New Carl Sagan Archive Features His Digitized Home Movies, Student Journalism, Draft of His Pale Blue Dot & More

in Archives, Astronomy, History, Science | February 3rd, 2014

Several days ago, we brought you a rare Carl Sagan sketch, where the young scientist depicted an imagined history of interstellar space flight. In that post, we made brief mention of the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, which merits to be highlighted in its own right: its arrival means that the Internet now has access to a vast repository of the eminent science educator’s original papers and personal artifacts.

Historians, biographers, and die-hard Sagan devotees will inevitably want to visit the Library of Congress in person to view the full archive, which contains over 1700 boxes of material. The lay reader curious about Sagan’s life, however, won’t need to make the trek to the U.S. capital to sample the archive’s contents. That’s because the Library of Congress has uploaded a portion of the collection online, including sundry fascinating biographical pieces. Above, you can view a digitized set of the Sagan family’s silent home movies, where young Carl shows off his boyhood boxing prowess, rides horseback, and plays piano (preciously, we presume).

It was during high school that Sagan began to fill out intellectually. His senior yearbook is testimony to both his interest in science and the humanities: not only was Sagan president of both the science and chemistry clubs, he also led the French club, served as an editor on his school’s newspaper, debated, took part in theatre productions, and was a member of the photography club.

Indeed, Sagan displayed his uncanny ability to merge science with the humanities in Wawawhack, his high school newspaper, writing a piece entitled “Space, Time, and The Poet.” He begins by saying, “it is an exhilarating experience to read poetry and observe its correlation with modern science. Profound scientific thought is hardly a rarity among the poets.” Throughout the piece, Sagan goes on to draw from verses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and Robert Frost.

Mixing science and literature would remain one of Sagan’s specialties, and would eventually lead to his writing The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of Human Future In Space (1994). The book discusses humankind’s place in the universe, past, present, and future, and a PDF version of the annotated second draft, pictured below, is available in the archive.

For more of the digitized collection, visit Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive.

via Boing Boing

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

Free Mini Course: Carl Sagan Presents Six Lectures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar System … For Kids (1977)

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking & Arthur C. Clarke Discuss God, the Universe, and Everything Else

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The President of Northwestern University Predicts Online Learning … in 1934!

in History, MOOCs | January 31st, 2014

One of our most popular posts this year centered around a prescient set of predictions that Isaac Asimov made for 2014, way back in 1964. Asimov, however, wasn’t the only one whose vision of the future seems to have been realized.

The web site Paleofuture features a 1934 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine, where Northwestern University president Walter Dill Scott made some farsighted pronouncements of his own. Scott believed that the physical college campus would no longer need to be a lynchpin for education, and that students could learn by way of radio and pictures. Fax machines and televisions would allow students to access lecture materials worldwide, and ensure that researchers could conduct their research remotely. He also figured that we’d all end up commuting by planes. Everyday Science and Mechanics wrote:

The university of twenty-five years from now will be a different looking place, says President Scott of Northwestern. Instead of concentrating faculty and students around a campus, they will “commute” by air, and the university will be surrounded by airports and hangars. The course will be carried on, to a large extent, by radio and pictures. Facsimile broadcasting and television will enlarge greatly the range of a library; and research may be carried on by scholars at great distances.

Airports and hangars aside, Scott’s conjectures hit pretty close to home. While fax machines and radio may have been supplanted by the Internet, the essence of our educational advancements is the same: university students can often listen to lectures and complete assignments online, spending only a few short face-to-face hours in the classroom. Other times, classes may be wholly available online, and students may never step foot on campus altogether. Scholars, too, can trawl through databases like JSTOR and PsycINFO without getting out of bed, conducting research as they travel.

In fact, today almost anyone can have access to university knowledge. Feel like taking a Technology Entrepreneurship class offered by Stanford, or learn about Walt Whitman, courtesy of The University of Iowa? Nothing simpler! Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs) are proliferating, and you can download audio & video lectures from top tier universities. Visit our collection of 825 Free Online Courses to see what we mean.

In the end, it’s a good thing Scott was right. Otherwise, there’d be no Open Culture.

via Paleofuture

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Walter Cronkite Imagines the Home of the 21st Century … Back in 1967

The Internet Imagined in 1969

Marshall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Global Village

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

New York’s Famous Chelsea Hotel and Its Creative Residents Revisited in a 1981 Documentary

in History, Television | January 31st, 2014

Last year, we featured a clip of Nico singing “Chelsea Girls” at the Hotel Chelsea, the much-mythologized Manhattan institution that, at one time or another, housed a range of cultural figures including Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Allen Ginsberg, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Iggy Pop, Gaby Hoffmann, Sid Vicious, and Arthur Miller. “The Chelsea in the Sixties seemed to combine two atmospheres,” writes Miller in a 1978 essay on his time there. “A scary optimistic chaos which predicted the hip future, and at the same time the feel of a massive, old-fashioned, sheltering family. That at least was the myth one nursed in one’s mind, but like all myths it did not altogether stand inspection.” That era more than arguably marked the Chelsea’s social and cultural heyday.

A few years later, in 1981, BBC’s arts documentary series Arena made its way to New York to investigate the history and then-current state of this veritable counterculture incubator. The film spends time with current Chelsea residents, former Chelsea residents, and Chelsea habitués notable, creative, and otherwise — the notably creative Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Quentin Crisp all make appearances. It also talks to the hotel’s staff and follows a tour guide as he leads a curious group through its storied corridors. “With all my misgivings about the Chelsea,” Miller reflects, “I can never enter it without a certain quickening of my heartbeat. There is an indescribably homelike atmosphere which at the same time lacks a certain credibility. It is some kind of fictional place, I used to think. As in dreams things are out front that are concealed in other hotels.”

For more, you might want to spend time with “An Oral History of the Chelsea Hotel: Where the Walls Still Talk,” which appeared in Vanity Fair last October.

Find the documentary above listed in our collection of 625 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

via Dangerous Minds

Iggy Pop Conducts a Tour of New York’s Lower East Side, Circa 1993

Charles Bukowski Takes You on a Very Unconventional Tour of Hollywood

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. 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 and Search Newly Digitized Conversations with 148 People Who Witnessed the Great Depression

in History | January 30th, 2014

In March of 1992, many years after photographer Dorothea Lange’s 1936 image of a migrant mother in California (above) became one of the most iconic images from the Great Depression, a camera crew sat down with two daughters of the subject of Lange’s photo. For about 40 minutes, Norma Rydlewski and Katherine McIntosh shared their stories with Blackside, Inc., a company founded by award-winning filmmaker Henry Hampton. In the footage and transcript of that conversation, accessible for the first time along with many more such interviews through Washington University Libraries, the family’s daily challenges come to life. The sisters describe not only their strong, beautiful mother but everything from field work and playing with dirt clods as children to early union meetings and the economical “saving grace” that was World War II.

When The Great Depression, Blackside’s seven-part documentary series, debuted on PBS in October of 1993, the program wove together short segments from extensive interviews with 148 people who experienced the Great Depression, including Rydlewski and McIntosh. As illuminating as the documentary is in its own right, the many additional hours of oral history that Blackside recorded in the process of creating it are a treasure trove of primary source material—all of it now viewable, browsable, and searchable online through the efforts of WU Libraries’ Visual Media Research Lab and Digital Library Services (DLS).

The diverse range of individuals whose reflections on the 1930s are now easily accessible include a grandson of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, celebrated authors Maya Angelou and Gore Vidal, longtime New York Times political reporter Warren Moscow, actors Karen Morley and Ossie Davis, Morton Newman, who worked on the Upton Sinclair campaign for governor in California, and many more from all walks of life. The multicultural, multiregional approach brings needed depth and color to an era that is often remembered and depicted as a monolithic event dragging the nation down for a decade, says Special Collections assistant Alison Carrick, who managed the workflow of the digitization project.

“When we think about the Great Depression, images of the dust bowl and breadlines immediately come to mind,” Carrick says. “And that is part of the history Blackside covered with this series, but they also revealed complex and lively stories that are often overlooked—from union struggles, to heated political campaigns, Works Progress Administration projects, the New Deal, and more. What Blackside managed to do with this series and these interviews was to bring that period of history back to life in a vivid, engaging way.”

The intent behind The Great Depression Interviews project is to provide a seamless, powerful tool with much potential for interdisciplinary research.

“One of the best features of the site, thanks to DLS, is that it is text/keyword searchable,” Carrick says. “This creates a way for users to pinpoint a subject, name, or event and quickly look to see where it occurs in each transcript. Our hope is that this feature will lead users to other transcripts they might not have thought contained similar subject matter.”

This post was written by Evie Hemphill (@evhemphill), a writer and photographer for Washington University Libraries in St. Louis.

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

Pete Seeger Tells the Story Behind “We Shall Overcome”

in History, Music | January 28th, 2014

Like nearly all folk songs, “We Shall Overcome” has a convoluted, obscure history that traces back to no single source. The Library of Congress locates the song’s origins in “African American hymns from the early 20th century” and an article on About.com dates the melody to an antebellum song called “No More Auction Block for Me” and the lyrics to a turn-of-the-century hymn written by the Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. The original lyric was one of personal salvation—“I’ll Overcome Someday”—but at least by 1945, when the song was taken up by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., it was transmuted into a statement of solidarity as “We Will Overcome.” Needless to say, in its final form, “We Shall Overcome” became the unofficial anthem of the labor and Civil Rights movements and eventually came to be sung “in North Korea, in Beirut, Tiananmen Square and in South Africa’s Soweto Township.”

Pete Seeger—who passed away yesterday at the age of 94—has long been credited with the dissemination of “We Shall Overcome,” but he was always quick to cite his sources. Seeger heard the song in 1947 from folklorist Zilphia Horton, music director at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk Center who, Seeger said, “had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm.” As he told NPR recently, his touches were also those of other singers:

I gave it kind of ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump. It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year, and the following year I put it in a little music magazine called People’s Songs. Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways. I’m usually credited with changing [‘Will’] to ‘Shall,’ but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. And she always liked shall, too, I’m told.

According to Seeger in the interview above—conducted by Josh Baron before a 2010 performance—the person most responsible for “making it the number one song back in those days” was the Music Director of the Highlander Folk Center, Guy Carawan, who “sent messages to the civil rights movement all through the South from Texas to Florida to Maryland.” Carawan “introduced this song with a new rhythm that I had never heard before.” Seeger goes on to describe the rhythm in detail, then says “it was the hit song of the weekend in February 1960…. It was not a song, it was the song all across the South. I’ve found out since then that the song started off as a union song in the 19th century.”

In this particular interview, Seeger takes full credit for changing the “will” to “shall.” Although it was “the only record [he] made which sold,” he didn’t seek to cash in on his changes (Seeger shared the copyright with Zilphia Horton, Carawan, and Frank Hamilton). As you can easily see from the numerous eulogies and tributes popping up all over (or a quick scan of the “Pete Seeger Appreciation Page”), Seeger deserves to be remembered for much more than his sixties folk singing, but he perhaps did more than anyone to make “We Shall Overcome” a song sung by a nation. And as he tells it, it was song he hoped would resonate worldwide:

I was singing for some young Lutheran church people in Sundance, Idaho, and there were some older people who were mistrustful of my lefty politics. They said: ‘Who are you intending to overcome?’ I said: ‘Well, in Selma, Alabama they’re probably thinking of Chief Pritchett.; they will overcome. And I am sure Dr. King is thinking of the system of segregation across the whole country, not just the South. For me, it means the entire world. We’ll overcome our tendencies to solve our problems with killing and learn to work together to bring this world together.

Via Blank on Blank

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

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

See Carl Sagan’s Childhood Sketches of The Future of Space Travel

in Art, Astronomy, History | January 24th, 2014

Carl Sagan had his first religious experience at the age of five. Unsurprisingly, it was rooted in science. Sagan, then living in Brooklyn, had started pestering everyone around him about what stars were, and had grown frustrated by his inability to get a straight answer. Like the resourceful five-year-old that he was, the young Sagan took matters into his own hands and proceeded to the library:

“I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars … And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light … The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.”

This sense of universal wonder would eventually lead Sagan to become a well-known astronomer and cosmologist, as well as one of the 20^th century’s most beloved science educators. Although he passed away in 1996, aged 62, Sagan’s legacy remains alive and well. This March, a reboot of his famed 1980 PBS show, Comos: A Personal Voyage, will appear on Fox, with the equally great science popularizer Neil DeGrasse Tyson taking Sagan’s role as host. Meanwhile, last November saw the opening of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive at the Library of Congress.

Among the papers in the archive was this sketch, titled “The Evolution of Interstellar Flight,” which Sagan drew between the ages of 10 and 13. In the center of the drawing Sagan pencilled the logo of Interstellar Spacelines, which, Sagan imagined, was “Established [in] 1967 for the advancement of transpacial and intrauniversal science.” Its motto? “Discovery –Exploration – Colonization.” Surrounding the logo, Sagan drew assorted newspaper clippings that he imagined could herald the key technological advancements in the space race. Impressively drawn astronauts in the corner aside, I most enjoyed the faux-clipping that read “LIFE FOUND ON VENUS: Prehistoric-like reptiles are…” Good luck containing your sense of wonder on seeing that.

via F, Yeah Manuscripts!

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lectures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar System … For Kids (1977)

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking & Arthur C. Clarke Discuss God, the Universe, and Everything Else

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A List of Nelson Mandela’s Possessions Upon Leaving Prison: Surfboard, Exercise Bike & White Cardboard Hat

in History | January 23rd, 2014

Nelson Mandela, who passed away late last year, spent more than a quarter of his life in prisons. For the first twenty years, beginning with his 1962 incarceration in Johannesburg’s Marshall Square Prison when Mandela was 44 years old, there was little hope of clemency from the apartheid regime. By the 1980s, however, international pressure was bearing down on the reigning National Party. Multinational banks stopped investing in South Africa, and several of them, alongside British PM Margaret Thatcher, demanded that Mandela be released. Internally, the country’s tensions were becoming difficult to control, and the regime attempted to enforce order by declaring a state of emergency. The crackdown resulted in further anti-government attacks by the anti-apartheid African National Congress. Eventually, the pressure proved insurmountable, and the 72 year old Mandela was released from Victor Verster prison in 1990.

Upon walking out of Victor Verster, Mandela received the personal property he had relinquished during his time in jail. Above is a photograph of the handwritten list of his personal effects. (Click the image to read it in a larger format.) Our resident Afrikaans expert (i.e., Google Translate) provides an English translation below:

Inventory

Property Mr. Mandela

21 +1 boxes

1 Reisegers* Bag

1 Urn

1 Surf Board

4 Rattan Baskets

1 footstool

1 Large Birthday Card

1 White Cardboard Hat

2 Big Umbrellas

1 Set Weights

1 Exercise Bike

Correct Ontavang:* [illegible]

Urns and rattan baskets are all well and good, but I was most impressed that the great anti-apartheid leader counted an exercise bike and a set of weights among his possessions. Don’t even get me started on the surfboard. Then again, Mandela took his fitness more seriously than most during his lifetime, as he noted in his autobiography:

“I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.”

“On Monday through Thursday, I would do stationary running in my cell in the morning for up to forty-five minutes. I would also perform one hundred fingertip push-ups, two hundred sit-ups, fifty deep knee-bends, and various other calisthenics.”

“Exercise was unusual for African men of my age and generation… I know that some of my younger comrades looked at me and said to themselves, ‘if that old man can do it, why can’t I?’ They too began to exercise.”

“I attended the gym for one and a half hours each evening from Monday through Thursday… We did an hour of exercise, some combination of roadwork, skipping rope, calisthenics, or shadow boxing, followed by fifteen minutes of body work, some weight lifting, and then sparring.”

To learn more about Nelson Mandela and view other original documents, head over to the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Digital Archives.

And if you can help us figure out what “Reisegers bag” and “Correct Ontavang” mean and write the translation in the comment section, we’d appreciate it!

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

Morgan Freeman Masterfully Recites Nelson Mandela’s Favorite Poem, “Invictus”

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by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

in Art, Biology, History, Science | January 21st, 2014

The Wellcome Library, in London, specializes in the history of medicine. While the institution has long offered a good digital collection for browsing, the library announced yesterday that they are making more than 100,000 historical images free to download under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. (Users can distribute, edit, or remix at will; the license even allows for commercial use, with attribution.)

The Wellcome’s holdings represent the institution’s long-term interest in collecting art related to medicine, the body, public health, and medical science. The drop-down menu labeled “Technique” in the standard search box returns a staggering array of types of visual culture, from aquatint to carving to fresco to X‑ray. The library reports that the earliest image available is from 400 AD: a fragment of papyrus from an illustrated herbal manuscript, featuring a faded color drawing of a plant.

Some images in the collection are, perhaps unsurprisingly, squirm-inducing (an 1851 Japanese woodcut showing an amputation of the lower leg; a Dutch etching depicting a 17^th-c mastectomy; a German illustration showing 17th-century monks performing eye surgery). But there is plenty of beauty here, as well. I loved an a 19^th-c woodcut of a sumo match, and a Tibetan illustrated manuscript used in the production of medicines.

Browsers interested in dipping a toe into the stream of images may try out the galleries listed on the Images homepage. The “Olympic Sports” gallery offers an 1829 engraving of the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng holding badminton rackets, and an 1870 illustration of recommended ring exercises for lady gymnasts. The “Witchcraft” collection (under the “Favourites” tab) contains many illustrations from historical books covering witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies, along with a more surprising 19^th-century Malayan black-magic charm.

Rights-managed images are marked as such in the thumbnail results that appear after a search. Although the archive requires you to enter a CAPTCHA to access the free images, you can select several thumbnails on the search-results page in order to bulk-download files for many images at the same time. The sample files I requested arrived on my desktop at 300 dpi.

The image above is an illustration of a mechanical hand from 1564.

h/t @kirstinbutler

Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.

The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain (and There’s More to Come)

The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online

by Rebecca Onion | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

New Carl Sagan Archive Features His Digitized Home Movies, Student Journalism, Draft of His Pale Blue Dot & More

The President of Northwestern University Predicts Online Learning … in 1934!

New York’s Famous Chelsea Hotel and Its Creative Residents Revisited in a 1981 Documentary

Watch and Search Newly Digitized Conversations with 148 People Who Witnessed the Great Depression

Pete Seeger Tells the Story Behind “We Shall Overcome”

See Carl Sagan’s Childhood Sketches of The Future of Space Travel

A List of Nelson Mandela’s Possessions Upon Leaving Prison: Surfboard, Exercise Bike & White Cardboard Hat

Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

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