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.
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.
Great cities are highly changeable by nature, though certain skyline-dominating landmarks endure. Visitors and residents alike romanticize the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Colosseum. (That last one’s got real staying power)
Time has altered all of Parkinson’s and Miller’s locations over the last 90 years, as Miller’s 2013 footage shows. The iconic architecture may remain, but Covent Garden now caters to tourists, a rack of Boris Bikes flanks the Haymarket, and the West End reflects the sensibilities of ladies who dare appear in public in trousers.
Using Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony as a sort of sonic mortar, Smith bricks the present day onto the British Film Institute’s recent restoration of Parkinson and Miller’s work. Actually, it’s more of a keyhole effect, through which viewers can peep into the past.
Assuming the medium (and species) survives, we may one day seem as quaint and the sepia-toned figures bustling through the earlier film. Unthinkable? What will the modern world surrounding our keyhole look like?
Ayun Halliday recommends the working man’s caff E Pellici in London’s East End the next time you’re in the mood for lunch with a side of history. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Give “The London Evolution Animation” seven minutes, and it will show you the historical development of London over the course of 2,000 years. The animation moves from the Roman port city of Londinium (circa 50 AD) through the Anglo-Saxon, Tudor, Stuart, Early Georgian, Late Georgian, Early Victorian and Late Victorian periods. It then brings you through the Early 20th Century and into Postwar London. Developed by The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the animation was made with historical data about London’s road networks and buildings. The video recently appeared at the “Almost Lost” Exhibition in London, an exhibition that contemplated how digital maps can help us rethink the past, present and future of great cities.
If you find it difficult to read the text in the animation, you can view the video in a larger format here.
And in case you’re wondering, the enlarging yellow dots show “the position and number of statutorily protected buildings and structures built during each period.” More information on the animation can be found here.
We’ve previously documented the strange case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fervent Spiritualism, which Mark Strauss of io9 aptly describes as “hard to reconcile [with] the man who created the literary embodiment of empirical thinking,” Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was so eager to believe in the existence of fairies and what he called “psychic matters” that he was frequently taken in by hoaxes. But the physician and novelist’s seemingly odd views obtained widely among his contemporaries who sought confirmation of the afterlife and communion with their dead relatives, millions of whom were lost in the Civil War, then World War I.
Spiritualism provided a comfort to the bereaved, as well as ample opportunity for grifters and charlatans. And yet, Strauss points out, the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century may also have been due to the rising influence of science in popular culture, as more and more people sought experimental evidence for their supernatural beliefs. Conan Doyle wrote twenty books on the subject, including the two-volume 1924 History of Spiritualism. In a speech he gave in May of 1930, just before his death, he explained the appeal. Hear the audio above and read a transcription below:
People ask, what do you get from spiritualism? The first thing you get is that it absolutely removes all fear of death. Secondly, it bridges death for those dear ones whom we may lose. We need have no fear that we are calling them back, for all that we do is to make such conditions as experience has taught us, will enable them to come if they wish. And the initiative lies always with them.
Two months later at a séance attended by thousands at the Royal Albert Hall, a medium claimed to have communicated with the Sherlock Holmes author. And four years after that, another medium, Noah Zerdin, held a séance attended by hundreds, and Conan Doyle is said to have been one of 44 who spoke from the beyond. This time, the event was recorded, on 26 acetate disks, which were only discovered 67 years later in 2001 by Zerdin’s son, who donated them to the British Library. The 1934 recordings featured in a 2002 BBC radio documentary called What Grandad Did in the Dark.
Just above, you can hear the supposed voice of Arthur Conan Doyle speaking from the spirit world. The audio is seriously spooky, but I’m not inclined to believe that it’s anything more than a hoax, although the technology of the time would make manipulation of the direct recordings difficult. So-called “spirit voices” in recordings such as this are known as EVP (“electronic voice phenomenon”), and there are many such examples of the genre at the British Library, including a batch of 60 tapes made by a Dr. Konstantin Raudive, “who believed that the dead could communicate with the living through the medium of radio waves.”
A post on the British Library site comments that “the recorded evidence is not especially convincing, being short comments or fragments that without the accompanying spoken ‘translation’ would probably not strike the listener as having any meaningful content.” The Conan Doyle audio seems a little more coherent, though it’s difficult to make out exactly what the voice says. Compare the two samples and draw your own conclusions. Or better yet, consider what Sherlock Holmes would make of this alleged “evidence.”
If you have an interest in how the internet has widened the very concept of education, you may well know about Google’s Art Project, a digital wealth of free visual art information and viewing opportunities we’ve featured before. And you more than likely know about Khan Academy, the highest-profile producer of educational videos on the internet. Now, from the combined power of their learning resources comes this collection of video introductions to over 100 important paintings. Ranging from between two to nine minutes and covering works of art created in eras from 575 B.C.E to the Second World War, these brief but intellectually dense and visually rich lessons bear the label of Smarthistory, “a multimedia web-book about art and art history” that merged with Khan Academy in 2011.
In the video at the top of the post, Smarthistory introduces us to Botticelli’s 1486 Tbe Birth of Venus, “one of the most iconic images in the history of Western art” — its content, its context, and its inspiration. The Birth of Venus might seem like one of those images that needs no introduction, but as all the information revealed in the video reminds us, most of us, if not art historians ourselves, could at least use a refresher.
Just above, we have Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bedroom, a painting that, in the words of the artist himself, “ought to rest the brain — or rather, the imagination.” Though we all know the name of this particular post-Impressionist, we may not have seen this particular canvas of his before, a fact Smarthistory’s experts Beth Harris and Steven Zucker take into account when they explain to us how they themselves think about it. “What you’re talking about is the root of abstraction itself,” says Zucker. “It’s not that this is representative; it’s that the formal qualities of painting itself can have their own experiential aspect.” And they speak just as insightfully on the paintings we encounter, in one form or another, every so often in our daily lives. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, for instance, a replica of which I saw on the side of one coffee mug I used every day for years, gets discussed below as “an expression of wartime alienation” that delivers “an immediate implication that we are alone” that “makes us look for some sign of life, but we don’t see anything.” Smarthistory’s videos manage to reveal a great deal of emotional, technical, and historical knowledge on these and many other paintings in a fraction of the time it takes a student to cross campus for their art history lecture — let alone to sit through its entire slideshow. You can see all 100 videos in the collection here.
What, I wonder, would Sigmund Freud have made of Hannibal Lector? The fictional psychoanalyst, so sophisticated and in control, moonlighting as a bloodthirsty cannibal… a perfectly grim rejoinder to Freud’s ideas about humankind’s perpetual discontent with the painful repression of our darkest, most antisocial drives. While Freud’s primary taboo was incest, not cannibalism, I’m sure he would have appreciated the irony of an ultra-civilized psychiatrist who gives full steam to his most primal urges.
Freud—who was born on this day in 1856, in the small town of Freiberg—also had a carefully controlled image, though his passionate avocation was not for the macabre, salacious, or prurient, but for the archaeological. He once remarked that he read more on that subject than on his own, an exaggeration, most likely, but an indication of just how much his interest in cultural artifacts and ritual contributed to his theoretical explication of individual and social psychology.
In the film above, we see Freud in conversation with a friend, a professor of archaeology, whom the psychiatrist consulted on his extensive collection of antiquities. Later, we see Freud with his dog, then reclining outdoors with a book. Over this footage we hear the narration of Freud’s daughter Anna, who only allowed this film to be viewed by a small circle until her death in 1982.
Though Freud lived many decades into the era of recording technology, precious little film and audio of the founder of psychoanalysis exists. While the home movies at the top may be the only moving image of him, perhaps the only audio recording of his voice, above, was made in 1938, the year before his death. At 81 years old, Freud’s advanced jaw cancer left him in considerable torment. Nonetheless, he agreed to record this brief message for the BBC from his London home in Maresfield Gardens. Read a transcript of the speech, and see Freud’s handwritten copy, below.
I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over. –Sigmund Freud.
The Library of Congress online exhibit Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture has many more primary documents including a holograph page from Freud’s manuscript of Civilization and its Discontents, in which he theorized the bedrock impulse of serial killers, fictional and real: the so-called “Death Drive,” our “human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”
“My life came to a standstill,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his 1882 conversion memoir A Confession, “I could not breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things.” So Tolstoy’s described his “arrest of life,” a period of severe depression that led to a very deep, personal brand of faith in his late middle age. The towering Russian novelist renounced worldly desires and came to identify with the poor, the former serfs of his aristocratic class. Tolstoy’s radical religious anarchism in his final years spread his fame far among the peasantry just as his literary achievements had brought him worldwide renown among the reading public. So famous was Tolstoy, William Nickell tells us, that Russian critic Vasily Rozanov wrote that “to be a Russian and not have [seen] Tolstoy was like being Swiss and not having seen the Alps.”
Nickell describes the occasions that Tolstoy appeared on film, the new medium that allowed the author’s millions of adoring fans to get a glimpse of him. Just as his life was punctuated by a radical departure from his earlier attitudes, his medium was in for a shock as film forever changed the way stories were told.
In those early days, however, it was very often simply a means of recording history, and we should be glad of that. It means we too can see Tolstoy, at the top on his 80th birthday. We see him vigorously sawing logs and piously giving alms to the poor. Also included in the initial footage are Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, his daughter Aleksandra, and aide and editor Vladimir Chertkov. Then, at 1:04, the scene shifts to Tolstoy’s deathbed and scenes of his funeral. The remaining 11 minutes give us some unidentified footage of the author. (If you’re able to read the title cards in Russian, please let us know!).
Just above, see a more complete film of Tolstoy’s death and funeral procession. The author died at age 82 after he abruptly decided to leave his wife, taking only a few possessions and his doctor. Read the dramatic story of Tolstoy’s last ten days in this translated excerpt from Pavel Basinsky’s award winning Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise.
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