal music, sound record­ing his­to­ry, and arts, lit­er­a­ture, and per­for­mance (such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s short dis­course on “Wire­less,” ani­mat­ed in the video below).

The 80,000 record­ings avail­able to stream online rep­re­sent just a selec­tion of the British Library’s “exten­sive col­lec­tions of unique sound record­ings,” but what a selec­tion it is. In the short video at the top of the post, The Wire Mag­a­zine takes us on a mini-tour of the phys­i­cal archive’s metic­u­lous dig­i­ti­za­tion meth­ods. As with all such wide-rang­ing col­lec­tions, it’s dif­fi­cult to know where to begin.

One might browse the range of unusu­al folk sounds on aur­al dis­play in the World & Tra­di­tion­al music sec­tion, cov­er­ing every con­ti­nent and a daunt­ing meta­cat­e­go­ry called “World­wide.” For a more spe­cif­ic entry point, Elec­tron­ic Beats rec­om­mends a col­lec­tion of “around 8,000 Afropop tracks” from Guinea, record­ed on “the state-sup­port­ed Syli­phone label” and “released between 1958 and 1984.”

Edison Disc Phonograph

Oth­er high­lights include “Between Two Worlds: Poet­ry & Trans­la­tion,” an ongo­ing project begun in 2008 that fea­tures read­ings and inter­views with “poets who are bilin­gual or have Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, or who oth­er­wise reflect the project’s theme of dual cul­tures.” Or you may enjoy the exten­sive col­lec­tion of clas­si­cal music record­ings, includ­ing “Hugh Davies exper­i­men­tal music,” or the “Oral His­to­ry of Jazz in Britain.”

The cat­e­go­ry called “Sound Maps” orga­nizes a diver­si­ty of recordings—including region­al accents, inter­views with Holo­caust sur­vivors, wildlife sounds, and Ugan­dan folk music—by ref­er­ence to their loca­tions on Google maps.

Not all of the mate­r­i­al in “Sounds” is sound-based. Record­ing and audio geeks and his­to­ri­ans will appre­ci­ate the large col­lec­tion of “Play­back & Record­ing Equip­ment” pho­tographs (such as the 1912 Edi­son Disc Phono­graph, above ), span­ning the years 1877 to 1992. Also, many of the recordings—such as the won­der­ful first ver­sion of “Dirty Old Town” by Alan Lomax and the Ram­blers, with Ewan Mac­Coll and Peg­gy Seeger (below)—feature album cov­ers, front and back, as well as disc labels.

The record­ings in the Archive are unfor­tu­nate­ly not down­load­able (unless you are a licensed mem­ber of a UK HE/FE insti­tu­tion), but you can stream them all online and share any of them on your favorite social media plat­form. Per­haps the British Library will extend down­load priv­i­leges to all users in the future. For now, brows­ing through the sheer vol­ume and vari­ety of sounds in the archive should be enough to keep you busy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

1,000 Record­ings to Hear Before You Die: Stream a Huge Playlist of Songs Based on the Best­selling Book

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

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478 Dorothea Lange Photographs Poignantly Document the Internment of the Japanese During WWII

in History, Photography | May 24th, 2016

Lange 1

“This is what we did. How did it hap­pen? How could we?” –Dorothea Lange

The idea sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive giv­en the vio­lence we read about dai­ly, but it is per­haps pos­si­ble that human soci­eties are slow­ly out­grow­ing xeno­pho­bia and war, as Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist and lin­guist Steven Pinker has argued exten­sive­ly. It’s also pos­si­ble that Pinker’s view is an “arti­cle of faith” rather than fact. In any case, we can at least be heart­ened by one thing: If we do become bet­ter at learn­ing from the past than repeat­ing it, the pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments will not have dis­ap­peared into a mem­o­ry hole. The very same tech­nolo­gies that spread fear, big­otry, and dis­in­for­ma­tion across the globe also enable us to unearth humanity’s long his­to­ry of bad deci­sion-mak­ing and pre­serve the evi­dence in wide­ly-acces­si­ble online archives.

Lange 5

One such archive, the Den­sho Dig­i­tal Repos­i­to­ry, con­tains “his­toric pho­tographs, doc­u­ments, news­pa­pers, let­ters and oth­er pri­ma­ry source mate­ri­als” from the his­to­ry of the Japan­ese in America—including, of course, a par­tic­u­lar­ly regret­table his­tor­i­cal episode, the intern­ment of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans dur­ing WWII, a grim polit­i­cal expe­di­ent that offers lessons today to those who choose to learn them. Promi­nent among the archives’ many doc­u­ments from the peri­od is the Dorothea Lange Col­lec­tion, almost 500 images tak­en by the famous pho­tog­ra­ph­er of “the many dif­fer­ent stages of mass removal and incar­cer­a­tion” of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in Cal­i­for­nia. The pho­tographs (recent­ly high­light­ed on Kottke.org) fea­ture orig­i­nal cap­tions writ­ten by Lange that con­tex­tu­al­ize the sub­jects and some­times pro­vide their names and a few bio­graph­i­cal details.

Lange 3

The lives of Japan­ese internees were in fact doc­u­ment­ed by not one, but two famous Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­phers, Lange and Ansel Adams. How­ev­er, Adams—whose pho­to­graph­ic series we fea­tured in a pre­vi­ous post—gained access to an intern­ment camp in the foothills of the Sier­ra Nevadas on his own, through a friend­ship with the camp’s war­den. Lange, on the oth­er hand, snapped sev­er­al hun­dred pho­tographs while on offi­cial assign­ment with the War Relo­ca­tion Author­i­ty. In 1942, the gov­ern­ment hired her to doc­u­ment the removal and impris­on­ment of over 100,000 Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in camps across the state.

Lange 11

Lange’s pho­tographs, writes Densho’s blog, have helped shape “the col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of Japan­ese Amer­i­can removal.” Despite the restric­tions placed on her by the authorities—Lange could not shoot images of barbed wire, bay­o­nets, or guard towers—“she man­aged to pro­duce a body of work that at once cap­tured the inhu­mane actions of the U.S. gov­ern­ment and the human­i­ty of the indi­vid­u­als being forced to leave their lives behind for the ‘crime’ of Japan­ese ances­try.”

Lange 13

Her pho­tographs are “seem­ing­ly unstaged and unlight­ed,” writes Dini­tia Smith in a New York Times review of Impound­ed, a book fea­tur­ing many of the close to 800 pho­tographs Lange took, most of which were only recent­ly dis­cov­ered at the Nation­al Archives, “where they had lain neglect­ed for a half-cen­tu­ry after hav­ing been impound­ed by the gov­ern­ment.” Best known for her pho­tos of Dust Bowl farm work­ers, Lange, writes schol­ar Megan Asa­ka at Den­sho, “was an odd choice, giv­en her left­ist pol­i­tics and strong sym­pa­thy for vic­tims of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.” She was “appalled by the forced exile” and “con­fid­ed to a Quak­er pro­test­er that she was guilt strick­en to be work­ing for a fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that could treat its cit­i­zens so unjust­ly.” She took on the assign­ment “to accu­rate­ly record what the Japan­ese Amer­i­cans were under­go­ing,” but apart from “a few pho­tos that reached the pub­lic,” most of her work didn’t see the light of day for decades.

Lange 8

“What the mil­i­tary want­ed from her,” explains his­to­ri­an Lin­da Gor­don in a PBS doc­u­men­tary on Lange’s assign­ment, “was a set of pho­tographs to illus­trate that they weren’t per­se­cut­ing or tor­tur­ing these peo­ple who they evac­u­at­ed.” Gor­don, who co-edit­ed Impound­ed, notes in the book that the pho­tos “tell us that con­di­tions in the camps were much worse than most peo­ple think.” It’s hard not to be remind­ed of anoth­er, more har­row­ing, forced removal hap­pen­ing a con­ti­nent away as we see Lange’s images of Japan­ese Amer­i­can fam­i­lies forced to aban­don their homes and stores, fill out reg­is­tra­tion paper­work, gath­er their belong­ings in suit­cas­es, and board trains and bus­es en masse with num­bered tags around their necks.

Lange 10

What await­ed the internees at the camps were mil­i­tary-style bar­racks, libraries, rudi­men­ta­ry schools, and “tar-paper shacks where they endured bru­tal heat and bit­ter cold, filth, dust and open sew­ers,” writes Smith. Some internees were housed in for­mer horse stalls and many endured cav­i­ty search­es and oth­er humil­i­at­ing indig­ni­ties, as well as dai­ly fear and anx­i­ety about their even­tu­al fates. Lange’s pho­tographs, how­ev­er, “pow­er­ful­ly con­test the gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da and hate­ful rhetoric aimed at vil­i­fy­ing Japan­ese Amer­i­cans,” writes Den­sho: “Often shot from a low angle, Lange places her sub­jects on a visu­al pedestal. She restores some dig­ni­ty in a moment when, many admit, they felt they had none.”

Lange 4

Unlike Ansel Adams’ fas­ci­nat­ing pho­tos, which are restrict­ed to the con­fines of one camp, Lange’s doc­u­ment the internees entire jour­ney from free­dom to impris­on­ment, as well as the respons­es of many Japan­ese Amer­i­cans to their new sta­tus as inter­nal ene­mies of the state. One shop own­er, “a Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia grad­u­ate of Japan­ese descent,” Lange not­ed, placed the sign you see above on his closed store­front.

lange4-780x350

All of the pho­tographs in the Den­sho archive are now in the pub­lic domain and can be freely used for any pur­pose. Lange, I imag­ine, would hope they force us to reflect on the futile insan­i­ty of demo­niz­ing entire pop­u­la­tions and turn­ing on fel­low cit­i­zens in times of war, xeno­pho­bic fer­vor and polit­i­cal oppor­tunism.

Lange 9

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

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

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Can You Pass This Test Originally Given to 8th Graders Living in Kentucky in 1912?

in Education, History, K-12, Math, Science | May 20th, 2016

bcschoolexam1912sm--1-

Can you spell “con­ceive”?

Of course you can! All it takes is a device with a built-in spelling app, an inno­va­tion of which no eighth grad­er in the far west­ern reach­es of blue­grass area Ken­tucky could have con­ceived back in 1912.

They were, how­ev­er, expect­ed to be able to name the waters though which an Eng­lish ves­sel would pass en route to Mani­la via the Suez Canal.

Can you?

While we’re at it, how much do you real­ly know about the human liv­er? Enough to locate it, iden­ti­fy its secre­tions, and dis­course on its size rel­a­tive to oth­er bod­i­ly glands?

If you answered yes, con­grat­u­la­tions. There’s a good chance you’d be pro­mot­ed to high school back in 1912. Not bad for a kid attend­ing a one-room school in rur­al Bul­lit Coun­ty.

And now for some extra cred­it, name the last bat­tles of the Civ­il War, the War of 1812, and the French and Indi­an War. Com­mand­ing offi­cers, too…

That’s the sort of mul­ti­part ques­tion that await­ed the eighth graders con­verg­ing on the Bul­lit Coun­ty cour­t­house for 1912’s com­mon exam, above. The very same cour­t­house in which the mod­ern day Bul­litt Coun­ty His­to­ry Muse­um is locat­ed. A civic-mind­ed indi­vid­ual donat­ed a copy of the test to this insti­tu­tion, and the staff put it online, think­ing it might be fun for lat­ter-day spec­i­mens like you and me to see how we mea­sure up.

So—just for fun—try typ­ing the phrase “com­mand­ing offi­cer last bat­tle french & indi­an war” into your search engine of choice. For­get instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Embrace the anx­i­ety!

Com­mon wis­dom holds that stan­dard­ized tests are a lot hard­er than they used to be. But look­ing at the sort of stuff your aver­age eighth grad­er had to regur­gi­tate two years pri­or to the start of WW1, I’m not so sure…

Thank god the Inter­net was there to define “kalso­min­ing” for me. Even with the aid of a cal­cu­la­tor, math is not my strong suit. That said, I’m usu­al­ly good enough with words to get the nar­ra­tive gist of any sto­ry prob­lem.

Usu­al­ly.

I con­fess, I was so demor­al­ized by my igno­rance, I couldn’t have dreamed of attempt­ing to fig­ure out how much it would cost to “kalsomine” a 20 x 16 x 9 foot room, espe­cial­ly with a door and win­dow involved.

For­tu­nate­ly, the Bul­lit Coun­ty Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety has seen fit to pro­vide an online answer sheet, a dig­i­tal lux­u­ry that would have gob­s­macked their fore­bears.

SPOILER: $8.01. That’s the amount it would’ve cost to kalsomine your room at 1912 prices. (A steal, con­sid­er­ing that a quart of White Wash Pick­ling Water Based Stain will run you $12.37 a quart at a nation­al­ly known hard­ware super­store today.)

Go ahead, take that test.

If you quail at the prospect of far­ing poor­ly against a rur­al 1912 eighth grad­er, just imag­ine how well he or she would do, tele­port­ed to 2016, and forced to con­tend with such mys­ter­ies as cyber bul­ly­ing, gen­der pol­i­tics, and offen­sive egg­plant emo­jis…

via The Paris Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Open Syl­labus Project Gath­ers 1,000,000 Syl­labi from Uni­ver­si­ties & Reveals the 100 Most Fre­quent­ly-Taught Books

Take the 146-Ques­tion Knowl­edge Test Thomas Edi­son Gave to Prospec­tive Employ­ees (1921)

Take The Near Impos­si­ble Lit­er­a­cy Test Louisiana Used to Sup­press the Black Vote (1964)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She lives in fear that her youngest child will pen a mem­oir titled I Was a Home­schooled 8th Grad­er and Oth­er Chillling True Life Tales. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ List of 13 Recommended Books

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | May 19th, 2016

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been rid­ing a wave so high these past few years that most hon­est writ­ers would con­fess to at least some small degree of envy. And yet anyone—writer or reader—who appre­ci­ates Coates’ rig­or­ous schol­ar­ship, styl­is­tic mas­tery, and enthralling per­son­al voice must also admit that the acco­lades are well-earned. Win­ner of the Nation­al Book Award for his sec­ond auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal work, Between the World and Me and recip­i­ent of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Coates is fre­quent­ly called on to dis­cuss the seem­ing­ly intractable racism in the U.S., both its long, grit­ty his­to­ry and con­tin­u­a­tion into the present. (On top of these cre­den­tials, Coates, an unabashed com­ic book nerd, is now pen­ning the revived Black Pan­ther title for Mar­vel, cur­rent­ly the year’s best-sell­ing com­ic.)

As a senior edi­tor at The Atlantic, Coates became a nation­al voice for black Amer­i­ca with arti­cles on the para­dox­es of Barack Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy and the boot­straps con­ser­vatism of Bill Cos­by (pub­lished before the comedian’s pros­e­cu­tion). His arti­cle “The Case for Repa­ra­tions,” a lengthy, his­tor­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of Redlin­ing, brought him fur­ther into nation­al promi­nence. So high was Coates’ pro­file after his sec­ond book that Toni Mor­ri­son declared him the heir to James Baldwin’s lega­cy, a man­tle that has weighed heav­i­ly and sparked some back­lash, though Coates court­ed the com­par­i­son him­self by styling Between the World and Me after Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. In doing so, writes Michael Eric Dyson, “Coates did a dar­ing thing… waged a bet that the Amer­i­can pub­lic could absorb even more of the epis­to­lary device, and wrote a book-length essay to his son.”

Not only did Amer­i­ca “absorb” the device; the nation’s read­ers mar­veled at Coates’ deft mix­ture of exis­ten­tial tough­ness and emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty; his intense, unsen­ti­men­tal take on U.S. racist ani­mus and his mov­ing, lov­ing por­traits of his close friends and fam­i­ly. As a let­ter from a father to his son, the book also works as a teach­ing tool, and Coates lib­er­al­ly salts his per­son­al nar­ra­tive with the sources of his own edu­ca­tion in African Amer­i­can his­to­ry and pol­i­tics from his father and his years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty. In the wake of the fame the book has brought him, he has con­tin­ued what he seems to view as a pub­lic mis­sion to edu­cate, and inter­views and dis­cus­sions with the writer fre­quent­ly involve digres­sions on his sources of infor­ma­tion, as well as the books that move and moti­vate him.

So it was when Coates sat down with New York Times Mag­a­zine and ProP­ub­li­ca reporter Nikole Han­nah-Jones at New York’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture last year. You can watch the full inter­view at the top of the post. Dur­ing the course of the hour-long talk, Coates men­tioned the books below, in the hopes, he says, that “folks who read” Between the World and Me “will read this book, and then go read a ton of oth­er books.” He both began and end­ed his rec­om­men­da­tions with Bald­win.

1. “The Fire Next Time” in Col­lect­ed Essays by James Bald­win.

2. The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Inves­ti­gates the Dark­est Sto­ry of His Life, His Own by David Carr

3. The Half Has Nev­er Been Told: Slav­ery and the Mak­ing of Amer­i­can Cap­i­tal­ism by Edward E. Bap­tist

4. Bat­tle Cry of Free­dom: The Era of the Civ­il War by James McPher­son

5. Mak­ing the Sec­ond Ghet­to: Race and Hous­ing in Chica­go, 1940–1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch

6. Fam­i­ly Prop­er­ties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploita­tion of Black Urban Amer­i­ca by Beryl Sat­ter

7. Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca — Dec­la­ra­tion of the Imme­di­ate Caus­es Which Induce and Jus­ti­fy the Seces­sion of South Car­oli­na from the Fed­er­al Union from Aval­on Project, Lil­lian Gold­man Law Library, Yale Law School

8. Show­down: Thur­good Mar­shall and the Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion That Changed Amer­i­ca by Wil Hay­good

9. Amer­i­can Slav­ery, Amer­i­can Free­dom: The Ordeal of Colo­nial Vir­ginia by Edmund S. Mor­gan

10. Race­craft: The Soul of Inequal­i­ty in Amer­i­can Life by Karen E. Fields and Bar­bara J. Fields

11. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in Amer­i­ca by Paula Gid­dings

12. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Cam­paign against Lynch­ing by Paula J. Gid­dings

13. Out of the House of Bondage: The Trans­for­ma­tion of the Plan­ta­tion House­hold by Thavo­lia Glymph

Final­ly, Coates ref­er­ences the famous debate between James Bald­win and William F. Buck­ley at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty in 1965, which you can read about and watch in full here.

via The New York Pub­lic Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Writ­ing Wis­dom in 1993 Paris Review Inter­view

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer, 1934

Michael Stipe Rec­om­mends 10 Books for Any­one Marooned on a Desert Island

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

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Crowdsourced Database Will Locate the Burial Sites of Forgotten US Slaves

in Archives, History | May 18th, 2016

slave grave database

Image cour­tesy of Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans

The sto­ries are infre­quent but deeply com­pelling: one recent news item in the AP’s The Big Sto­ry describes the bones of 14 peo­ple from the 18th or ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, dis­cov­ered in Albany, NY, “wrapped in shrouds, buried in pine box­es and—over centuries—forgotten.” Sev­en adults, five infants, and two chil­dren, soon to be “pub­li­cal­ly memo­ri­al­ized and [re]buried in per­son­al­ized box­es beside promi­nent fam­i­lies in old Albany.”

Over the 11 years since the bones’ dis­cov­ery by con­struc­tion work­ers, sci­en­tists have been able to piece togeth­er clues about what these lives were like: marked by con­stant toil and phys­i­cal hard­ship. Genet­ic mark­ers, and bro­ken bones, notched and miss­ing teeth, and arthrit­ic joints offer the only means of iden­ti­fy­ing the remains. A gran­ite head­stone donat­ed to the new gravesite will read, “Here lies the remains of 14 souls known only to God. Enslaved in life, they are slaves no more.”

In 1991, many miles south in low­er Man­hat­tan, a find of the remains of 419 peo­ple even­tu­al­ly gave rise to an even more impres­sive memo­r­i­al and muse­um, the African Bur­ial Ground Nation­al Mon­u­ment, a reminder of not only the slave labor that built New York City, but also of the peo­ple bought and sold in the once bustling slave mar­ket at what is now Wall Street.

Elmwood

Cre­ative Com­mons pho­to by Bruce Guthrie

Memo­ri­als like this one and the recent Albany bur­ial site do not change the facts or right the wrongs of his­to­ry, but they do make vis­i­ble lives and his­to­ries long buried and for­got­ten. “Among the scars left by the her­itage of slav­ery,” writes Edward Roth­stein at The New York Times, “one of the great­est is an absence: where are the memo­ri­als, ceme­ter­ies, archi­tec­tur­al struc­tures or stur­dy sanc­tu­ar­ies that typ­i­cal­ly pro­vide the ground for a people’s mem­o­ry?” This is pre­cise­ly the ques­tion San­dra Arnold is now ask­ing, in a very lit­er­al sense, for a project called The Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans (NBDEA).

A Grad­u­ate Fel­low at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, Arnold found­ed the Peri­win­kle Ini­tia­tive, “a pub­lic human­i­ties and edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing cul­tur­al her­itage asso­ci­at­ed with enslaved Amer­i­cans.” The NBDEA—Periwinkle’s core project in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, and the 1772 Foun­da­tion—aims, writes Arnold at The New York Times, to “be the first nation­al repos­i­to­ry of infor­ma­tion on the grave sites of indi­vid­u­als who died while enslaved or after they were eman­ci­pat­ed.”

The grave sites The NBDEA com­piles will depend in some part on the pub­lic: “Any­one who comes to the web­site will even­tu­al­ly be able to sub­mit infor­ma­tion about these places and con­duct search­es.” Cur­rent­ly, the site remains in devel­op­ment, unavail­able for pub­lic search­es, but users can make pre­lim­i­nary sub­mis­sions. Arnold describes the process of sift­ing through the sub­mis­sions she has received as “painful.”

Bur­ial grounds that should be revered spaces… instead are cov­ered by play­grounds and apart­ment com­plex­es. I have learned that many grave sites of for­mer­ly enslaved Amer­i­cans are aban­doned, undoc­u­ment­ed, des­e­crat­ed by the asphalt of “devel­op­ment,” and lack any type of memo­ri­al­iza­tion or recog­ni­tion. The bur­ial grounds are often found inci­den­tal­ly by devel­op­ers under parks and office build­ings, and for many of the sites, oral his­to­ry is their only source of doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Just such an oral his­to­ry pre­served the unmarked gravesite of one of Arnold’s ances­tors in her home­town in West Ten­nessee. Alli­son Meier at Hyper­al­ler­gic points to some specif­i­cal­ly trou­bled sites like those Arnold describes, includ­ing “a slave ceme­tery… bull­dozed in Hous­ton,” anoth­er “cov­ered with asphalt in Atlanta,” and a third “found below a Harlem bus depot.”

Arnold hopes that record­ing and memo­ri­al­iz­ing these “sacred spaces… can con­tribute to heal­ing, under­stand­ing and poten­tial­ly even rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.” Addi­tion­al­ly, she cites a “prag­mat­ic” ratio­nale for the project, since “bur­ial grounds are valu­able resources for schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans, serv­ing as road maps for genealog­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal research.”

The project presents a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty for the many thou­sands of cit­i­zen his­to­ri­ans scat­tered across the coun­try to come togeth­er and fill in the absences in our his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry; and the cen­tral­ized data­base will also draw more atten­tion to the few memo­ri­als that do exist, many of which, writes Meier, “are often stag­ger­ing­ly small in rela­tion to the num­ber of lives they remem­ber.” She refers to the exam­ple of a “minia­ture mass grave mon­u­ment” in Mem­phis’ Elm­wood Cemetary (above), a “sin­gle stone [that] memo­ri­al­izes over 300 slaves who died between 1852 and 1865.”

Like The Freedman’s Bureau Project, a recent online data­base of 1.5 mil­lion his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments relat­ed to slav­ery, The NBDEA will fur­ther his­tori­cize and human­ize “over­looked lives,” writes Arnold, that “are an inex­tri­ca­ble part of the his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive of our coun­try.”

Can can vis­it The Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

Freed Slave Writes Let­ter to For­mer Mas­ter: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865)

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

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

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1,000+ Haunting & Beautiful Photos of Native American Peoples, Shot by the Ethnographer Edward S. Curtis (Circa 1905)

in History, Photography | May 17th, 2016

curtis-4

From the fig­ure­heads of ships to cig­ar store stat­ues to the car­i­ca­ture mas­cots of var­i­ous sports teams…. Unfor­tu­nate or den­i­grat­ing images of Native Amer­i­can peo­ples have per­sist­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, folk sym­bols of what Elis­a­beth W. Rus­sell refers to in her his­to­ry of the cig­ar store Indi­an as “The Van­ish­ing Amer­i­can.” The phrase comes from the title of a Zane Grey nov­el, which then became a 1925 silent film deal­ing, wrote the New York Times that year, “with the pass­ing of the Amer­i­can Indi­an.” Although both the nov­el and film attempt to protest the treat­ment of Native peo­ple by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, both under­write a com­mon, trou­bling assumption—that Native Amer­i­cans, like the Buf­fa­lo and the wild Mus­tang, were a threat­ened (and threat­en­ing) sep­a­rate species, whose “van­ish­ing” from the picaresque West (as they had “van­ished” from the East) was a lam­en­ta­ble, but per­haps unavoid­able, side effect of the march of Euro-Amer­i­can progress.

Curtis One

Each sym­bol­ic memo­ri­al­iz­ing of Native Amer­i­cans in U.S. iconog­ra­phy, how­ev­er solemn or offen­sive­ly car­toon­ish, ges­tures toward some mea­ger recog­ni­tion of a trag­ic loss, while eras­ing the cir­cum­stances that occa­sioned it. Of course Native Amer­i­cans didn’t van­ish, but were slow­ly killed or hound­ed into pover­ty and dis­pos­ses­sion, and out of sight of white America—their dress, reli­gions, and cul­tures made to dis­ap­pear through forced assim­i­la­tion, only to reap­pear in roman­ti­cized images of trag­i­cal­ly con­quered, but admirably war­like, prim­i­tives.

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Those images pro­lif­er­at­ed dur­ing the mid-to-late 19th cen­tu­ry, the peri­od of intense West­ern set­tle­ment and expan­sion and the so-called Indi­an Wars. “It is a giv­en today,” writes his­to­ri­an Bri­an Dip­ple, “that the idea of the Amer­i­can Indi­an has been his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. It shaped the atti­tudes of those in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry who shaped Indi­an pol­i­cy. Indi­an policy—be it removal of the East­ern tribes in the 1830s, reser­va­tion iso­la­tion­ism begin­ning in the 1850s, or allot­ment of reser­va­tion lands and assim­i­la­tion in the 1880s—cannot be under­stood with­out an aware­ness of the ideas behind it. Lit­er­a­ture and the visu­al arts pro­vide reveal­ing guides to nine­teenth cen­tu­ry assump­tions about the Indi­an.”

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Native his­to­ri­an Vine Delo­ria describes the cul­tur­al sit­u­a­tion with more inci­sive wit in his “Indi­an Man­i­festo,” Custer Died for Your Sins: “The Amer­i­can pub­lic feels most com­fort­able with the myth­i­cal Indi­ans of stereo­type-land who were always THERE. These Indi­ans are fierce, they wear feath­ers and grunt. Most of us don’t fit this ide­al­ized fig­ure since we grunt only when overeat­ing, which is sel­dom.” By the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, “myth­i­cal Indi­ans” had become firm­ly embed­ded in pop­u­lar cul­ture, thanks to art and enter­tain­ment like the pre­sum­ably seri­ous attempts of Zane Grey and Fred­er­ic Rem­ing­ton, and J.M. Barrie’s deeply unse­ri­ous Peter Pan. It is in this cul­tur­al atmos­phere that pho­tog­ra­ph­er Edward Sher­iff Cur­tis’ huge, 20-vol­ume ethno­graph­ic project, The North Amer­i­can Indi­an emerged.

SIL7-058-021, 8/15/08, 3:01 PM, 8C, 5338x5873 (264+1428), 100%, Custom, 1/30 s, R39.5, G27.5, B38.9

Begin­ning in 1904, and with the even­tu­al back­ing of J.P. Mor­gan, writes Mash­able, Cur­tis “spent more than 20 years criss­cross­ing North Amer­i­ca, cre­at­ing over 40,000 images of more than 80 dif­fer­ent tribes. He made thou­sands of wax cylin­der record­ings of native songs and lan­guage, and wrote down oral his­to­ries, leg­ends and biogra­phies.” You can view and down­load more than 1,000 of these pho­tographs at the Library of Con­gress. Cur­tis thought of his work as doc­u­ment­ing “what he saw as a van­ish­ing way of life.” Moti­vat­ed by assump­tions about Native peo­ple as semi-myth­ic rem­nants from the past, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “some­times med­dled with the doc­u­men­tary authen­tic­i­ty of his images. He posed his sub­jects in roman­ti­cized set­tings stripped of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an imag­ined pre-Colom­bian exis­tence than the sub­jects’ actu­al lives in the present.”

curtis4x5-7

The pho­tographs are beau­ti­ful, their sub­jects enno­bled by the dra­mat­ic light­ing and styl­ized pos­es, and the breadth and scope of the entire project is noth­ing less than breath­tak­ing. It set the stage for the sig­nif­i­cant work of lat­er pho­tog­ra­phers and ethno­g­ra­phers like Walk­er Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Lomax­es. Cur­tis has even been cred­it­ed with pro­duc­ing the first doc­u­men­tary film. The images, his­to­ries, tra­di­tions, and biogra­phies Cur­tis pre­served con­sti­tute an invalu­able his­tor­i­cal record. That said, we should bear in mind that The North Amer­i­can Indi­an comes to us framed by Cur­tis’ assump­tions about Native Amer­i­can cul­tures, formed by a cli­mate in which myth vied with, and usu­al­ly sup­plant­ed, fact. What do we see in these staged images, and what do we not see?

One of Cur­tis’ enthu­si­as­tic ear­ly back­ers, Theodore Roosevelt—who authored the intro­duc­tion to Vol­ume One—was, “like many of Cur­tis’ even­tu­al sup­port­ers,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more inter­est­ed in obtain­ing a record of van­ish­ing Native Amer­i­can cul­tures as a tes­ta­ment to the supe­ri­or­i­ty of his own civ­i­liza­tion than out of any con­cern over their sit­u­a­tion or recog­ni­tion of his own role in the process.” Though Cur­tis did not nec­es­sar­i­ly share these views, and lat­er became “rad­i­cal in his admo­ni­tion of gov­ern­ment poli­cies toward Native Amer­i­cans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audi­ence, most of whom would have felt the way Roo­sevelt did. We should bear this cul­tur­al con­text in mind as we take in Cur­tis’ work, and ask how it shaped the cre­ation and recep­tion of this tru­ly impres­sive record of both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can myth. Enter the archive of images here.

Curtis 9

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

New Rosa Parks Archive is Now Online: Fea­tures 7,500 Man­u­scripts & 2,500 Pho­tographs, Cour­tesy of the Library of Con­gress

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

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Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

in Comedy, Film, History, Theatre | May 16th, 2016

In 1900, Thomas Edi­son trav­eled to Paris to doc­u­ment the many won­ders of the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle, and the city itself. Among the sights cap­tured with his kine­to­scope cam­eras were the Expo’s mov­ing side­walks, the Champs-Élysées, and the pre­vi­ous Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle’s crown jew­el, the Eif­fel Tow­er, now eleven years old.

It wasn’t all so high-mind­ed. Edi­son and his kine­to­scope also caught a per­for­mance by for­mer Moulin Rouge star, Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, above. This ele­gant­ly attired gen­tle­men achieved fame and for­tune with a series of impres­sions, car­ried out by a rather eccen­tric ori­fice. He was not so much artiste as fartiste, a title he wore with pride.

Pujol claimed to have dis­cov­ered his unusu­al tal­ent as a child, and soon set about achiev­ing dif­fer­ent effects by using his abdom­i­nal mus­cles to expel not gas, but odor­less air. By vary­ing the pres­sure, he was able to play sim­ple tunes. By the time he turned 30, his act had expand­ed to include imper­son­ations of celebri­ties, musi­cal instru­ments, birds, a thun­der­storm and such stock char­ac­ters as a ner­vous bride. His grand finale includ­ed such feats as blow­ing out can­dles, smok­ing cig­a­rettes and play­ing an oca­ri­na (below), all with the aid of a rub­ber hose insert­ed into his anus via a mod­est trouser slit.

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What a tragedy that Edison’s short film is silent! No live piano accom­pa­ni­ment could do jus­tice to this mag­i­cal artis­tic fruit, and if there were oth­er record­ings of Pujol, they’ve been lost to his­to­ry.

He lives on in the imag­i­na­tions of artists who fol­lowed him.

Actor Ugo Tog­nazzi, below, assumed the title role in a 1983 Ital­ian lan­guage fea­ture.

Direc­tor Mel Brooks inject­ed a bit of sub­tle­ty into Blaz­ing Sad­dles’  beans-around-the-camp­fire humor when he appeared as a char­ac­ter named Gov­er­nor William J. LeP­etomane.

Sad­ly, Pujol was left on the cut­ting room floor of direc­tor Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, but all is not lost. Report­ed­ly, John­ny Depp has indi­cat­ed inter­est in bring­ing this his­toric fig­ure back to life. (Gen­tle­men, start your screen­plays…)

Fartiste

Then there is the half hour biopic, below, direct­ed by Mon­ty Python alum Ian McNaughton and star­ring Leonard Rossiter as Pujol. Pre­pare to hear the open­ing ses­sion of the Con­gress of Vien­na, a toad, and a four-part har­mo­ny.

via Messy Nessy Chic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talk­ing Dolls: An Inven­tion That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Mar­ket

Thomas Edison’s Box­ing Cats (1894), or Where the LOL­Cats All Began

Thomas Edi­son Recites “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb” in Ear­ly Voice Record­ing

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

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Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

in Film, History | May 12th, 2016

You may nev­er have heard of Oscar Micheaux, but out of his “impov­er­ished con­scious­ness-rais­ing exploita­tion pot­boil­ers,” writes crit­ic Dave Kehr, “the Amer­i­can black cin­e­ma was born.” Kehr wrote that in a brief review of Micheaux’s Mur­der in Harlem, a “1935 mys­tery tale involv­ing corpses and mys­te­ri­ous let­ters and flash­backs and Byzan­tine plot twists, all of which should undoubt­ed­ly prove tax­ing to Micheaux’s mea­ger tech­ni­cal abil­i­ties. It hard­ly mat­ters though, since Micheaux was his own cin­e­mat­ic insti­tu­tion.”

That movie came in the late-mid­dle peri­od of Micheaux’s career, which pro­duced more than 44 pic­tures and qual­i­fied him as the most pro­lif­ic black inde­pen­dent film­mak­er in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma his­to­ry as well as, in the words of Atlas Obscu­ra’s Stephanie Weber, “a pio­neer in almost every aspect of film.” Hav­ing start­ed out as a writer, he chose for his first motion pic­ture to adapt The Home­stead­er, his own nov­el “about a black home­stead­er in the Dako­tas who falls in love with the daugh­ter of a Scot­tish wid­ow­er. In 1919, Micheaux raised the mon­ey on his own to film and pro­duce The Home­stead­er in Chica­go, becom­ing the first African Amer­i­can to make a fea­ture film.”

Not only did Micheaux take on a con­tro­ver­sial theme right away by hint­ing at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of inter­ra­cial romance (though The Home­stead­er’s love inter­est turns out, in a plot twist that must have made more sense at the time, not to actu­al­ly be white), his­to­ry has remem­bered him as stand­ing against not just the dom­i­nant social phe­nom­e­na but the dom­i­nant cin­e­mat­ic phe­nom­e­na of his day: his sec­ond film With­in Our Gates told the sto­ry of a mixed-race school­teacher whose adop­tive father stood up to the fam­i­ly’s white land­lord, osten­si­bly as a response to post-World War I social insta­bil­i­ty, though some took it as a rebuke to D.W. Grif­fith’s The Birth of a Nation.

“Giv­en the times, his accom­plish­ments in pub­lish­ing and film are extra­or­di­nary,” says NAACP His­to­ry, “includ­ing being the first African-Amer­i­can to pro­duce a film to be shown in ‘white’ movie the­aters. In his motion pic­tures, he moved away from the ‘Negro’ stereo­types being por­trayed in film at the time.” In recent years, crit­ics like Kehr and oth­ers have direct­ed a bit of atten­tion back toward Micheaux’s path-break­ing body of work, and many future lead­ing lights of black Amer­i­can cin­e­ma could no doubt ben­e­fit from dis­cov­er­ing it them­selves. But in his con­fi­dent treat­ment of sen­sa­tion­al mate­r­i­al, his cre­ativ­i­ty-induc­ing tech­ni­cal and eco­nom­ic lim­i­ta­tions, and his learn-on-the-job under­stand­ing of the mechan­ics of cin­e­ma, he also fore­shad­owed the excite­ment of all the waves of indie film to come.

You can watch many of Oscar Micheaux’s films free on Youtube or at the Inter­net Archive. Or find them in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

To learn more about Micheaux, read Patrick McGilli­gan’s book, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of Amer­i­ca’s First Great Black Film­mak­er. 

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

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