We’ve written a fair amount on the various facets of Thomas Edison’s career, and somewhat less on his less-famous former employee-become-rival Nikola Tesla (who seems to polarize people in ways Edison doesn’t). Both inventors provoke all kinds of serious speculation, commentary, and debate. But even people having fun with these larger-than-life characters feel the need to pick sides. For example, there’s webcomic The Oatmeal’s “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived,” which obviously comes down hard in favor of Tesla. Then there’s Tetsuya Kurosawa Biographical comic Thomas Edison: Genius of the Electric Age, which gives the edge to Edison.
Now, in another showdown between the pioneering geniuses of the electric age, we have Epic Rap Battles of History, Season 2, with Edison and Tesla spitting rhymes to prove who should wear the top inventor’s crown. Previous Epic Rap Battles of History episodes pit Gandhi against Martin Luther King, Obama vs. Romney, and Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. They’re all pretty great, but this one goes out to the science history nerds (who have a sense of humor). The lyrics hit the high points of Edison and Tesla’s careers—Edison’s intellectual property theft, endless string of patents, use of direct current, and “stacking riches”; Tesla’s almost religious belief in the power of electricity, disinterest in business, grievances with Edison—and there are plenty of personal insults thrown into the mix.
Whether you’re a partisan of Edison or Tesla, or couldn’t care less either way, no doubt you’ll get a kick out of this. And for an added bonus, check out the “making of” video below.
Perhaps you noticed? During the past two years, the TED brand has morphed into something new. Once known for staging a couple of high-priced annual conferences, TED has recently launched a series of new products: TEDx conferences for the masses, TED Books, TED Radio, TED ED and Ads Worth Spreading. In the wake of all of this, some have questioned whether TED has grown too quickly, or to put it more colloquially, “jumped the shark.” There are days when TED feels like a victim of its own success. But there are other days — especially when it returns to its roots — where the organization can still be a vital force. That happens whenever TED wraps up its big annual conference, as it did two weeks ago, and puts some noteworthy talks online. (See, for example, Stewart Brand describing how scientists will bring extinct species back from the dead.) Or it happens when TED brings older talks from its archive to YouTube.
Which brings us to the talk above. Here we have David Christian, a professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, explaining the history of the world in less than 18 minutes, starting with the Big Bang and then covering another 13.7 billion years. Formally trained as a Russian historian, Christian began working on Big History in the 1980s, a meta discipline that “examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities.” Christian then popularized his newfangled way of telling history when he produced for the Teaching Company: Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. It didn’t hurt that Bill Gates stumbled upon the lectures and gave backing to The Big History Project, an online initiative that experiments with bringing Big History to high school students. The Big History Project got its start at the 2011 TED conference, with the talk presented above.
Last year, we posted on a song archive of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, it turns out, was also quite a singer. As she traveled through the American South and the Caribbean doing field research in the 1930s and ‘40s, Hurston collected and interpreted several folk songs and stories, sometimes working with folklorists Stetson Kennedy and Alan Lomax. Hurston dropped off the map for a few decades before a revival of her work in the 1970s caused literary scholars and historians to re-evaluate her place in American letters. One recent evaluation of her work and life, the 2008 PBS American Masters documentary Jump at the Sun, profiles the writer in all her independence, contrariness, and vigor. Unfortunately, the full documentary is not online, but you can order a copy of the award-winning film on DVD from California Newsreel or Amazon.
In the short clip above from Jump at the Sun, you can see footage Hurston shot herself, over which she sings, in her crystal clear alto, a bawdy old-time country blues song called “Uncle Bud.” Hurston called “Uncle Bud” a “jook song,” not the kind of thing sung around (or by) respectable ladies. The song comes from experiences with the infamous Chief Transfer Agent for the Texas prison system, “Uncle Bud” Russell, whose dreaded wagon, “Black Betty,” was possibly the reference for a work song immortalized by Lead belly, no stranger to Texas prisons (Russell also gets a name-check in Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special”).
Russell earned his notoriety, delivering 115,000 men and women to prison, including Clyde Barrow in 1930. The prison song, with equally profane, but slightly different lyrics, appeared on a 1960 album called The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men, compiled by Texas musicologist and folklorist Mack McCormick, and Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins had his own narrative of the lawman in “Bud Russell Blues.”
After Hurston’s brief rendition above, we see a photo montage of the author, smiling broadly, never without a rakishly cocked hat. Partly because of the work of folklorists and lovers of Americana like McCormick and Hurston, songs like “Uncle Bud” stayed in the lexicon of popular music, transmitted from obscure folk renditions to the blues and weaving together working-class black and white blues and folk traditions that were often never very far apart to begin with. Those worlds come together in Zydeco legend Boozoo Chavis’ take on “Uncle Bud,” but my favorite version by far is the lyrically cleaned-up, harmonica-driven stomper by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, recorded in 1956 (below).
It should surprise few to learn that Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry. But this fact about his life is dwarfed by those events that defined his political legacy, and this is also no surprise. Nevertheless, in the midst of the current Lincoln revival, the man and the statesman, I think it’s fitting to attend to Abraham Lincoln the poet. Certainly scholars have read his poetry in relation to his skillful prose and oratory. But, on its own, this writing gives us insight into the sensitivity of Lincoln’s less public modes of expression.
Was he a great poet? Well, it appears that he had at least three phases—the first, a youthful one in his teens and early twenties when he produced some silly juvenelia, “a number of crude and satirical verses.” The most popular of these is called “Chronicles of Reuben,” a local satire Lincoln scholar Robert Bray describes as “a series of pseudo-biblical prose and verse pieces that are, out of their local Indiana context, so topical as to be neither funny nor comprehensible.” The piece, written in 1828 to avenge himself upon a rival Indiana family, apparently had great effect on the neighbors, however. One of them, Joseph C. Richardson, claimed that the poem was “remembered here in Indiana in scraps better than the Bible.”
We have to credit frontier oral tradition for our knowledge of some of Lincoln’s more serious poems in his second phase, after he joined “a Kind of Poetical Society” in Illinois sometime between 1837–39. One neighbor, James Matheny, remembered the following worldly lines from a Lincoln poem called “On Seduction”:
Whatever Spiteful fools may Say—
Each jealous, ranting yelper—
No woman ever played the whore
Unless She had a man to help her.
If this is truly a stanza from Lincoln’s pen, the satirist is still very much in evidence—Swift could have written these lines—but the self-described “prairie lawyer” has grown philosophical and left the adolescent boundaries of local feuds and pranks.
His third, most serious phase begins when Lincoln returned to Indiana, after leaving Illinois briefly in an attempt to help Henry Clay’s failed presidential bid against James Polk. Lincoln called Indiana “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,” and yet it serves as a subject for a poem completed in 1846 called “My Childhood Home I See Again.” (The image above is of the first six stanzas of this long poem in Lincoln’s handwriting. Click here to see the remaining pages). Here in the first two stanzas (below), you can see the cutting wit of the younger, more confident man give way to a kind of wistful nostalgia worthy of Wordsworth:
Lincoln-as-poet continued in this thoughtful, mature voice in the remaining years of his life, though never equaling the poetic output of 1846. Somewhat out of character, the final documented piece of poetry from Lincoln comes from July 19, 1863. Written in response to the North’s victory in Gettysburg, “Verse on Lee’s Invasion of the North” is a short piece of doggerel that sees him returning to satire, writing in the voice of “Gen. Lee”:
Gen. Lee’s invasion of the North written by himself—
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees they got arter us, and
giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.
Surely the poem was written in a hurry, and with jubilant, triumphal glee, but if this is the last we heard from Lincoln the poet, it might be a shame, though it would not blot out the literary skill of poems like “My Childhood Home I See Again” and others like “The Bear Hunt” and “To Rosa,” which you can read here.
But there’s more to this story; in 2004, a historian discovered an unsigned poem called “The Suicide’s Soliloquy”—published in the August 25, 1838 issue of the Sangamo Journal, a Springfield newspaper—and believed the former president to be the poet. In the video above, listen to a moody, dramatic reading of the poem:
It is not known with certainty if Lincoln wrote this poem, but scholarly consensus inclines heavily in that direction, given its stylistic similarity to his other work from this period. “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” is as passionate and morbid as any of Edgar Allen Poe’s verse, and betrays Lincoln’s characteristic melancholy in its stormiest and most Romantic guise. NPR has the full poem and the story of its discovery.
One hundred years ago, America had only just begun talking about “avant garde” art. Before the famous “Armory Show,” no one was even using the term; after it, United States’ art-watchers had many reasons to. It’s what they saw on display at the exhibition, mounted by two dozen artists entirely without public funding. Properly called The International Exhibition of Modern Art, the show got its popular name by starting out in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. It then moved to Chicago and Boston, provoking shock, dismissal, and sometimes even appreciation across the East Coast and Midwest. A little Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp can do that to you.
Or at least, they do that to you if you live in 1913 and have never seen such bold destruction and reinvention of visual art’s established forms. To mark the Armory Show’s centennial, the Art Institute of Chicago has recreated its viewing experience on the web. There you can explore the galleries as Chicagoans actually saw them a century ago, albeit in black-and-white. The site also provides much in the way of context, offering articles on the exhibition’s genesis, program notes, legacy, and more. You can learn more about the impact of the Armory Show in this recent NPR piece, which quotes Museum of Modern Art curator Leah Dickerman on the subject: “It’s this moment in time, 100 years ago, in which the foundations of cultural practice were totally reordered in as great a way as we have seen. And that this marks a reordering of the rules of art-making — it’s as big as we’ve seen since the Renaissance.”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson was looking to become the new sheriff in town — the town being Aspen, Colorado. In a heated election, Thompson ran against a traditional, conservative candiate, Carrol Whitmire, on what he called the “freak power” platform, which mostly called for the legalization of marijuana and unconventional environmental protections.
As Thompson later explained in his essay “Freak Power in The Rockies,” hundreds of Haight-Ashbury refugees moved to Aspen after the ill-fated “Summer of Love” in 1967, and they became part of the general population. In the town, registered Republicans historically outweighed registered Democrats by a two-to-one margin.
But both camps were outweighed by independents, which included “a jangled mix of Left/Crazies and Birchers; cheap bigots, dope dealers, nazi ski instructors and spaced off ‘psychedelic farmers’ with no politics at all beyond self-preservation,” remembers Thompson. So, winning an election came down to registering indie voters and getting them to the polls — something that was easier said than done, it turns out.
In the short term, Hunter S. Thompson lost the “Battle of Aspen” by 300–500 votes, depending on whose accounts you read. In the long-term, he arguably won. 42 years after Thompson made the legalization of marijuana his central campaign promise, Colorado voters passed Amendment 64, legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Somewhere, the would-be gonzo politician is smiling.
Some online scrabbling led me to the BBC’s Horrible Histories’ brief overview of the “causes of World War I” (above). Wow. If only this series—and, ahem, the Internet—had existed when I was the boy’s age! I think it’s safe to say my attention would have been captured. It’s silly, yes, but that’s the whole point. The players’ over-the-top comedic style ensures that even the driest of historical facts will stick, as anyone who’s watched Michael Cera bring Alexander Hamilton to life in Drunk History can attest. It’s the perfect gateway for further study.
Horrible Histories’ take on World War I proved such a hit, the boy immediately delved into other periods, often when he was supposed to be doing other things, like playing Minecraft or watching YouTube (technically, I guess this sort of counts). Still it’s gratifying to hear him studding his conversation with casual references to the Borgias, the Tudors, and Martin Luther. It makes me want to learn more, or at least bring myself up-to-speed on the videos. In the words of Schoolhouse Rock, knowledge is power.
A WWI centennial’s looming, folks. Don’t get caught with your drawers down.
Ayun Halliday graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in theater and has been making up for it ever since. Follow her @AyunHalliday
On January 24 1965, Sir Winston Churchill, the man who led Britain through the dark hours of the Second World War, died aged 90 at his London home. By decree of Queen Elizabeth II, his body lay in state for three days in the Palace of Westminster and a state funeral was held at St Paul’s Cathedral on January 30. Churchill was the first statesman to be given a state funeral in the 2oth century — a funeral that saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005. That day, the BBC reported that “silent crowds lined the streets to watch the gun carriage bearing Sir Winston’s coffin leave Westminster Hall as Big Ben struck 09:45. The procession travelled slowly through central London to St. Paul’s Cathedral for the funeral service.” After the service, his coffin was taken by boat to Waterloo Station, where a specially prepared railway carriage took Churchill to his final resting place at Bladon near Woodstock, close to his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
This color footage of Churchill’s funeral is narrated by Walter Thompson, Churchill’s former bodyguard.
Bonus material:
A draft script for Winston Churchill’s obituary to be broadcast by the BBC World Service, prepared in 1962
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
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