In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000

in History, Science | December 13th, 2013

Ladies Home Journal Dec 1900 paleofuture paleo-future

At least since that 17th cen­tu­ry archi­tect of the sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion, Sir Fran­cis Bacon (who was most­ly right), peo­ple have been mak­ing pre­dic­tions about the tech­nolo­gies and social advance­ments of the future. And since Bacon, sci­en­tists and futur­is­tic writ­ers have been espe­cial­ly in demand dur­ing times of great change and uncer­tain­ty, such as at the turn of the last cen­tu­ry. In 1900, civ­il engi­neer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in Ladies’ Home Jour­nal claimed to have sur­veyed “the most learned and con­ser­v­a­tive minds in Amer­i­ca… the wis­est and most care­ful men in our great­est insti­tu­tions of sci­ence and learn­ing.”

Spec­i­fy­ing advances like­ly to occur 100 years thence, “before the dawn of 2001,” Watkins culled 28 pre­dic­tions about such things as trav­el and the trans­mis­sion of infor­ma­tion over great dis­tances, bio­log­i­cal and genet­ic muta­tions, and the domes­tic com­forts of the aver­age con­sumer. Sev­er­al of the pre­dic­tions are very Bacon­ian indeed—as per the strange list at the end of Bacon’s sci­ence fic­tion frag­ment New Atlantis, a text obsessed with alter­ing the appear­ance of the nat­ur­al world for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son oth­er than that it could be done. Watkins’ list includes such pre­dic­tions as “Peas as Large as Beets,” “Black, Blue, and Green Ros­es,” and “Straw­ber­ries as Large as Apples.” Some are Bacon­ian in more sin­is­ter ways, and these are also a bit more accu­rate. Take the below, for exam­ple:

There will be No Wild Ani­mals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exter­mi­nat­ed. The horse will have become prac­ti­cal­ly extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for rac­ing, hunt­ing and exer­cise. The auto­mo­bile will have dri­ven out the horse. Cat­tle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fat­tened hog of to-day. A cen­tu­ry ago the wild hog could out­run a horse. Food ani­mals will be bred to expend prac­ti­cal­ly all of their life ener­gy in pro­duc­ing meat, milk, wool and oth­er by-prod­ucts. Horns, bones, mus­cles and lungs will have been neglect­ed.

I would defer to ecol­o­gists and meat indus­try watch­dogs to con­firm my intu­itions, but it does seem that some of this, except­ing the exter­mi­na­tion of ver­min and horns, has come to pass or is very like­ly in regard to sev­er­al species. Anoth­er pre­dic­tion, this one about our own species, is laugh­ably opti­mistic:

Every­body will Walk Ten Miles. Gym­nas­tics will begin in the nurs­ery, where toys and games will be designed to strength­en the mus­cles. Exer­cise will be com­pul­so­ry in the schools. Every school, col­lege and com­mu­ni­ty will have a com­plete gym­na­si­um. All cities will have pub­lic gym­na­si­ums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regard­ed as a weak­ling.

We’re much clos­er to the future of Pixar’s Wall‑E than any­thing resem­bling this sce­nario (unless you live in the world of Cross­fit). Anoth­er pre­dic­tion is both dead on and dead wrong at once. Claim­ing that there will be “from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 peo­ple in the Amer­i­c­as and its pos­ses­sions by the lapse of anoth­er cen­tu­ry” did in fact turn out to be almost uncan­ni­ly accurate—current esti­mates are some­where around 300,000,000. The “pos­ses­sions” allud­ed to, how­ev­er, dis­play the atti­tude of blithe Mon­roe doc­trine expan­sion­ism that held the nation in its sway at the turn of the cen­tu­ry. The pre­dic­tion goes on to say that most of the “South and Cen­tral Amer­i­can republics would be vot­ed into the Union by their own peo­ple.” A few more of Watkins’ pre­dic­tions, some pre­scient, some pre­pos­ter­ous:

Tele­phones Around the World. Wire­less tele­phone and tele­graph cir­cuits will span the world.

Store Pur­chas­es by Tube. Pneu­mat­ic tubes instead of store wag­ons, will deliv­er pack­ages and bun­dles.

Hot and Cold Air from Spig­ots. Ris­ing ear­ly to build the fur­nace fire will be a task of the old­en times.

Ready-Cooked Meals will be Bought from estab­lish­ments sim­i­lar to our bak­eries of to-day [see the above Wall‑E ref­er­ence]

There will be No C, X, or Q in our every-day alpha­bet. They will be aban­doned because unnec­es­sary.

Aeriel War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twen­ty-five miles or more, and will hurl any­where with­in such a radius shells explod­ing and destroy­ing whole cities.

How Chil­dren will be Taught. A uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion will be free to every man and woman.

Ah, if only that last one had come true! To read all of Watkins pre­dic­tions in detail, click on the image above for a larg­er, read­able, ver­sion of the full arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Pre­dic­tions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Lat­er — in 2014

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

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Imag­ine How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

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

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Oxford University Presents the 550-Year-Old Gutenberg Bible in Spectacular, High-Res Detail

in History, Religion | December 12th, 2013

The great British empiri­cist Fran­cis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’s print­ing 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.

This Tues­day, The Polon­sy Foun­da­tion Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project, which aims to dig­i­tize the col­lec­tions of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican’s Bib­liote­ca Apos­toli­ca, made a vir­tu­al ver­sion of the Guten­berg Bible avail­able online. Read­ers flu­ent in vul­gate can now put down their dog-eared bibles and enter the infor­ma­tion age with this fright­en­ing­ly high-res­o­lu­tion cov­er-to-cov­er scan of Gutenberg’s orig­i­nal print­ing. In addi­tion to exam­in­ing its fine­ly drawn ini­tials and curlicues, you can also browse oth­er ear­ly bibles, includ­ing a beau­ti­ful­ly col­ored 13th cen­tu­ry Hebrew tome, and the del­i­cate illus­tra­tions with­in a 10th cen­tu­ry Greek vol­ume. We’ve includ­ed two images below:

Bible image 1
Bible image 2
View the first por­tion of the dig­i­tized col­lec­tions here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

How the King James Bible For­ev­er Changed Eng­lish: 400th Anniver­sary Cel­e­brat­ed with Fun Videos

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Errol Morris Meditates on the Meaning and History of Abraham Lincoln’s Last Photograph

in History, Photography | December 11th, 2013

LincolnRetouched

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.

LincolnCracked

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.

Pro­logue: Pre­mo­ni­tions

Part 1: Feb­ru­ary 5, 1865

Part 2: The Pro­lep­tic Crack

Part 3: In the Cau­ca­sus

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Errol Mor­ris Film Asks Whether We Will Ever Know the Truth About the Kennedy Assas­si­na­tion

The Last Sur­viv­ing Wit­ness of the Lin­coln Assas­si­na­tion

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

The Poet­ry of Abra­ham Lin­coln

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

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

in Archives, History, Life | December 11th, 2013

NewYorkNoiseComplaints

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 la Coco 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.

CityNoiseSourcesShot

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.

via i09

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Hous­es Over 17,400 Folk Record­ings From 1946 to the 1990s

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

The Chal­lenge of Archiv­ing Sound + Vision in the 21st Cen­tu­ry

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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Hear King Edward VIII Explain Why He Abdicated The Crown For Love, 77 Years Ago Today

in History, Radio | December 10th, 2013

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:

Edward_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.

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Google’s Moving Ad About 1947 Partition of India & Pakistan Tops 10 Million Views

in Google, History, Television | December 9th, 2013

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.

Don’t miss any­thing from Open Cul­ture. Sign up for our Dai­ly Email orRSS Feed. And we’ll send qual­i­ty cul­ture your way, every day.

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The Pulp Fiction Archive: The Cheap, Thrilling Stories That Entertained a Generation of Readers (1896–1946)

in Archives, Art, Books, Comics/Cartoons, History | December 8th, 2013

Phantm_d

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.

To browse the com­plete data­base, head over to The Pulp Mag­a­zines Project.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives Sneak Peek of Pulp Fic­tion to Jon Stew­art (1994)

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

Did Shake­speare Write Pulp Fic­tion? (No, But If He Did, It’d Sound Like This)

Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

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Nelson Mandela’s First-Ever TV Interview (1961)

in History, Life | December 5th, 2013

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nel­son Man­dela Archive Goes Online (With Help From Google)

The Nel­son Man­dela Dig­i­tal Archive Goes Online

U2 Releas­es a Nel­son Man­dela-Inspired Song, “Ordi­nary Love”

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.

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