Click the image above and you’ll enter an interactive/moving graphic that gives you a fairly nice genealogy of rock n roll and the many forms of music it later spawned. The graphic starts you with the blues, appalachian folk, and bluegrass. Eventually you hit the 1950s and the advent of rock. Then you keep traveling through time, reaching the hard rock, glam rock and punk of the 70s; the power metal and emerging grunge of the 80s; the post metal and neo folk of the 90s; and beyond. At any point, you can click the pause button, click on the name of a particular musical genre (eg Gothabilly), and hear a sample of the music. When you’re done, you might want to check out some of the related items below:
The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States remains a valuable historical resource today. But, for all of these years, it had one notable shortcoming. Around the time of its first publication, John K. Wright acknowledged that “The ideal historical atlas might well be a collection of motion-picture maps, if these could be displayed on the pages of a book without the paraphernalia of projector, reel, and screen.” The technology that would lend itself to creating motion-picture maps wasn’t available in the 1930s. But it is today. And thanks to the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, we can now view The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States in a new digital, sometimes animated format. If you want to see a good example of historical data put into motion, then you might want to check out this map of American Explorations in the West, 1803–1852. (Click here and then click “Animate” at the bottom of the screen.) This map will trace for you the expeditions of Lewis and Clark and many other explorers. Then, if you’re ready to be an explorer yourself, you can start your journey through the digitized atlas by entering the Table of Contents.
After reaching the rank of Sergeant during World War I, Alexander Woollcott returned to New York to become a drama critic for the New York Times. Woollcott was a man of large bulk and outsized personality, whose sharp, acerbic wit made him popular with his readers. According to The Ten-Year Lunch, an Oscar-winning documentary about the New York group of writers and journalists known as the Algonquin Round Table, Woollcott’s quick tongue made his bombastic presence nearly unbearable to his friends:
When he returned from the war, Woollcott boasted of his military adventures so often and so loudly that his friends grew tired of listening. He began every sentence with “When I was in the theatre of war…” Irritated by his pomposity, press agent Murdoch Pemberton lured Woollcott [to the Algonquin Hotel] with the promise of an ace pastry chef. The idea was to hold a sort of roast, at which a number of critics and journalists from around town would come and poke fun at him.
For better or worse, the attempt to puncture Woollcott’s ego at the Algonquin Hotel was unsuccessful. Rather than take offence, Woollcott was flattered by the attention, and the various figures in attendance also thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Serendipitously, the legendary luncheons of the Algonquin Round Table were born.
Most of the Table’s members had taken part in the war, to one degree or another: journalist Ruth Hale and her syndicated-columnist husband Heywood Broun had been war correspondents; New Yorker founder Harold Ross had edited the military newspaper Stars & Stripes; acclaimed columnist Franklin Pierce Adams had made Captain. Other members included poet and critic Dorothy Parker, a tragic romantic who had become the city’s most quotable woman. (Parker’s inexhaustible supply of witticisms still feels fresh today: when asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, Parker replied, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”) Parker’s best friend was humorist and essayist Robert Benchley, who had once written an essay exploring Newfoundland fishing rights for his International Law class at Harvard from the unorthodox perspective of the fish. Frequently joining them was Neysa McNein, a sought-after illustrator who hosted the Table’s afternoon gatherings in her studio, where Irving Berlin could occasionally be found playing the piano.
The near-daily meetings at the Algonquin Hotel fostered a close-knit cultural fraternity of New York’s best writers, illustrators, and artists. The group vacationed together at their jointly-owned Vermont island, played games of poker wagering houses and honeymoons, and criticized each other’s work. Whenever a member of the Round Table would make a conceited remark, everyone would immediately rise and bow, honoring their friend’s regal affectations. The only exception to the rule was Woollcott, whose bread and butter pomposity was tolerated by virtue of its regularity.
With its interviews of original Table members, the documentary is a tantalizing look at the lives of the men and women who ruled New York’s cultural milieu during the heyday of the printed word. Equal parts wish for the idyllic past and history of New York’s biggest cultural players, The Ten-Year Lunch leaves one with a pang of oddly potent nostalgia. We can’t recommend it enough.
In the image above, see Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
When young artists, be they writers, painters, or musicians, aim to strike it big, they invariably choose to move to New York. Brooklyn lofts, hopes of finding a likeminded smart set, and the promise of good times beckon countless young men and women to develop their creative careers in a city whose history teems with outsized aspirations and even larger personalities. New York has, after all, been a hub for artistic luminaries since the early 20th century.
In the 1961 documentary entitled New York In The Twenties, above,Walter Cronkite gives a snapshot of the talented crowd that was once drawn in by the city’s cultural riptide during the 1920s. The short video consists of interviews with the publisher Alfred Knopf; New York Herald Tribune editor Stanley Walker; and Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Green Pastures, Marc Connelly. Walker plays the part of the consummate New York newspaperman, pining for the days when decent citizens weren’t forced to rub shoulders with the boors now infesting the Westchester and Connecticut trains. Connelly, in more affable fashion, describes the fabled 1920s group of creative minds known as the Algonquin Round Table:
Alexander Woollcott was searing, acid, rude; I used to feel sometimes his only exercise was rancour. But, he was engaging, was compelling, and amusing… Edna Ferber, young, industrious, she used to scare us all to death by her habit of industry. George Kaufman was certainly one of the wittiest of that group. George’s wit… had the sharpness of a silver point etching… There was… Harold Ross, founder of the New Yorker. There was speculation about Ross, his curious head of hair; it was very high, very thick. Somebody once said that that jungle picture Chang had been filmed in it. I think it was George Kaufmann that once said he looked like a dishonest Lincoln.
A lot of people who knew nothing about the personal lives or the attitudes … of the people at the round table… thought that it was a mutual admiration society and a logrolling organization. It was anything but that because I promise you, the worst pannings ever received for our books or our plays came from the critical friends who were members of that group.
Alfred Knopf, in turn, discusses the glory days of publishers and writers, as well as the genius of H. L. Mencken, whom he describes as “the greatest editor… that I’ve ever known.”
Viewing the halcyon days of New York’s creative scene, with its jazz clubs and speakeasies, it’s no wonder that Knopf, Walker, and Connelly’s accounts leave one with an ineluctable sense of nostalgia. Of course, with its unceasing influx of artists, the city’s substance remains the same today. It’s just that its Bloomberg-era sterility has led to a change in style.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Without further ado, and in no particular order, here is the list:
Caracalla & Geta(198–217 C.E.) –Unlike some of the other emperors we’ve gathered here, Caracalla really was a jerk of colossal proportions. After reigning over Rome for a few years alongside his father, Septimius Severus, Caracalla took charge of the Roman Empire in tandem with his younger brother, Geta, in 211. The reign of brotherly love didn’t last long: after failing to assassinate Geta during the revelry that was the festival of Saturnalia, Caracalla had him slaughtered in their mother’s arms by loyal centurions during a peace agreement meeting.
To follow with this fratricidal motif, Caracalla himself was murdered in 217 by a man whose brother Caracalla may have had killed just days earlier. Caracalla had stopped on the side of a road to urinate while journeying to Edessa, and was dispatched by Julius Martialis, one of his bodyguards, with a single sword blow. Martialis, in turn, succumbed to an arrow fired by an Imperial Guard archer. We presume that Martialis didn’t have any more brothers, because things seem to have ended there.
Joannes(423–425 C.E.) – By the rare extant accounts, Joannes seems to have been a senior civil servant of some ability who had, to his detriment, failed to establish a firm grip on the Empire. Although Procopius, an antique scholar, had called him “both gentle and well-endowed with sagacity and thoroughly capable of valorous deeds,” Joannes was quickly engulfed in conflict with the eastern part of the Empire. In 425, the eastern Empire’s army captured him, cut off his hands, and placed him on a donkey to be paraded and jeered at in a hippodrome. Having suffered both insult and injury, Joannes was put out of his misery and decapitated.
Commodus(177–192 C. E.) – On paper, Commodus should have made an exemplary emperor. Both his grandfather and father were emperors before him, and his father, Marcus Aurelius, was praised both as a ruler and one of Stoicism’s central thinkers. Commodus, however, inherited neither his father’s philosophical inclinations nor his political smarts. To cap off a reign plagued by political strife, Commodus let himself fall victim to some destructive megalomania: after Rome was engulfed in a conflagration, Commodus declared himself to be the new Romulus and ceremoniously re-founded the city under the new name of Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana. The renaming of his empire’s foremost city didn’t quite cut it, however, and Commodus resorted to renaming the months of the year after his 12 names. As December of 192 (known, by this point, as Pius of 192) drew to a close, Commodus was poisoned by his concubine, but vomited the substance, whereupon his wrestling training partner was sent in by a number of senators to strangle the emperor in the bathtub.
Valerian(253–259 C. E.) – If Joannes’ demise strikes you as having been somewhat undignified, Valerian’s end was a full-blown assault on human decency. Lactantius, an early Christian author, claimed that after his capture by the Persian king Shapur I, Valerian was put to use as a regal footstool to help the Persian ruler mount his horse. Valerian, understandably, expressed some consternation at such treatment, and offered Shapur a hefty sum in exchange for his freedom. There are two versions of what transpired next. In the first, Shapur expresses his disdain for Valerian’s measly offer by pouring molten gold down the former emperor’s throat. In the second, Shapur also expresses his disdain, albeit in a more creative fashion, this time by flaying Valerian’s skin and subsequently stuffing it with straw to be put on display. Thankfully, there’s evidence to contradict Lactantius’ account, which leads some historians to believe that Valerian was used as neither furniture nor gold receptacle, but rather lived a quiet life with some of his soldiers in an indeterminate Persian city. For his sake, we hope they’re right.
Above, you can see “The Humiliation of Valerian by Shapur,” a pen and black ink sketch created by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1521.
For a full list of gory deaths, head on over to The Awl.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
There are myriad New Year’s Eve customs worldwide. In Japan, toshikoshi soba noodles are eaten to bring in the coming year. In North America, finding someone to share a New Year’s Eve kiss with as the clock winds down has become a boon to the romantically-challenged. In Germany, however, a different tradition has taken form: every year on December 31st, TV networks broadcast an 18-minute-long black and white two-hander comedy skit.
In 1963, Germany’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk television station recorded a sketch entitled Dinner For One, performed by the British comics Freddie Frinton and May Warden. The duo depicted an aging butler serving his aristocratic mistress, Miss Sophie, dinner on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
Although four additional spots have been set at the table, the nonagenarian’s friends have long since passed away, and the butler is forced to take their places in drinking copious amounts of alcohol while toasting Miss Sophie’s health. Hilarity, as it is wont to do in such cases, ensues.
Since its initial recording, the clip has become a New Year’s Eve staple in Germany. Although Dinner For One has never been broadcast in the U. S. or Canada, the clip has spread throughout Europe to Norway, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond the continent’s shores, to South Africa and Australia. In Sweden, a bowdlerized 11-minute version of the clip has been produced, where, for decency’s sake, much of the butler’s boozing was excised alongside its attendant comedic effect. In Denmark, after the national television network failed to broadcast the sketch in 1985, an avalanche of viewer complaints has guaranteed its subsequent yearly appearance. Although the category is now defunct, the clip held the Guinness World Record for Most Frequently Repeated TV Program. As for why the video’s garnered so much attention? No one’s really sure. The Wall Street Journal’s Todd Buell posits that the sketch’s easy to understand English combined with a German longing for security and simplicity may have led to its iconic status. To me, however, it seems that the finely tuned physical comedy translates readily beyond any linguistic boundaries, and simply hit the right note at the right time.
Above, you can view the original 18-minute comedic opus and celebrate New Year’s day in the same way that much of Europe brought in 2014 (don’t mind the German introduction — the video is in English). In future years, you can always find Dinner for One in our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
From all of us at Open Culture to you, have a happy new year!
Censorship, as most serious filmgoers know, shaped the sensibility of all the pictures we know from the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. It did so in the form of 1930’s “Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code),” which “set up a small jury to review films for content,” at first “still without teeth and largely mocked by industry insiders.” But that changed in a big way when “the American Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church organized The Legion of Decency and, in 1934, with the support of Protestant and Jewish Organizations, began calling for boycotts of films deemed unacceptable. [ … ] The Hollywood studios, still reeling from the losses of 1933 due in large part to the delayed effects of the Great Depression, were forced to act.” That summary comes from “The History of Hollywood Censorship and the Ratings System,” a brief but in-depth lesson produced by Filmmaker IQ. Its video version appears at the top. Below, you can watch 1941’s The Outlaw, the bust size of whose star Jane Russell had the censors demanding “37 specific reshoots.”
The complete story of censorship and ratings in Hollywood involves such elements of American history and culture as not just the Great Depression and the Roman Catholic Church, but the 1919 World Series Gambling scandal, the Chicago’s Women’s Municipal League, mighty systems of production, the sport of boxing, Howard Hughes, and of course, the almighty dollar. Eventually, filmmakers began to simply defy the Hays Code; you can watch Otto Preminger’s famous example of just that, the 1953 comedy The Moon is Blue (possessed, censors said, of “an unacceptably light attitude towards seduction, illicit sex, chastity, and virginity”). In 1968, the weakened Code’s replacement arrived: the Motion Picture Association of America’s Ratings system and its still-familiar G, PG, R, and X (PG-13 was introduced in 1984; NC-17 replaced X in 1990). Quaint as these measures may now seem, the lesson tells us that controversy has remained. “Some may say that films were sexier and scarier under the censorship of the production code – for nothing that can be seen is as tantalizing and horrifying as what the imagination and anticipation can conjure. But given the choice between freedom and censorship, freedom is the only sustainable option.”
The Strong National Museum of Play, located in Rochester, NY, is a fun children’s museum. But the institution also has serious research archives, stuffed with toys, games, and records of the toy industry. Its online collections, which currently boast 55,068 objects, take a holiday browser on a trip into a figurative grandma’s attic, chock-full of the playthings people loved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The online archives are divided into four categories: “Toys”, “Dolls”, “Games”, and “More.” Each of these four sections is further subdivided into topically-specific groups, chosen by the archivists.
The collection’s strength is also its weakness: there are so many toys that it can be easy to get overwhelmed. The subject divisions are helpful here. As somebody with an interest in gender and childhood, I found myself fascinated by the housekeeping toys—kids used to use ovens that were heated with real coals!—and that was an easy way to narrow down my browse. Subject groupings for toy soldiers, celebrity dolls, and board games also piqued my interest.
It’s fun to look around for toys from your own childhood (I found a few), but if you’re interested in history, you might find the echoes of historical events to be even more intriguing. Late-nineteenth-century kids played with a paper doll inspired by the circus celebrity Tom Thumb; children of the 1930s had licensed dolls of the media-sensation Dionne Quintuplets; a playset from 1940 featured grim, suited-up “Paratroops in Action.”
Mousing over the thumbnails will allow you to see the item’s name. If you see a blue “Learn More” tag, be sure to click through; that means that the item’s image will be accompanied by an interpretive historical note written by the Strong’s archivists. These vary in length, and contain intriguing tidbits. Did you know, for example, that Holly Hobbie was a real person: the artist Holly Ulinkas Hobbie? Or that the famous artist Charles Dana Gibsonhad a now-forgotten follower, Nell Brinkley, who illustrated the flapper era?
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
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