Visit The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM): A Mega Collection of 220 Online Exhibitions

in Art, Design, History, Museums, Travel | May 27th, 2014

It is my habit, when travel looms, to case the Internet for obscure museums my destination might have to offer. Once loaded, I fixate. Chat me up about my itinerary, and you will definitely come away with the impression that these offbeat locales are the trip’s primary raison d’être.

It’s shocking how rarely I actually make it to one of these off-the-beaten path gems. Time flies and I rarely travel alone these days.

Take a recent family trip to London. Every time I brought up the Museum of Brands, my husband expressed reservations. “But what is it, exactly, other than a bunch of old labels?” he’d press.

I hemmed and hawed, realizing on the cellular level that neither he nor the kids could see the beauty in old labels. Dinosaurs, maybe. Vespas, no doubt. But old labels? This is how I found myself giving the British Museum nearly three times the Museum of Brand’s admission charge to join a mighty throng of pensioners, squinting at a handful of boring button fragments and a chunk of wood that no longer resembled a Viking Ship.

Next time, I swear…

How fortunate for me and my ilk that Chicago design firm Coudal Partners is committed to laboring far outside its expected scope. In addition to championing Stanley Kubrick and poetry, they’ve taken it upon themselves to consolidate a panoply of digital collections into the Museum of Online Museums. (The preferred acronym is MoOM, FYI.)

Unlike that of certain of my traveling companions, Coudal Partners’ definition of what constitutes a museum is democratic. Generous, even. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, and the Musée d’Orsay share space with such non-brick-and-mortar companions as the Busy Beaver Button Museum, the Grocery List Collection, and Toaster Central.

Like any major institution, MoOM touts their current exhibitions, a seasonal sampling of five. This spring brings together the Rijksmuseum’s Studio Project, NASA’s Space Food Hall of Fame, a collection of Dutch safety posters from 50 Watts, 40 retro-groovy Japanese ads compliments of Voices of East Anglia, and a photographic survey of eggnog cartons. (That last one really deserves a brick and mortar home. Location is immaterial. I’d just like to fantasize about visiting it someday.)

Meanwhile, the talk of the town here in New York City is the reappearance of Mmuseumm, an eclectic, non-profit housed in a 60-square-foot Tribeca elevator shaft. MoOM, take note.

Find more online exhibitions at the Museum of Online Museums.

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Ayun Halliday wrote about her experiences as a museum guard in her 3rd book, Job Hopper. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes a Job Recommendation for Walt Whitman (1863)

in History, Literature | May 26th, 2014

While we often recommend Letters of Note for the hits of history’s most illuminating pieces of incidental correspondence, do consider also making a regular visits to Slate’s history blog The Vault. There you’ll find such written artifacts as the one pictured in part above, astutely written up by occasional Open Culture contributor Rebecca Onion: “In 1863, as he considered seeking a government clerkship, Walt Whitman asked his friend and advocate Ralph Waldo Emerson for a letter of recommendation. Emerson, for decades a respected name in American letters, knew the secretaries of state and treasury personally, and Whitman hoped that a note from him would help the younger poet secure steady employment in Washington.” This note runs, in a transcript from the Walt Whitman archive, as follows:

Concord Massachusetts
10 January 2, 1863

Dear Sir,

Mr Walt Whitman, of New York, writes me that he is seeking employment in the public service in Washington, & perhaps some application on his part has already been made to yourself. Will you permit me to say that he is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends; entirely patriotic & benevolent in his theory, tastes, & practice. If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they show extraordinary power, & are more deeply American, democratic, & in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet.

A man of his talents & dispositions will quickly make himself useful, and, if the government has work that he can do, I think it may easily find that it has called to its side more valuable aid than it bargained for.

With entire respect,

Your obedient servant,

R. W. Emerson.

Hon Salmon P. Chase, | Secretary of the Treasury.

Any of us, I feel certain, would love having such an eloquently praise-filled letter of recommendation sent on our behalf by a friend, a teacher, a former employer, or a pillar of American Transcendentalism. But even with that, the author of Leaves of Grass didn’t find the road to a day gig particularly smooth — in large part, of course, because of having written Leaves of Grass. Whitman, whose “reputation preceded him in job interviews, reported that Salmon Chase, the secretary of the treasury and addressee of this letter, was vehemently against the idea of employing the author of Leaves, a book that celebrated open sexuality in a way that Chase found distasteful.” He would even get fired from another job specifically “because of objections to his poetry.” Well, they can’t say Emerson didn’t warn them about Whitman’s “marked eccentricities” — such as his tendency to write some of the most enduring verse in American history.

via The Vault

Hear Walt Whitman (Maybe) Reading the First Four Lines of His Poem, “America” (1890)

Find works by Whitman and Emerson in our twin collections: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

in History, Literature | May 25th, 2014

Why study a language like French? For the unparalleled pleasure, of course, of reading a beloved, respected, and enduring novel like Madame Bovary in the original — or so literarily inclined Francophiles might argue. After all, they’d rhetorically ask, can you really say you’ve read the book if you haven’t actually read the very same words Gustave Flaubert wrote? But now, literarily inclined Francophiles who also have an enthusiasm for the web (not an overwhelmingly large group, wags may point out) can insist that you haven’t really read Madame Bovary unless you’ve read it all in the original: all 4,500 pages of it. Yes, the French do tend to write longer sentences than most, but that impressive length has less to do with a national literary style than with thoroughgoing completism, an impulse that brings together all of the 1856 novel’s originally published pages as well as all of those cut, censored, or revised, free to read online at bovary.fr.

“After a marathon effort of transcription by 130 volunteers from all over the world, including a cleaning lady, an oil prospector and several teenagers,” writes the Independent’s John Lichfield, “all the variants of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece can be consulted on a new website. This is believed to be the first time that the complete process of creation, and publication, of a classic novel has been made available on the internet,” much less on a site that “contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers.” Despite this unprecedentedly vast and accessible trove of Madame Bovary resources, struggles over the proper interpretation of the once-scandalous novel will doubtless only continue, not only at the level of just which word Flaubert intended to write on the fourth draft of a particularly crucial paragraph, but at the level of whether to consider the whole book tragedy, comedy, or something in between. Enter the Madame Bovary Archive here.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The First Children’s Picture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus

in Books, History | May 22nd, 2014

I’ve heard a fair few new parents agonizing about what children’s books to admit into the family canon. Many of the same names keep coming up: 1947’s Goodnight Moon, 1969’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, 1977’s Everyone Poops — classics, all. Oddly, I’ve never heard any of them mention the earliest known children’s book, 1658’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures. “With its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals,” writes Charles McNamara at The Public Domain review, the Orbis looks “immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature. This approach centered on the visual was a breakthrough in education for the young. [ … ] Unlike treatises on education and grammatical handbooks, it is aimed directly at the young and attempts to engage on their level.” In other words, its author, Czech-born school reformer John Comenius, accomplishes that still-rare feat of writing not down to children, but straight at them — albeit in Latin.

The Orbis holds not just the status of the first children’s book, but the first megahit in children’s publishing, receiving translations in a great many languages and becoming the most popular elementary textbook in Europe. It opens with a sentence that, in McNamara’s words, “would seem peculiar in today’s children’s books: ‘Come, boy, learn to be wise.’ We see above a teacher and student in dialogue, the former holding up his finger and sporting a cane and large hat, the latter listening in an emotional state somewhere between awe and anxiety. The student asks, ‘What doth this mean, to be wise?’ His teacher answers, ‘To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly all that are necessary.’ ” This leads into something like “an early version of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm,’ ” lessons on “the philosophical and the invisible,” “thirty-five chapters on theology, elements, plants, and animals,” and finally, an “extensive discussion” of religion which ends with “an admonition not to go out into the world at all.” After reading the Orbis, embedded in full at the top of this post, you can judge for yourself whether it belongs on the shelf. Perhaps you could file it alongside Richard Scarry’s Busytown books?

via The Public Domain Review

The Epistemology of Dr. Seuss & More Philosophy Lessons from Great Children’s Stories

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

The First-Ever Look at the Original Disneyland Prospectus

in History | May 20th, 2014

Thanks to a benefactor, Boing Boing has posted the original Disneyland prospectus, drafted in 1953. These “extremely high-resolution scans,” Boing Boing says, “were made from one of the three sets of pitch-documents Roy and Walt Disney used to raise the money to build Disneyland.” The document isn’t long. It runs 12 pages from front to back. And it imagines some of the first parts of the park. Of course, there’s Main Street, but there’s also “True Life Adventureland,” “Lilliputian Land” and “Fantasy Land.” These imagined parts of the park were meant to entertain youngsters. They were also meant to educate. (The last page of the Prospectus sums things up by saying, “The idea of Disney land is a simple one. It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.…, a place for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education.” And, as Cory Doctorow notes, they were meant to make money. (In “True-Life Adventureland,” says the Prospectus, “magnificently plumed birds and fantastic fish from all over the world… may be purchased and shipped anywhere in the U.S. if you so desire.”) These days, the educational mission of Disneyland isn’t much in evidence, while the “merchantainment” side remains. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it. You can find the Prospectus on Archive.org in different formats. Or see it below.

via BoingBoing

How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made (1939)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

World War I Unfolds in a Three Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

in Animation, History, Maps | May 19th, 2014

As time places us ever further from the event, our knowledge of (and—generally speaking—interest in World War I) has shrunk precipitously. That trend is reversing as the centennial of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination draws nigh.

The Atlantic’s Alan Taylor launched an excellent 10-part series on World War I, which thusfar explored the role of technology and animals.

Cartoonist Joe Sacco documented the Battle of the Somme’s first day in The Great War, an astonishing twenty-four-foot-long panorama.

The UK’s Imperial War Museum is inviting the public to contribute photos and family anecdotes to Lives of the First World War, an interactive digital database.

It’s a good time to play catch up.

Before I started studying this game-changing catastrophic event with my young son, one of my few germane pieces of information was that a lot of soldiers lived and died in trenches dug along the Western front. Even without photos, statistics, or personal stories, this defining aspect hits home hard in Emperor Tigerstar’s animated map of the Great War’s changing front lines in Europe and the Middle East, above.

The trenches were built following the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. Eventually they covered over 25,000 miles. Hundreds of thousands met their ghastly ends there, via bombs, illness, and poison gas attacks, but these losses resulted in very little geographic gain for one side or the other.

If you’re looking for change, keep your eye peeled for the Russian Revolution. The Western Front was a deadlock.

An animated timeline of World War II can be found here.

British Actors Read Poignant Poetry from World War I

World War I Remembered in Second Life

Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, and creator of the award winning East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Rare Video Shows FDR Walking: Filmed at the 1937 All-Star Game

in History | May 17th, 2014

In 1921, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sailing in the Bay of Fundy when he fell overboard into the cold waters. The next day, he felt weakness in his legs. The sensation intensified, and, soon enough, he could no longer walk. Once doctors sorted things out, F.D.R. discovered that he had contracted polio, a disease that typically afflicted children, not adults. A long and grueling period of rehabilitation followed, mostly in Warm Springs, Georgia. You can see footage of his rehab right below.

With a lot of hard work, F.D.R. learned to walk short distances, aided by leg braces, a cane, and someone’s shoulder to lean on. When he re-entered politics, the F.D.R. Presidential Library notes, he “requested that the press avoid photographing him walking, maneuvering, or being transferred from his car. The stipulation was accepted by most reporters and photographers but periodically someone would not comply. The Secret Service was assigned to purposely interfere with anyone who tried to snap a photo of FDR in a ‘disabled or weak’ state.” Above, you can see (according to CNN) only the second known clip that shows F.D.R. walking. (Watch around the 40 second mark.) Recorded in Washington, D.C., at the 1937 All-Star Game, the video was recently donated to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The other extant video appears right below.

via CNN

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936: ‘Government by Organized Money is Just as Dangerous as Government by Organized Mob’

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Durable Wisdom on Curiosity, Empathy, Education & Responding to Criticism

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Literary Treasures From Great Romantic & Victorian Writers

in History, Literature | May 16th, 2014

We’ve long known the internet’s power to facilitate access to the great books (see, for instance, our collection of 600 eBooks free online), but recent projects like the British Library’s Discovering Literature have shown us that it can also help us engage with those great books. The site, says a MetaFilter user who goes under Horace Rumpole, offers “a portal to digitized collections and supporting material. The first installment, Romantics and Victorians, includes work from Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and Blake, and forthcoming modules will expand coverage of the site to encompass everything from Beowulf to the present day.” For now, if you enjoy classic English Romantic and Victorian novels, prepare to take that enjoyment to a higher level by immersing yourself in all manner of early manuscripts, authors’ papers and personal effects, and related pieces of contemporary media.

If you count yourself a Jane Austen fan, for instance, you can now scroll down her Discovering Literature author page and find “a host of texts” to do with her life, her work, and the intersection between them, “including the opinions — mostly positive — her friends and family had of her novels, copied out by the author (though ‘her immediate family is shown to have disagreed over which of her books was better’).” That comes from The Guardian’s Alison Flood, writing up the site’s collection of not just Austen accoutrements but items from writers like William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Shelley, “as well as diaries, letters, newspaper clippings from the time and photographs, in an attempt to bring the period to life.”

Flood cites “a survey of more than 500 English teachers, which found that 82% believe secondary school students ‘find it hard to identify’ with classic authors” on their classes’ syllabi. In response, Discovering Literature appears to have given special attention to oft-assigned writers like Charles Dickens, whose collection of materials on the site includes a literary sketch published at age 23, color illustrations for both an 1885 and 1911 edition of Oliver Twist (as well as the 1848 review that destroyed his relationship with the book’s previous illustrator), and “The Italian Boy,” an early work of journalism on “a brutal crime that occurred in London in 1831, a ‘copy-cat’ murder following upon those of the infamous Burke and Hare in Edinburgh.” The site’s archives also contain analytical essays on each writer’s body of work, like “Oliver Twist and the Workhouse” and “Status, Rank, and Class in Jane Austen’s Novels” — ideal for when these re-enthused students, previously unable to connect to the Romantic and Victorian eras’ most respected authors, reach grad school.

The image at the very top shows the earliest known writings of Charlotte Brontë.

Read Jane Austen’s Manuscripts Online

Charles Dickens’ Hand-Edited Copy of His Classic Holiday Tale, A Christmas Carol

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix

An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Including Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks And Mozart’s Diary

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Visit The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM): A Mega Collection of 220 Online Exhibitions

Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes a Job Recommendation for Walt Whitman (1863)

Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

The First Children’s Picture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus

The First-Ever Look at the Original Disneyland Prospectus

World War I Unfolds in a Three Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

Rare Video Shows FDR Walking: Filmed at the 1937 All-Star Game

The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Literary Treasures From Great Romantic & Victorian Writers

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