Download Images From Rad American Women A‑Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism

in Art, History, K-12, Life | March 30th, 2015

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.

To get all 26 illustrations in a downloadable format, click here. To order your own copy of the book, go here.

via Good

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

Simone de Beauvoir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intellectual and Feminist (1960)

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 ( None ) |

A Short Animated History of Daylight Saving Time, Narrated by Stephen Fry

in Animation, Economics, History | March 29th, 2015

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.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Stephen Fry Explains Humanism in 4 Animated Videos: Happiness, Truth and the Meaning of Life & Death

Stephen Fry Explains the Rules of Cricket in 10 Animated Videos

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

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Wonderful Photos of Historic New York City

in History, Photography | March 27th, 2015

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.

You can survey almost a hundred years of New York’s indomitable grandeur by perusing over 900,000 images from the New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery.

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.

These images come from a selection of photos culled from the various galleries by The Atlantic. For more, see the NYC Municipal Archives site, which you can search by keyword or other criteria. “Visitors,” writes the site, “are encouraged to return frequently as new content will be added on a regular basis. Patrons may order reproductions in the form of prints or digital files.”

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.

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City During the Roaring 20s

Vintage Video: A New York City Subway Train Travels From 14th St. to 42nd Street (1905)

Designer Massimo Vignelli Revisits and Defends His Iconic 1972 New York City Subway Map

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The History & Legacy of Magna Carta Explained in Animated Videos by Monty Python’s Terry Jones

in History | March 24th, 2015

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.

These videos come as part of a whole web site put together by the British Library meant to help us all “discover the history and legacy of one of the world’s most celebrated documents.” To this end, they’ve put up an introduction to Magna Carta by Claire Breay and Julian Harrison, which summarizes both its origins and its relevance today:

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.”

via Devour

Download 78 Free Online History Courses: From Ancient Greece to The Modern World

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

Free Online Political Science Courses

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E.

in History | March 20th, 2015

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.

Rome Reborn – An Amazing Digital Model of Ancient Rome

How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built: A New Theory in 3D Animation

Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View

Animation Gives You a Glimpse of What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome

The History of Rome in 179 Podcasts

Discover 100 Great Works of Art with Videos Created by Khan Academy & Google Art Project

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Drawings Show How He First Visualized the Ego, Superego, Id & More

in History, Psychology, Science | March 19th, 2015

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.

Sigmund Freud Writes to Concerned Mother: “Homosexuality is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of” (1935)

Sigmund Freud Appears in Rare, Surviving Video & Audio Recorded During the 1930s

Free Online Psychology Courses

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

Mark Twain Shirtless in 1883 Photo

Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909. It’s the Only Known Footage of the Author.

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.

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

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.

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

Download Images From Rad American Women A‑Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism

A Short Animated History of Daylight Saving Time, Narrated by Stephen Fry

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Wonderful Photos of Historic New York City

The History & Legacy of Magna Carta Explained in Animated Videos by Monty Python’s Terry Jones

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E.

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Drawings Show How He First Visualized the Ego, Superego, Id & More

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

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

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search