When archivist Stacey Chandler was combing through one of the “Massachusetts” files recently at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, she stumbled on something unexpected: a letter to Kennedy from an obscure writer named Kurt Vonnegut, volunteering his services on Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
The letter (click the image above to see it larger) was written on August 4, 1960, when Vonnegut was a struggling fiction writer and a failed Saab dealer living on Cape Cod, in the town of West Barnstable, Massachusetts. He had written two novels: Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959). In a few declarative sentences, Vonnegut outlines his writing experience and offers his help. There is no record at the JFK Library of a reply from Kennedy and, according to Rebecca Onion at Slate, no mention of the subject in two Vonnegut biographies.
“I am thirty-eight,” writes Vonnegut, “have been a freelance for ten years. I’ve published two novels, and am a regular contributor of fiction to The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and so on. On occasion, I write pretty well.”
From the The Finnish Defence Forces comes the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, a collection of 160,000 photographs taken during World War II when Finland fought to free itself from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Preserved in their original state, the pictures “portray life on the home front, ruins from bombings, the war industry and events that happened behind the front lines.” As you can imagine, some of the photos can be disturbing.
On a brighter note, let me add this. You can download each and every photo, and use them for educational purposes. The archive only asks that you give proper attribution by mentioning “SA-kuva” as the source. And, indeed, “SA-kuva” should be given credit for the image above.
In the early ’90s, the so-called “Iron Archives” of Russian political documents from the Cold War era opened up to historians, shedding light on the earliest days of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin’s diplomatic alliance.
But not all of the Russian documents were declassified at that time. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has launched a new digital archive containing recently declassified materials from some 100 different international collections, including a cable Mao sent to Commander Filippov (Stalin’s alias) eagerly detailing his plans to study Russia and complaining about his poor health.
The subsequent exchange between the two world leaders is as banal as their later correspondence would be ideological. Mao suggests, once his health improves, that they use the aerodrome in Weixian for his departure and he includes the exact dimensions of the landing strip. One wonders whether Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres worked so closely together on travel details for their meetings in March.
The details contained in the thousands of cables, telegrams and memos are part of the fun. Other documents exchanged between the KGB chairman and East German Minister in July, 1981 include blunt language about the difficulties of reading the Reagan Administration’s intentions and the importance of quashing the Polish Solidarity Movement.
Because the world’s biggest issues tend to have long roots, there is a lot of material here that echoes today’s headlines. Here, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs records a 1958 memo about his assessment of North Korea’s plans for a nuclear program.
During a 1960 global communist delegation meeting, Mao Zedong spoke at length with Che Guevara about sugar sales, American influence and counter-revolutionaries.
As a side note, the Wilson Center is a one of the more intellectual memorials to an American president. Woodrow Wilson was, after all, the only President of the United States to hold a Ph.D. The Center is one of the world’s top think tanks, with research and projects focused on U.S.-Russia relations, the Middle East, North Korea and, oddly, emerging nanotechnologies. But, of course, the Wilson Center is more known for its centrist analysis of international diplomacy issues.
The new digital archive (whose tagline is “International History Declassified”) offers several ways to search: by place, year (beginning with1938) or subject. For scholars or history buffs, this is a trove worth browsing.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website: .
In the past, we’ve brought you sound recordings from the 19th century — recordings that recapture the long lost voices of figures likes Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Gladstone,Tchaikovsky, and Thomas Edison. Now, thanks to the “dramatic application of digital technology,” the Smithsonian brings you (quite fittingly) the lost voice of the telephone’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. According to biographer Charlotte Gray, Bell recorded his voice onto discs while conducting sound experiments between 1880 and 1886. Although the discs remained in the Smithsonian’s possession for decades, researchers lacked the technical ability to play them back, and Bell’s voice went “mute” until Carl Haber, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, figured out how to take high resolutions scans of the discs and convert them into playable audio files. That’s what you can hear below. In the short recording dated April 15, 1885, the inventor declares: “Hear my voice — Alexander Graham Bell.”
Like so many daily comestibles we completely take for granted—salt, sugar, and (far fewer of us) tobacco—coffee has a long and often brutal history. And like many of these substances, it tends to be addictive. But coffee has also inspired a longstanding social tradition that shows no signs of ever going out of fashion. It’s a drug that makes us thinky and chatty and sociable (I for one don’t speak a human language until I’ve had my first cup). It’s these contradictions of coffee history—its complicity in slave economies and the Enlightenment public square—that Mark Pendergrast takes on in his new book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. Pendergrast puts it this way:
One of the ironies about coffee is it makes people think. It sort of creates egalitarian places — coffeehouses where people can come together — and so the French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses. On the other hand, that same coffee that was fueling the French Revolution was also being produced by African slaves who had been taken to Santo Domingo, which we now know as Haiti.
In the interview above with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Pendergrast explains his interest in coffee history as a way to look at the “relationship between the have-nots and the haves.” His investigation is another foray into the hundreds of years of European colonial history that gave us both massive global inequality and Starbucks on every corner. Listen to the short interview, read Pendergrast’s book, and the next time you get thinky over coffee, you may just think a lot about how coffee shaped the world.
When Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945 in Berlin (footage here), the Second World War may have been over for Europe, but the war on the Pacific front waged on as Japan refused to surrender. Only after the fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after the Soviets invaded Japanese-held Manchuria, did Emperor Hirohito accept the hopelessness of the situation and agree to surrender on August 15. When the official radio announcement (recording here) was broadcast — due to time zone differences on August 14 in the U.S. — the news spread like wildfire and the day became known as “Victory over Japan Day”, or simply as “VJ Day.” Spontaneous celebrations erupted all over the United States, but especially on Hawaii, where the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 leading the US to officially enter World War II.
One of these spontaneous celebrations in Honolulu was captured on Kodachrome 16mm film and has been digitally restored. One commenter on Vimeo has identified all of the exact locations here.
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.
Popular Scienceis the fifth oldest continuously-published monthly magazine—a long way of saying that the magazine has done a fine job of maintaining a niche in a crazily fast-paced industry. Founded in 1872 by science writer Edward Youmans to reach an audience of educated laypeople, Popular Science today combines reviews of the latest gadgets with stories about innovation in design and science. It’s an organized mishmash of news about “the future now,” liberally defined. A recent issue included stories about the military’s use of 3‑D printing and an astrophysicist who questions whether Shakespeare wrote the entire Folio.
With that kind of breadth, the magazine’s archives cover just about everything. And it’s easy to browse through back issues, dating all the way back to 1872, since the magazine teamed up with Google to put a searchable archive on the web. The earliest issues, like this one from February 1920, feature color covers that bring to mind science fiction with a fascination for the imagined future.
One of the cool things about the magazine is its equal attention to new and old technology. Search for “scissors” and you will find this 1964 article about the mechanics of sharpening your own scissors. The archive also offers another search tool that returns results in a visual word frequency grid, which is especially cool if you click the “animate” button. Any social historians out there able to explain why the word “scissor” would appear so often in the mid-20th century?
Interestingly, although the word “internet” dates back to the 1960s, the word didn’t appear in the magazine’s pages until 1989.
Period advertisements are included, which adds to the fun. This issue from September, 1944 includes a house-advertisement on the table of contents page calling for all collectors of back issues to consider surrendering them for the war cause. “There’s a war going on and this is no time for sentiment,” the ad urges. “Grit your teeth and dig out those stacks of back numbers. Then turn them over to your local paper salvage drive!” Enter the archive here.
So much has been written about hand-written letters, mostly lamenting their death. What else can be added about the beautiful vulnerability of handwriting and the satisfying feel of paper stationary and envelopes, not to mention the miracle of letter delivery? Think of all those heartsick soldiers in wars old and modern receiving an actual letter from home, thousands of miles away.
The only news about letter writing is that we continue to discover its value. Just recently Cambridge University published some 1,200 letters exchanged between Charles Darwin and his closest friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. The letters span 40 years of Darwin’s working life, from 1843 to his death in 1882, and join the other letters in the Darwin Correspondence Project.
There is so much to appreciate about these letters. Call it 19th century bromance, if you must, but the correspondence between Darwin and Hooker touched on nearly every subject, scientific and personal. Darwin wrote Hooker for his help negotiating with publishers, for his opinion about whether seeds from islands without four-legged animals are ever hook-shaped, and for his support after his 6‑year-old daughter Maria died.
From a scientific point of view the most important letter may be the one Darwin wrote Hooker on January 11, 1844. Writing from his home, Down House in Kent, Darwin fires questions at Hooker about seeds, seashells and Arctic species—his mind obviously a blur of activity—and then describes that his work has taken a “presumptuous” turn. After years of research and collecting specimens, he was beginning to form an idea that “species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”
Fifteen years later Darwin published On the Origin of Species. (Find it on our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.)
In his letters to Hooker, himself a great botanist and explorer, Darwin works out and worries over his ideas. In one letter he expresses impatience with all other existing explanations for the geographical distribution of plants.
The Correspondence Project has archived more than 7,500 of Darwin’s letters altogether, including the mail he sent home while at sea aboard The Beagle. Darwin was 22 when he joined a team to chart the coast of South America, a trip that was planned for two years but which stretched into five. After a bout of seasickness, Darwin wrote home to his father.
A quick aside to those who long for the days of long letters and who believe that our IQs drop a point with each text: Take note of Darwin’s liberal use of ampersands, numerals and quaint 19th century contractions (sh’d for should, etc.). IMHO, these are all just Victorian shortcuts to speed up the process of handwriting when the mind can work so much more quickly.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website: .
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