Play Mark Twain’s “Memory-Builder,” His Game for Remembering Historical Facts & Dates

in History | March 19th, 2015

Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, of course, but like any good luminary of 19th-century America, he also put together a few inventions on the side. These non-literary achievements of Twain’s included an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” (as the patent calls it) meant to replace suspenders, a “self-pasting” scrapbook”, and the “Memory-Builder, a game for acquiring and retaining all sorts of facts and dates.”

“Twain believed that memorization — a common strategy of 19th-century schooling — was a worthy, if tiresome, pursuit, and looked for ways to make it more interesting for annoyed students,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion. This line of thinking led him to create the Memory-Builder, which he described as a “game which shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study” in an 1883 letter to a friend. He explained the background of his educational philosophy in much fuller detail in a 1914 piece from Harper’s magazine:

Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of this fun — if you like to call it that — consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.

This experience gave rise to a couple of different learning methods, of which the Memory-Builder (patented in 1885) would prove the best-known. Though Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline, you can play a technologically much-updated but materially identical version of the game online (with the same cribbage pins and the same strangely intense focus on those royals) at the web site of the University of Oregon’s library. Alternatively, you can play an adaptation that deals with the life and times of Twain himself at the University of Virginia’s web site.

Whether or not the Memory-Builder can help you learn your history, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Not having caught on at the time, Twain’s game didn’t get far out of the prototype stage, but the idea behind it has survived in the form of one of Twain’s many so-very-quotable quotes: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Something tells me he’d approve of seeing his game on the internet, surely the tool that has done more to get education into the learner’s own hands than anything else in human history so far. (Um, have you seen our list of 1100 Free Online Courses?)

via Slate

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

in History, Science | March 16th, 2015

I remember opening my college newspaper one day, and out of it fell what looked like an advertising supplement of unusually utilitarian design. Upon closer inspection, it contained a series of math‑y looking problems for the reader to work out and, if they did so, mail in to an address provided. Word soon began to circulate that this unusual leaflet came from no less an institution than Google itself, already well known as a provider of advanced search services but not quite yet as a benevolent provider of dream jobs (an image now satirized in movies like The Internship).

The unusual hiring practices of giant, innovative American technology companies have become the stuff of modern myth, but the usage of seemingly job-unrelated intellectual tests as a filter for potential employees has a much longer history. Thomas Edison, that original giant of American technological innovation, put forward the first famous example: a 146-question test on subjects of general knowledge from geography to history to physics to the price of gold.

“Americans obsessed over the test following [the] publication of many questions in the May 11, 1921 New York Times,” writes Paleofuture’s Matt Novak. “From there the test was debated, copied, and parodied in newspapers and magazines around the country.” If you’d like to get a sense of how you’d have fared in the scramble for a sweet Edison job, set your mind back to the early 1920s and tackle these questions as best you can:

1. What countries bound France?

2. What city and country produce the finest china?

3. Where is the River Volga?

4. What is the finest cotton grown?

5. What country consumed the most tea before the war?

6. What city in the United States leads in making laundry machines?

7. What city is the fur centre of the United States?

8. What country is the greatest textile producer?

9. Is Australia greater than Greenland in area?

10. Where is Copenhagen?

11. Where is Spitzbergen?

12. In what country other than Australia are kangaroos found?

13. What telescope is the largest in the world?

14. Who was Bessemer and what did he do?

15. How many states in the Union?

16. Where do we get prunes from?

17. Who was Paul Revere?

18. Who was John Hancock?

19. Who was Plutarch?

20. Who was Hannibal?

21. Who was Danton?

22. Who was Solon?

23. Who was Francis Marion?

24. Who was Leonidas?

25. Where did we get Louisiana from?

26. Who was Pizarro?

27. Who was Bolivar?

28. What war material did Chile export to the Allies during the war?

29. Where does most of the coffee come from?

30. Where is Korea?

31. Where is Manchuria?

32. Where was Napoleon born?

33. What is the highest rise of tide on the North American Coast?

34. Who invented logarithms?

35. Who was the Emperor of Mexico when Cortez landed?

36. Where is the Imperial Valley and what is it noted for?

37. What and where is the Sargasso Sea?

38. What is the greatest known depth of the ocean?

39. What is the name of a large inland body of water that has no outlet?

40. What is the capital of Pennsylvania?

41. What state is the largest? Next?

42. Rhode Island is the smallest state. What is the next and the next?

43. How far is it from New York to Buffalo?

44. How far is it from New York to San Francisco?

45. How far is it from New York to Liverpool?

46. Of what state is Helena the capital?

47. Of what state is Tallahassee the capital?

48. What state has the largest copper mines?

49. What state has the largest amethyst mines?

50. What is the name of a famous violin maker?

51. Who invented the modern paper-making machine?

52. Who invented the typesetting machine?

53. Who invented printing?

54. How is leather tanned?

55. What is artificial silk made from?

56. What is a caisson?

57. What is shellac?

58. What is celluloid made from?

59. What causes the tides?

60. To what is the change of the seasons due?

61. What is coke?

62. From what part of the North Atlantic do we get codfish?

63. Who reached the South Pole?

64. What is a monsoon?

65. Where is the Magdalena Bay?

66. From where do we import figs?

67. From where do we get dates?

68. Where do we get our domestic sardines?

69. What is the longest railroad in the world?

70. Where is Kenosha?

71. What is the speed of sound?

72. What is the speed of light?

73. Who was Cleopatra and how did she die?

74. Where are condors found?

75, Who discovered the law of gravitation?

76. What is the distance between the earth and sun?

77. Who invented photography?

78. What country produces the most wool?

79. What is felt?

80. What cereal is used in all parts of the world?

81. What states produce phosphates?

82. Why is cast iron called pig iron?

83. Name three principal acids?

84. Name three powerful poisons.

85. Who discovered radium?

86. Who discovered the X‑ray?

87. Name three principal alkalis.

88. What part of Germany do toys come from?

89. What States bound West Virginia?

90. Where do we get peanuts from?

91. What is the capital of Alabama?

92. Who composed “Il Trovatore”?

93. What is the weight of air in a room 20 by 30 by 10?

94. Where is platinum found?

95. With what metal is platinum associated when found?

96. How is sulphuric acid made?

97. Where do we get sulphur from?

98. Who discovered how to vulcanize rubber?

99. Where do we import rubber from?

100. What is vulcanite and how is it made?

101. Who invented the cotton gin?

102. What is the price of 12 grains of gold?

103. What is the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal?

104. Where do we get benzol from?

105. Of what is glass made?

106. How is window glass made?

107. What is porcelain?

108. What country makes the best optical lenses and what city?

109. What kind of a machine is used to cut the facets of diamonds?

110. What is a foot pound?

111. Where do we get borax from?

112. Where is the Assuan Dam?

113. What star is it that has been recently measured and found to be of enormous size?

114. What large river in the United States flows from south to north?

115. What are the Straits of Messina?

116. What is the highest mountain in the world?

117. Where do we import cork from?

118. Where is the St. Gothard tunnel?

119. What is the Taj Mahal?

120. Where is Labrador?

121. Who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

122. Who wrote “Home, Sweet Home”?

123. Who was Martin Luther?

124. What is the chief acid in vinegar?

125. Who wrote “Don Quixote”?

126. Who wrote “Les Miserables”?

127. What place is the greatest distance below sea level?

128. What are axe handles made of?

129. Who made “The Thinker”?

130. Why is a Fahrenheit thermometer called Fahrenheit?

131. Who owned and ran the New York Herald for a long time?

132. What is copra?

133. What insect carries malaria?

134. Who discovered the Pacific Ocean?

135. What country has the largest output of nickel in the world?

136. What ingredients are in the best white paint?

137. What is glucose and how made?

138. In what part of the world does it never rain?

139. What was the approximate population of England, France, Germany and Russia before the war?

140. Where is the city of Mecca?

141. Where do we get quicksilver from?

142. Of what are violin strings made?

143. What city on the Atlantic seaboard is the greatest pottery centre?

144. Who is called the “father of railroads” in the United States?

145. What is the heaviest kind of wood?

146. What is the lightest wood?

Some of these questions, like those on the location of Copenhagen or the identity of Leonidas (you need think back only to 300), have grown easier with time. Some — “What is coke?” “What is vulcanite and how is it made?” — have grown harder. Others will require you to call upon not current knowledge, but period knowledge: sure, you know the number of states in the union now, but how about in 1921? And sure, you know which city is the fur center of the United States now, but how about in 1921?

Once you’ve made your guesses, you can check your answers over at Paleofuture. Edison’s test will almost certainly frustrate you — and if it doesn’t, you may have a career waiting not at Google, but on Jeopardy! — and it may even fill you with gratitude that we live in an age where hot employers check for raw brainpower, not the ability to memorize a seemingly random assortment of facts. But the test itself, like several of its questions, pulls a bit of a trick. The tremendous amount of attention it received when the public caught a glimpse of it reveals Edison’s mastery of the highest American force: publicity.

Note: Thanks to one of our readers, you can see how Edison defended the test in the pages of The New York Times.

via Paleofuture

Thomas Edison & His Trusty Kinetoscope Create the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)

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

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Albert Einstein Sports a Native American Headdress and a Peace Pipe at the Grand Canyon, 1931

in History, Physics | March 9th, 2015

Click here to view the image in a larger format.

In 1931, Caltech invited Albert Einstein to spend some time on their campus, with the hopes that he might eventually join their faculty. While in Southern California, he met Charlie Chaplin, took a photo with an Einstein puppet, enjoyed the mild winter, ruffled a few conservative feathers, then eventually left town. On the train ride back across the country, he visited the Hopi House, near the Grand Canyon, where he posed for a picture with members of the Hopi tribe. The website Hanksville.org revisits the classic photograph (apparently taken by Eugene O. Goldbeck) that documented his short visit:

There are several striking things about this photograph that deserve mention. It is clear that the headdress that has been placed on Professor Einstein’s head and the pipe he has been given to hold have no relationship to the Indians in this photograph. These Indians are Hopis from the relatively nearby Hopi pueblos while the headdress and pipe belong to the Plains Indian culture.… The Hopis in this picture were employees of the Fred Harvey Company who demonstrated their arts there and, no doubt, posed for many other pictures with tourists.

Besides Albert Einstein and his wife, there are 3 adult Hopis and one Hopi child in the photograph. Einstein is holding the hand of a young Hopi girl in a very natural manner; she is clutching something tightly in her other hand and is quite intent upon something outside the frame. Prof. Einstein’s attraction to children is seen in several other unofficial photographs. He loved children and felt quite comfortable with them. The two men on the left side of the photograph were there to facilitate the Einsteins’ trip. The man on the left is J. B. Duffy, General Passenger Agent of the ATSF (the famous Atichson, Tokepa and Santa Fe Railroad); the other man is Herman Schweizer, Head of Fred Harvey Curio, normally stationed in Albuquerque. He may have spoken German and was therefore present because Prof. Einstein was not completely comfortable yet with English.

According to the Einstein Almanac, the Hopi “gave Einstein a peace pipe, recognizing his pacifism, and dubbed him the ‘Great Relative.’ ” You can see the pipe on display in the photo.

As one website observed, what’s perhaps most notable about the historic image is this: It captures layers of commodification/fetishization. Here stands the most fetishized intellectual of the 20th century posing with one of the most fetishized peoples. Or maybe that’s just overthinking things.

Note: Some sources date the classic photo back to 1922, but that seems less plausible. The Harry Ransom Center provides an image available for download here.

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Albert Einstein Holding an Albert Einstein Puppet (Circa 1931)

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Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History From Ancient Sumeria, 1800 B.C.

in Food & Drink, History | March 3rd, 2015

Image courtesy of Lock, Stock, and History

Beer, that favorite beverage of football fans, frat boys, and other macho stereotypes—at least according to the advertisers—actually has a very long, distinguished heritage. It’s older, in fact, than wine, older than whiskey, older perhaps even than bread (or so some scholars have thought). As soon as humans settled down and learned to cultivate grains, some 13,000 years ago, the possibility for fermentation—a naturally occurring phenomenon—presented itself. But it isn’t until the 5th century, B.C. that we have sources documenting the deliberate production of ale in ancient Sumeria. Nonetheless, beer has been described as the “midwife of civilization” due to its central role in agriculture, trade, urbanization, and medicine.

Beer became so important to ancient Mesopotamian culture that the Sumerians created a goddess of brewing and beer, Ninkasi, and one anonymous poet, smitten with her powers, penned a hymn to her in 1800 B.C.. A daughter of the powerful creator Enki and Ninti, “queen of the sacred lake,” Ninkasi is all the more poignant a deity given the role of women in ancient culture as respected brewers. The “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which you can read below, not only provides insight into the importance of this custom in Sumerian mythology, but it also gives us a recipe for brewing ancient Sumerian beer—the oldest beer recipe we have.

Translated from two clay tablets by Miguel Civil, Professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago, the poem contains instructions precise enough that Fritz Maytag, founder of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, took it upon himself to try them. He presented the results at the annual meeting of the American Association of Micro Brewers in 1991. The brewers, writes Civil, “were able to taste ‘Ninkasi Beer,’ sipping it from large jugs with drinking straws as they did four millennia ago. The beer had an alcohol concentration of 3.5%, very similar to modern beers, and had a ‘dry taste lacking in bitterness,’ ‘similar to hard apple cider.’” A challenge to all you home brewers out there.

Unfortunately, Maytag was unable to bottle and retail the recreation, since ancient Mesopotamian beer “was brewed for immediate consumption” and “did not keep very well.” But what Civil learned from the experiment was that his translation—in the hands of a master brewer “who saw through the difficult terminology and poetic metaphors”—produced results. Below, see the first part of the “Hymn to Ninkasi,” which describes “in poetic terms the step-by-step process of Sumerian beer brewing.” A second part of the hymn “celebrates the containers in which the beer is brewed and served” and “includes the toasts usual in tavern and drinking songs.” You can read that joyful text—which includes the line “With joy in the heat [and] a happy liver”—on page 4 of Professor Civil’s article on the Hymn.

Hymn to Ninkasi (Part I)
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing water,
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,

Having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you,
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished it’s walls for you,

Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.
Ninkasi, your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud,
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake.

You are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics,
Ninkasi, you are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel,
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date] — honey,

You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven,
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains,

You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt set on the ground,
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates,

You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar,
The waves rise, the waves fall.

You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats,
Coolness overcomes,

You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine
(You the sweet wort to the vessel)
Ninkasi, (…)(You the sweet wort to the vessel)

The filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on a large collector vat.

When you pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.

The Art and Science of Beer

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

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Guidelines for Handling William Faulkner’s Drinking During Foreign Trips From the US State Department (1955)

in History, Literature | February 27th, 2015

Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a polite turn of phrase I’ve always found amusing, if a little sad; when someone has too much to drink at a social function and embarrasses him or herself, we say the person has been “overserved.” This euphemism graciously lays the blame at the host’s feet rather than the sometimes shamefaced imbiber’s, suggesting that a good host cares enough about his or her guests—whether they be lightweights or binge-drinking alcoholics—to monitor their intake and keep things on an even keel. In the case of one notoriously hard-drinking guest, novelist William Faulkner, this responsibility became much more than the tactful burden of a few friends. Keeping an eye on the writer’s drinking became a mandate of State Department officers at the U.S. Information Agency during Faulkner’s official trips abroad.

Since his 1950 Nobel win—writes Greg Barnhisel at Slate—Faulkner was in high demand as a Cold War goodwill ambassador for American culture, along with Martha Graham, John Updike, and Louis Armstrong, all “living proof that America wasn’t just Mickey Mouse and chewing gum.” Unfortunately, as most everyone knows, “the author had a bit of a drinking problem.” During a 1955 visit to Japan, for example, he got so drunk at the welcome reception “that the U.S. ambassador ordered he be put on the next plane back to the states.” U.S. officials may have been embarrassed, but the Japanese, it seems, did not feel that Faulkner’s drinking was a hindrance. According to Dr. Leon Picon, books officer at the Tokyo embassy, the writer’s hosts “didn’t see anything wrong with the amount of drink that he had, and they understood when he went off completely, and was not communicable again….” Rather than send Faulkner home, Picon found ways to make sure his guest was never overserved.

Picon—whom Faulkner called his “wet nurse”—composed and discreetly circulated a document called “Guidelines for Handling Mr. William Faulkner on His Trips Abroad.” These instructions came from Picon’s observations that Faulkner “fared better… when there was little time for concerted drinking.” Of the Japanese visit Faulkner biographer David Mintner writes:

Given shrewdly arranged schedules and carefully arranged audiences, Faulkner talked easily about books, war, and race, hunting, farming, and sailing. Although his manners remained formal and his replies formulaic, he seemed poised and responsive.

Barnhisel quotes among Picon’s guidelines for assuring a smooth visit the following:

“Keep several pretty young girls in the front two rows of any public appearance to keep his attention up”
“Put someone in charge of his liquor at all times so that he doesn’t drink too quickly”
“Do not allow him to venture out on his own without an escort”

As the declassified memoranda above testify (click once, and then again, to view them in a larger format), the instructions helped other foreign service officers to successfully navigate the writer’s habits. In the memo near the top of the post with the oddly-worded subject “Exploitation of Faulkner Visit,” Dr. Picon is lauded for “humoring and handling Mr. Faulkner,” and his guidelines credited with being “effective and vital to the success of the whole tour.” The memo just above—written in needlessly wordy bureaucratese, apparently by none other than J. Edgar Hoover—commends Picon in more detail:

The Department wishes to commend Mr. Leon Picon for the superb job he did in describing a procedure for developing a program for Mr. Faulkner in other countries.

In his book Cold War Modernists, Barnhisel, a professor at Duquesne University, notes that Faulkner continued to represent the U.S. abroad, in trips to Greece and Venezuela, and though his drinking remained a challenge for his government handlers, the trips were deemed unqualified successes.

via Slate

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

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George Orwell Creates a Who’s Who List of “Crypto” Communists for British Intelligence Forces (1949)

in History, Politics | February 26th, 2015

Journalist and novelist Eric Blair, known for all of his professional life by the pen name George Orwell, staunchly identified himself as a democratic socialist. For example, in his slim 1946 publication Why I Write, he declared, “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it.” Despite the widespread blurring of lines these days between socialism and communism—whether through ignorance or deliberate misleading—the distinction was not lost on Orwell. Though he supported an equitable distribution of wealth and public institutions for the common good, he fiercely opposed Soviet communism as anti-democratic and oppressive. As Orwell biographer John Newsinger writes, one “crucial dimension to Orwell’s socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist. Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet Union and instead remained a socialist.”

Of course, Orwell’s anti-communist sentiments are familiar to every student who has read Animal Farm. Less well known is the degree to which he contributed to anti-communist propaganda, even corresponding with British secret services and keeping a blacklist of writers he deemed either “cryptos” (secret communists), “fellow travellers” (communist sympathizers), or outright members of the Communist Party. Orwell’s involvement with the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit formed in 1948 under the UK’s Foreign Office to combat Stalinism at home and abroad has received a good deal of attention in the past few decades, in part because of the discovery in 2003 of a private notebook containing his original list. Even before this revelation, biographers and historians had known about the list, which Orwell included, in part, in a letter to his love interest Celia Kirwan, who worked for the IRD, with the instructions that she keep it secret due to its “libelous” nature. Orwell intended that the writers on the list not be asked to work for the IRD because, in his estimation, they were people who could not be trusted.

Reactions to Orwell’s list have been very mixed. When the story first broke in the late nineties, Orwell’s longtime friend Michael Foot said he found the list “amazing” and out of character. One of the people named, Norman Mackenzie, ascribed the list to Orwell’s illness, saying that the writer was “losing his grip on himself” in 1949 during his final struggle with the tuberculosis that killed him that year. Orwell biographer Bernard Crick defended his actions, writing, “He did it because he thought the Communist Party was a totalitarian menace. He wasn’t denouncing these people as subversives. He was denouncing them as unsuitable for counter-intelligence operation.” On the other hand, late leftist firebrand journalist Alexander Cockburn condemned Orwell as a “snitch” and thought the list was evidence of Orwell’s bigotry, given his suspicion of Paul Robeson as “anti-white” and his denouncing of others due to their rumored homosexuality or Jewish background. He makes a compelling case. Whatever Orwell’s motivations, the effect on the named individuals’ professional and political lives was mild, to say the least. This was hardly a McCarthyite witch-hunt. Nonetheless, it’s a little hard for admirers of Orwell not to wince at this collaboration with the state secret service.

Below, see the list he submitted to Kirwan in his letter. Further down is a list of names, including those of Orson Welles and Katherine Hepburn, that appeared in his notebook but not on the list he gave to the IRD.

Writers and journalists

“Aldred,” novelist (first name unknown)
John Anderson, journalist, Industrial correspondent for Manchester Guardian
John Beavan, editor
Arthur Calder-Marshall, writer
H. Carr, historian
Isaac Deutscher, former Trotskyist writer, correspondent for The Economist and The Observer (1942–1947)
Cedric Dover, journalist
Walter Duranty, New York Times Moscow correspondent
Douglas Goldring, novelist
“Major Hooper”, writer on military history
Alaric Jacob, Moscow Correspondent for the Daily Express during the Second World War
Marjorie Kohn, journalist
Stefan Litauer, journalist
Norman MacKensie, historian and a founding member of the SDP
Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman
Hugh McDiarmid, poet and Scottish nationalist
Naomi Mitchison, novelist
Nicholas Moore, poet
Iris Morley, Moscow Correspondent for The Observer during the Second World War
Neumann, novelist
George Padmore, Trinidadian journalist and anti-imperialist campaigner
Ralph Parker, journalist, News Chronicle
B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
Peter Smollett, Daily Express journalist later identified as a Soviet agent, Smolka recruited by Kim Philby.
Margaret Stewart, industrial/labour correspondent
Alexander Werth, journalist

Academics and scientists

Patrick Blackett, physicist
Gordon Childe, archaeologist
John Macmurray, philosopher
Tibor Mende, Foreign Affairs analyst
G. Crowther, The Guardian’s first science correspondent

Actors

Labour MPs

Tom Driberg

Others

Joseph Macleod
Peadar O’Donnell, Irish socialist
The Reverend Leonard Schiff, clergyman
Commander Edgar Young

People named in Orwell’s notebook, but not appearing on the final IRD list:

Bessie Braddock, Labour MP
Alex Comfort, pacifist writer
Nancy Cunard, heiress and left-wing activist
Katharine Hepburn, actress
Harold Laski, economist
Cecil Day-Lewis, poet.
Alan Nunn May, scientist
John Platts-Mills, Labour MP
Sean O’Casey, playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright
John Steinbeck, novelist
Randall Swingler, poet
Stephen Swingler, Labour MP
J. P. Taylor, historian
Orson Welles, film director
Solly Zuckerman, scientist

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf (1940)

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

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Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

in Art, History | February 25th, 2015

Earlier this month, we featured advertisements from Japan’s prewar Art Deco golden age, a period that shows off one facet of the country’s rich graphic history. While all forms of Japanese design remain compelling today, any time or place would be hard pressed to compete with the world of Japan’s pre-war print advertising. It has, especially for the modern Westerner, not just a visual novelty but a commercial novelty as well: as often as not, surviving examples glorify now-restricted addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco.

At Pink Tentacle (a completely safe-for-work page, believe it or not), you can find a roundup of Japanese print advertisements for products that tap into just such vices. Japan opened up to the world in a big way in the mid-to-late 19th century, and the country’s acceptance (and subsequent Japanification) of all things foreign kept chugging along right up until the Second World War. At the top, we have an appealing example of this internationalism at work in the service of Sakura Beer in the late 1920s. The 1902 ad just above depicts not just the globe but a smoking Pegasus astride it in the name of Peacock cigarettes.

When the tone of Japanese life got militaristic in the 1930s, so did the tone of Japanese ads. The 1937 poster just above proclaims “Defense for Country, Tobacco for Society,” a message brought to you by the South Kyoto Tobacco Sellers’ Union. Below, the kind of Japanese maiden prewar graphic design always rendered so well appears in a different, more outwardly patriotic, and much more naval form.

It goes without saying that most of these ads’ designers geared them toward the eyes of the Japanese — most, but not all. After the war, during the United States’ occupation of the country, there appeared print announcements in this same stylistic vein urging GIs and other American military personnel to keep on their best commercial behavior. Take, for instance, these words the straightforwardly named Japan Monopoly Corporation placed beside this archetypically courtly but uncharacteristically stern traditional lady in 1954:

A valiant effort, but from the stories I’ve heard of the occupation, no amount of graphic design could’ve shut down that particular black market. And finally, no look back at vintage Japanese ads would be complete without including one advertisement for sake. The ad below is for Zuigan sake, created in 1934.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Watch Veterans of The US Civil War Demonstrate the Dreaded Rebel Yell (1930)

in History | February 23rd, 2015

“It was the ugliest sound that any mortal ever heard—even a mortal exhausted and unnerved by two days of hard fighting, without sleep, without rest, without food and without hope.”

- Ambrose Bierce, “A Little of Chickamauga” (1898)

“…a shrill ringing scream with a touch of the Indian war-whoop in it .”

- London Times reporter William Howard Russell (1861)

“…a foxhunt yip mixed up with sort of a banshee squall.”

- Historian Shelby Foote (1990)

The secessionist battle cry has long captivated Civil War scholars. A fixture of literature as well as eyewitness accounts, its actual sound was a matter of conjecture. It lent itself to colorful description. Phonetic renderings could not hope to reproduce the chilling effect:

“Yee-aay-ee!” ‑Margaret Mitchell

“Wah-Who-Eeee!” ‑Chester Goolrick

“Rrrrrr-yahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!” -H. Allen Smith

Of course, the Rebel Yell is far from the only sound to have struck a note of dread during The Civil War. Hoofbeats, the crackle of flames, a white voice commanding you to leave your hiding place…

By the time the harmless-looking grandpas in the archival footage above donned their old uniforms to demonstrate the yell, the war had been over for sixty-five years.

There’s a clear sense of occasion. The old fellows’ pipes are impressive, though one begins to understand why there was never consensus regarding the actual sound of the thing.

Linguist Allen Walker Read concluded that the yell—aka the “Pibroch of the Confederacy,” a vocal legacy of blue painted Celtic warriors facing down the Roman army—was a stress-related, full body response. Ergo, any hollering done after 1865 was a facsimile.

At least one veteran agreed. In Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary, Shelby Foote recalled how one of them refused to oblige eager listeners at a society dinner, claiming he could only execute it at a run, and certainly not with “a mouth full of false teeth and a belly full of food.”

(An assertion several legions of grey coated reenactors clearly do not support.)

My 14-year-old son was greatly amused by the coyote-like ululations of the old gents. The variety of interpretations only heightened his enjoyment. Their proud demonstration is undeniably reminiscent of Patrick Stewart’s take on the regional variations of mooing British cows.

I had to remind my boy that this was once a serious thing. To quote Henry “Dr. Livingston, I Presume” Stanley, who participated in the Battle of Shiloh as a 21-year-old enlistee on the Southern side:

It drove all sanity and order from among us. It served the double purpose of relieving pent-up feelings, and transmitting encouragement along the attacking line. I rejoiced in the shouting like the rest. It reminded me that there were about four hundred companies like the Dixie Greys, who shared our feelings. Most of us, engrossed with the musket-work, had forgotten the fact; but the wave after wave of human voices, louder than all other battle-sounds together, penetrated to every sense, and stimulated our energies to the utmost.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Watch Veterans of The US Civil War Demonstrate the Dreaded Rebel Yell (1930)

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