The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’sprinting press “changed the whole face and state of the world.” Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
I believe it was Jacques Derrida, though I don’t recall exactly where, who said that some of the most revealing text of any work can be found in the footnotes. In documentarian Errol Morris’ recent photo-essay series on Lincoln for The New York Times, footnotes, chronologies, snippets of interview, and endlessly recursive references continuously intrude on the stories he tells. In this way, the series, called “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns,” enacts the tension Morris identifies as “the push-pull of history,” a contest between several ways of approaching the past: “Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects—the storyteller vs. the collector.”
The way story after story inevitably nests within each historical artifact seems to be Morris’ overarching theme as he charts the history of Lincoln iconography by reference to a single image, a photo of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner that exists in only one known original print, called O‑118 after collector of Lincoln photography Lloyd Ostendorf (see the retouched version above, the original print below). This print, along with 13 others, was made either four or five days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Morris’ fascination with this photograph is as variously motivated as the number of different views he adopts in examining its provenance, its history, and its meaning. For one thing, O‑118 is supposedly the last photograph taken of Lincoln alive. In 1922, The New York Times published the original print (above) with text by James Young, who wrote:
Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of the picture…. The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death.
The photo’s caption also included information that Morris makes a great deal of: “The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” For one thing, Morris seems to associate the photograph with what Walter Benjamin called “aura”; The print, it seems, was the only one Gardner was able to make before the cracked negative became useless and mass production from the source impossible. Un-retouched, the print shows a “fracture cutting through the top of Lincoln’s head.” For the storyteller, writes Morris, “the crack is the beginning of a legend—the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.” Using the rhetorical term for “a figure of anticipation,” a narrative feature that foreshadows, foretells, or prophesies, Morris calls this “the proleptic crack.”
His winding narrative, replete with the antiquarian minutiae of collectors, moves from the day—February 5, 1865—that Lincoln and his son Tad walked to Gardner’s studio on 7th Street in Washington, DC for the photo session, through the use of photography as an aid to Lincoln painters and sculptors, to the meaning of Lincoln for such diverse people as Leo Tolstoy, Marilyn Monroe, and our current President. Morris’ series ranges far and wide, visiting with historians and collectors along the way, and telling many a story, some freely speculative, some wistful, some tragic, and all somehow circling back to O‑118. Like much of Morris’ documentary work, it’s an exercise in collage—of the methods of the scholar, the essayist, and the archivist—and like its subject, it’s a fractured, but everlastingly fascinating meditation. Follow Morris’ entire series below.
The French refer to the decade between 1920 and 1929 as les Années folles, “the crazy years,” which is apt when you consider how the French middle and upper classes generally loosened their brassieres and defined modern bohemia, à laCoco Chanel.
But the American moniker — the Roaring 20s — fits too. Nearly everything about that decade roared: cars, jazz, manufacturing, construction.
Din, in fact, came to define the age, particularly in big cities and especially in New York. An unnamed Japanese visitor was quoted upon his visit to that city in 1920: “My first impression of New York was its noise. When I know what they mean, I will understand civilization.”
A Princeton history professor took that challenge at face value, while capturing a broader industrial era. The Roaring Twenties is an audio (and to some extent video) archive of what New York City sounded like from 1900 to 1933. Professor Emily Thompson and designer Scott Mahoy have created a lovely site that’s fun to explore. The archive includes a beautiful 1933 map of New York City loaded with links to noise complaints (screenshot at top), complete with documentation. New York had long been a place where people from all over the world lived on top of one another, but noise levels were shifting—getting louder and more varied, that is—and the city was inundated with complaints about ferry whistles, radio shops, street traffic, the clatter of restaurant dishwashing, and all manner of construction.
Sensitivity to the city’s volume was high. The city’s Noise Abatement Commission measured the “deafening effect” of sound in Times Square. The women’s cafeteria in the New York Life Insurance building was designed with state-of-the-art acoustics to keep the noise of the city out and the sound of office workers in.
Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was lined with radio shops, each broadcasting different music. Don’t miss that video, which you’ll find by scanning the Space tab map.
You can also move through time on the site, listening to the city’s cacophony from the early 1900s up to the 1930s, or browse a menu of noise sources from home sounds to the noise of the harbors and rivers. Again, you can visit the The Roaring Twenties site here.
Seventy-seven years ago, in a move unprecedented since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, King-Emperor Edward VIII abdicated the throne. Today’s audiences will recognize the episode from The King’s Speech: less than a year after having ascended to the British kingship in January of 1936, Edward became romantically entangled with a yet-to-be-divorced American socialite named Wallis Simpson. As long as the King’s liaisons remained discreet, the couple was afforded a respectable amount of privacy by the royal family and the British media. Things grew more complicated, however, when Simpson divorced her second husband in October of 1936, and the pair decided to marry, come hell or high water.
A King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland being wedded to a twice-divorced American socialite would have caused a furor. As the head of the Church of England, Edward could not marry a divorced woman whose former husband (let alone husbands) remained alive. Simpson’s first divorce proved even more problematic—it was granted based on “emotional incompatibility,” and may not have been recognized under both Church and English law. The King’s marriage to Simpson also raised the possibility of an American Queen, a sacrilegious idea in the eyes of his subjects.
Faced with a choice between the crown and his love, Edward VIII chose to step down. On December 10, 1936, the King signed the following declaration of abdication:
In the audio clip at the top of the post, Edward VIII takes to the radio waves to declare his abdication on December 11. Brimming with hardly-contained emotion, Edward attempts to explain his reasons to the British people (read the full transcript here):
“You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the Throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the Empire which as Prince of Wales, and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve. But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”
For those who had doubts about Simpson’s true feelings for the King (some suspected her of caring only about the king’s money), the next 35 years would provide sufficient proof. The pair remained married until Edward’s death in 1972.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Recently, Wired writer Steve Silberman (aka @stevesilberman) shot us a note on Twitter, saying, “@openculture, do not miss this brilliant ad. Most touching movie (in 3 mins!) I’ve seen in years.” Released on November 13th, the video has already clocked over 10 million views. But chances are you haven’t seen it. And that’s because it’s targeted to the web-enabled middle class of India and Pakistan. As The Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest English newspaper, describes it, the Google-created ad entitled “Reunion” “portrays two childhood friends, now elderly men, who haven’t seen each other since they were separated by the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan from the old British empire in South Asia. Partition sparked a mass exodus as millions of Muslims and Hindus fled across the new borders amid religious violence.” Now Google search products are helping to bring old friends and neighbors back together.
Cynics may be quick to judge this a saccharine, manipulative ad. But others are seeing in it something else — a sign that “personal connections between Indians and Pakistanis run deep.” Even if their governments gain something from keeping the conflict alive, everyday people in India and Pakistan are increasingly ready to put history aside.
Note: If you click CC at the bottom of the video, you can use captions to translate the film into nine languages, including French, Malayalam and Urdu. It is preset to English.
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For the first half of the twentieth century, pulp magazines were a quintessential form of American entertainment. Printed on cheap, wood pulp paper, the “pulps” (as opposed to the “glossies” or “slicks,” such as The New Yorker) had names like The Black Mask and Amazing Stories, and promised readers supposedly true accounts of adventure, exploitation, heroism, and ingenuity. Such outlets offered a steady stream of work for stables of fiction writers, with content ranging from short stories about intrepid explorers saving damsels from Nazis/Communists (depending on the precise time of publication) to novel-length man vs. beast accounts of courage and cunning. This, incidentally, gave birth to the term “pulp fiction,” popularized in the 1990s by Quentin Tarantino’s eponymous film.
In the 1950s, the pulps went into a steep decline. In addition to television, paperback novels, and comic books, the pulps were overtaken by the more explicit, and even lower brow men’s adventure magazines (readers of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood may remember Perry Smith, the sociopathic misfit who murdered the Clutter family, being an enthusiastic reader of these early lads’ mags). Thanks to The Pulp Magazines Project, however, many of the most famous publications remain accessible today through a well-designed online interface. Hundreds of issues have been archived in the database that spans from 1896 through to 1946. It includes large magazines, such as The Argosy and Adventure, and smaller, more specialized fare, such as Air Wonder Stories and Basketball Stories. Although good writing occasionally made its way into the pulps, don’t expect these magazines to mirror the literary depth of serialized publications of the 19th century; rather, the archive provides a terrifically entertaining look at the popular reading of early 20th century America.
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Note: This post was originally featured on our site in 2010. In light of the news that Nelson Mandela has passed away at age 95, we’re bringing this vintage clip back to the fore. Here you can see a young Mandela making history, and without perhaps realizing it, building the remarkable legacy that remains with us today.
In 1962, Nelson Mandela was arrested on allegations of sabotage and other charges and sentenced to life in prison, where he spent 27 years before becoming South Africa’s first president elected in a fully democratic election. His story, among modern history’s most profoundly inspirational, is beautifully and poetically captured in Clint Eastwood’s 2009 gem, Invictus. But what Eastwood’s account leaves out are the events that preceded and led to Mandela’s arrest.
In May of 1961, a 42-year-old Mandela gave his first-ever interview to ITN reporter Brian Widlake as part of a longer ITN Roving Report program about Apartheid. At that point, the police are already hunting for Mandela, but Widlake pulls some strings and arranges to meet him in his hideout. When the reporter asks Mandela what Africans want, he promptly responds:
“The Africans require, want the franchise, the basis of One Man One Vote – they want political independence.”
But perhaps more interesting is the dialogue towards the end of the interview, where Mandela explores the complex relationship between peace and violence as protest and negotiation tactics. We’re left wondering whether his seemingly sudden shift from a completely peaceful campaign strategy up to that point towards considering violence as a possibility may be the product of South African police going after him with full force that week. Violence, it seems, does breed violence even in the best and noblest of us.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of eclectic interestingness and indiscriminate curiosity. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, BigThink and Huffington Post, and spends a disturbing amount of time curating interestingness on Twitter.
The Reading Experience Database (RED), hosted by the Open University, provides a vast, open-access compendium of British authors’ reading habits from 1450 through 1945. The resource is a continuously updated repository of literary references, compiled using excerpts of biographies, letters, newspapers, magazines, and other informative texts. Among other things, the database provides both a humorous and fascinating look at what various authors thought of their peers.
Virginia Woolf, it seems, championed Fyodor Dostoevsky (“It is directly obvious that he [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born.”), but spurned Henry James (“… we have his works here, and I read, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar…”). Robert Louis Stevenson, a friend of James’, was too conflicted about some of his writing (“I must break out with the news that I can’t bear the Portrait of a Lady. I read it all, and I wept, too; but I can’t stand your having written it, and I beg you will write no more of the like”). Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, characteristically contrarian, despised certain aspects of Dickens (“peers were surprised to hear him speak disparagingly of Dickens, the most popular novelist of the day. While Wilde admired the author’s humor and his gift for caricature he loathed Dickens’s moralizing”).
Don’t see your favorite British author’s delightfully snarky commentary? Help your fellow reader and submit it yourself.
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