Almost all of us have read the story of Anne Frank, but we surely all picture it quite differently. Most of us have seen the photos used on the various covers of The Diary of a Young Girl, and some of us have even gone to Amsterdam and walked through the home in which she wrote it. But now, thanks to the internet, we have access to historical imagery that can help everyone envision the life of Anne Frank a bit more clearly.
Many years ago, we featured the only existing film of Frank, a 20-second clip from July 22, 1941 in which she looks on as a bride and groom pass below her window. Though short, the invaluable footage breathes a surprising amount of life into the cultural image of perhaps the 20th century’s most important diarist.
Even more comes from the 3D tour of her house and hiding place more recently made available online. The tour’s interface, with which anyone who played 1990s graphic adventure games like Myst will feel immediately familiar, gives you a first-person view behind the bookcase which for two years kept the Frank family’s living quarters a secret from Amsterdam’s Nazi occupiers.
The tour’s creators have loaded the digital recreation of the house with different spots that, when clicked, tell in audio of a certain aspect of the Franks’ experience there. The farther we get from the Second World War, the more these events might seem, to students reading about them for the first time, like a piece of capital‑H History disconnected from their own experience. But resources like these keep the story of Anne Frank and its lessons feeling as immediate as they should.
Plenty of us struggle, in the age when so many traditions in so many parts of the world now seem perpetually up for revision, with the choice of whether to get married. It even confounded no less a mind than that from which On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection flowed. This happened back in 1838, over twenty years before the publication of that most important book in biology. And, for a moment, it must have seemed almost as vexing as the question of how all the species came about.
Lists of Note tells us that the “29-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin found himself facing a difficult decision: whether or not to propose to the love of his life, Emma Wedgwood. This was his handwritten solution — a list of the pros and cons of marriage that includes such gems as ‘better than a dog anyhow’ and ‘not forced to visit relatives.’ ” (See original document above. Or click here to view it in a larger format, and read a complete transcription.)
Of the tantalizing claims of the single life, Darwin also includes “freedom to go where one liked,” “conversation of clever men at clubs,” freedom from the “expense & anxiety of children,” and no risk of the awful possibility that “perhaps my wife won’t like London.” But matrimony presents a strong case of its own, in the form of a “constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,” “someone to take care of house,” “charms of music & female chit-chat.” (And note his writing of “Children — (if it Please God)” under the pros, an interesting phrasing given the sorts of debates his name gets hauled into today.)
And so Darwin reaches his conclusion: “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps.” He would indeed marry and spend the rest of his life with Wedgwood, a union that produced ten children (one of whom, Francis, would go on to informally illustrate On the Origin of Species manuscript pages).
You can peruse the full list, even in Darwin’s own handwriting (if you can decipher it), at Darwin Online. If he went on to write a list of his secrets of a successful marriage, Darwin scholars haven’t yet discovered it, but I think we can safely say that it would include at least this recommendation: think the decision through, but don’t let it keep you from your life’s work.
The next time story hour rolls around, you can give a mouse a cookie or you can awaken pre-readers (and yourself) to some key figures in women’s history. 26 of them, to be precise. It’s no accident that that number corresponds to the exact number of letters in the alphabet.
Author Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl actively sought to include women of color and a variety of sexual orientations when choosing whom to feature in Rad American Women A To Z,a progressive feminist text cum ABC primer. (Illustrations from the book, like the ones featured on this page, can be downloaded here for free.)
Hopefully Gloria Steinem was not too upset to learn that G is for the Grimke sisters. Actually, I suspect that the second wave’s most recognizable superstar would be pleased if readers are moved to educate themselves as to some of the book’s more obscure references.
B is for Billie Jean King who whooped male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs on the court in 1973’s Battle of the Sexes. I remember her! A Billie and Bobby-themed pumpkin took top honors in my school’s Halloween carving contest that year.
It’s funny how when a woman does something they always think we only affect half of the population, and people will come up to me and say thanks for what you did for women’s tennis all the time, and I know they’d never say that to a guy.
E is for civil rights activist Ella Baker, a secretary who rose through the ranks of the NAACP to become director of branches. She recognized the press often overlooked her role, as did history.
You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.
J is for Jovita Idar, educator and cofounder of the Mexican Feminist League.
Mexican children in Texas need an education…. There is no other means to do it but ourselves, so that we are not devalued and humiliated by the strangers who surround us.
Godmother of Punk Patti Smith, author Ursula K. La Guin, and Odetta, legendary blues singer and “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” are among the marquee names to be canonized. See their illustrations above.
Several weeks back, we contemplated how, in the 1650s, the economic history of the West changed irrevocably when Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock — a timepiece that enabled us to measure time in accurate, uniform ways, making us attentive to the passage of time and focus on things like productivity and performance. Watch “A Briefer History of Time” to get more on that.
By the 18th century, Ben Franklin, America’s great Enlightenment figure, thought of another way to discipline time and squeeze more productivity out of us. While an envoy in France, Franklin suggested that Parisians save money on candles by getting out of bed earlier and profit from the morning sunlight. Not a surprising suggestion from the man who famously said: “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” In the video above, Stephen Fry tells you the rest of the Daylight Saving story. And just a reminder, Europe springs its time forward tonight.
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What is any major American city if not an industrial gallery bustling with people and machines? Sometimes the images are bleak, as with the photo essays that often circulate of Detroit’s beautiful ruin; sometimes they are defiantly hopeful, as with those of the rising of New Orleans; and sometimes they are almost unfathomably monumental, as with the images here of New York City, circa the 20th century—or a great good bit of it, anyway.
Photos like the astonishing tableaux in a sunlight-flooded Grand Central Terminal at the top (taken sometime between 1935 and 41) and like the breathtaking scale on display in the 1910 exposure of the Queensboro Bridge, above.
The online gallery features large-format photos of the human, like the sea of bathers above; of the human-made, like the vaulted, cavernous City Hall subway station below; and of the melding of the two, like the painters posing on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, further down.
Many of the images have watermarks on them to prevent illegal use. Nonetheless the gallery is a jaw-dropping collection of photos you can easily get lost in for hours, as well as an important resource for historians and scholars of 20th century American urbanism. See The Atlantic’s selection of images for even more dazzling photos. Or better yet, start rummaging through the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery right here.
Even those who paid next to no attention to their history teachers know about Magna Carta — or at least they know it first came about in 1215. To deliver all the other relevant details, we now have a new teacher in the form of Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who, on the occasion of this great charter’s 800th anniversary, provides the narration for these two short animations, “Magna Carta: Medieval” and “Magna Carta: Legacy,” that tell the rest of its story.
Originally issued by King John of England (r.1199–1216) as a practical solution to the political crisis he faced in 1215, Magna Carta established for the first time the principle that everybody, including the king, was subject to the law.
[ … ]
Three clauses of the 1225 Magna Carta remain on the statute book today. Although most of the clauses of Magna Carta have now been repealed, the many divergent uses that have been made of it since the Middle Ages have shaped its meaning in the modern era, and it has become a potent, international rallying cry against the arbitrary use of power.
These animations, of course, add a great deal of visual, narrative, and comedic vividness to this important piece of Western political history, following it from the reign of King John (“one of the worst kings in history”), through civil war, the creation of the United States of America, struggles for voting rights and the freedom of the press, right up to the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in a sense Magna Carta’s modern descendant. “Although very few of Magna Carta’s original clauses remain valid in English law,” says Jones, “it continues to inspire people worldwide. Not a bad legacy for an 800-year-old document.”
A few years ago, we featured Rome Reborn, which is essentially “a 3D digital model of the Eternal City at a time when Ancient Rome’s population had reached its peak (about one million) and the first Christian churches were being built.” Rome Reborn offers, declared Matthias Rascher, “a truly stunning bird’s‑eye view of ancient Rome that makes you feel as if you were actually there.” You may also remember our posts on video analyses of great works of art by Khan Academy’s Smarthistory. Today, the two come together in the video above, “A Tour Through Ancient Rome in 320 C.E.”
In it, we not only see and move through ancient Rome reconstructed, we have our extended tour guided by renowned “virtual archaeologist” and overseer of the Rome Reborn project Dr. Bernard Frischer, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. He picks 320 C.E. as the year of the tour, “the peak of Rome’s development, certainly in terms of public architecture, for the simple reason that the Emperor at this time was Constantine the Great.” Shortly after this year, Constantine would move the capital from Rome to his city, Constantinople.
We hear Frischer in dialogue with Dr. Steven Zucker, whose voice you may recognize from previous Smarthistory videos. Zucker’s questions ensure that, while we take in the spectacle of Rome’s impressive architecture (to say nothing of its equally impressive aqueducts) as it looked back in 320, we also think about what the real flesh-and-blood people who once lived there actually did there: the jobs they did, the chariot races they watched. “When I was studying ancient Rome,” admits Zucker, “one of the most difficult things for me to understand was how all these ancient ruins fit together.” Now, with Frischer’s expertise, he and we can finally understand how the Forum, the Basilica, the Coliseum, the Pantheon and more all fit onto this early but still majestic urban fabric.
It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about Sigmund Freud. His name, after all, has become an adjective, a sure sign that someone’s legacy has embedded itself in the cultural consciousness. But did you know that the German neurologist we credit with the invention of psychoanalysis, the diagnoses of hysteria, dream interpretation, and the death drive began his career patiently dissecting eels in search of… eel testicles? Perhaps you did know that. Perhaps you only suspected it. There are few things about Freud—who also pioneered both the medical and recreational use of cocaine, joined the august British Royal Society, and unwittingly re-engineered philosophy and literary criticism—that surprise me anymore. Freud was a peculiarly talented individual.
One area in which he excelled may seem modest next to his roster of publications and celebrity acquaintances, and yet, the doctor’s skill as a medical draughtsman and maker of diagrams to illustrate his theories surely deserves some appreciation. Freud’s drawing received a book length treatment in 2006’s From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind by Lynn Gamwell and Mark Solms. These are but a small sampling of the many works of medical art found within its covers, taken from a 2006 exhibit at the New York Academy of Medicine of the largest collection of Freud’s drawings ever assembled, in commemoration of his 150th birthday.
As the title of the book indicates, the drawings literally illustrate the radical shift Freud made from the hard science of neurology to a practice of his own invention. Curator Gamwell writes, “as Freud focused on increasingly complex mental functions such as disorders of language and memory, he put aside any attempt to diagram the underlying physiological structure, such as neurological pathways, and he began making schematic images of hypothetical psychological structures,” i.e. the Ego, Superego, and Id, as represented at the top in a 1933 diagram. Below it, from 1921, see “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” a schematic that “attempts to represent relations between the major mental systems (or agencies) in a group of human minds.” And just above, see Freud’s diagram for “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” from 1898, depicting “associative links between various conscious, preconscious and unconscious word presentations.”
It is in these late nineteenth-century diagrams that we see Freud make the definitive move from empirically observed illustrations of physical structures—like the 1878 “Spinal Ganglia and Spinal Chord of Petromyzom” above—to relations between ideas and “conceptual entities that have no tangible existence in the physical world.” That shift, generally marked by the publication of Studies in Hysteria in 1895, caused Freud some unease. “Looking back over his career 30 years later,” writes Mark Solms, “ his longing for the comfortable respectability of his earlier career is still evident.” Even at the time, Freud would write in Studies in Hysteria that his case histories “lack the serious stamp of science.” Though his studies of eel, lamprey, and human brains involved tangible, observable phenomena, he approached the new discipline of psychoanalysis with no less rigor, stating only that the “the nature of the subject” had changed, not his method.
The drawings, writes Benedict Carey in the New York Times, “tell a story in three acts, from biology to psychology, from the microscope to the couch.” As Freud makes the transition, his meticulously detailed medical work, copied from glass slides, gives way to loose outlines. One drawing of the brain’s auditory system from 1886 (above) “is as spare and geometric as a Calder sculpture.” Just a few years later, Freud sketched out the diagram below in 1894, a schematic, writes Solms, of “the relationship between various normal and pathological mood states and sexual physiology.” It’s his first purely psychoanalytic drawing, sketched in a letter to a colleague, Dr. Wilhelm Fleiss.
In the later diagrams, as we see above, his tentative freehand gave way to typescript and a technical draughtsman’s precision, with some drawings resembling, in Carey’s words, “the schematic for an air-conditioning system.” Freud seems to comment on the architectural nature of these diagrams when he writes in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, “We are justified, in my view, in giving free reign to our speculations so long as we retain the coolness of our judgment, and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building.” It’s a warning many of Freud’s disciples may not have heeded carefully enough.
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