Howard Zinn, the People’s historian, taught at Boston University for 24 years, until he died earlier this year. In late October, Bill Moyers delivered the first Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture during which, appropriately enough, he focuses on the challenges facing our democracy, and particularly America’s long drift toward plutocracy, where the rich get richer at the expense of the average citizen. The talk (followed by a Q&A session) runs a good two hours, and Moyers himself starts speaking at the 6:40 minute mark. You can watch the video here, or read the transcript here.
On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the best-known speeches in history: The Gettysburg Address. To pay homage to it, designer Adam Gault and illustrator Stefanie Augustine have rendered the immortal words in beautiful black-and-white typographic animation that visually captures the essence of Lincoln’s words as they are spoken.
For more on The Gettysburg Address, the Library of Congress has a fascinating exhibition of materials related to the address, including the earliest known draft and a short video on how the speech came to be. And for another visual treat, we recommend Jack Levin’s Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address Illustrated — a poignant and powerful selection of images which, coupled with Lincoln’s equally poignant and powerful words, are bound to put a lump in your throat.
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.
Let me set the scene: Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded Burma, a “backwater of the British Empire,” hoping to put the Chinese and British at a strategic disadvantage. (Get more details here.) Initially the Japanese campaign met with success, and, in early 1942, the British and local allies beat a retreat, trying to escape over the border to India. But when they reached the border, they found rivers, flooded by monsoons, blocking their way. That’s when a British tea planter named Gyles Mackrell stepped in and moved 200 refugees across the border using the only means available to them — elephants. This amazing story is now being told for the first time, thanks to the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and its short film (13 minutes) shown above. You can read more about the great elephant escape here.
Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, has lost some friends lately among geeks (term used lovingly, if not self-referentially) and conservatives. First came the suggestion that Twitter hasn’t made human change agents obsolete. We still need MLKs and Gandhis to change the world. And then, speaking at The New Yorker Festival earlier this month, Gladwell had to remind us of an inconvenient historical fact. During the Eisenhower presidency, taxes on the wealthiest Americans peaked at 91% (more than double what they are today). And, even more galling, life in America was just fine, even downright good…
Thanks Mary for sending this our way. Always appreciate the good tips.
The Astronomical Clock Tower, situated in Prague’s Old Town Square, just celebrated its 600th anniversary. And to help mark the occasion, artists projected visuals mappings onto the facade – ones that illuminated the history and symbolic significance of the tower for the crowd. These light shows are getting a little en vogue. Cambridge University recently punctuated its 800th anniversary celebration by turning its buildings into a canvas. And Ukraine marked its independence this year with a light show of its own.
The coronation of Nicholas II, the last Russian czar, took place in May 1896, an event captured in some of the oldest footage still in existence (above). The coronation was a high point, and, from there, it was largely downhill for Nicholas. In 1905, the czar lost a humiliating war against Japan, which then partly triggered an unsettling revolution later that year – one that forced the king to live within the constraints of a constitutional monarchy. But this was just the beginning. The real revolution came in 1917, and soon enough the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, executed Nicholas II, his wife and son, his four daughters and domestic staff in July 1918. Bloody Nicholas – he had a fair amount of blood on his own hands – was dead. And now the new communist/Soviet era was underway…
Related note: The Library of Congress hosts online a big series of photos from the Russian Empire circa. 1905 — 1915. You can access them via the top level, or by jumping directly into the full collection of images here. (Thanks Michael for the tip here.)
On September 26, 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon appeared in America’s first nationally televised presidential debate, an event witnessed by some 70 million Americans. Although radio listeners thought that Nixon handily won the debate (48% v. 21%), television viewers gave the edge to Kennedy (30% v. 29%) – the eventual winner of the election. On that September night, presidential politics entered the television age and never looked back.
Long ago, in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was the dominant language. And, for centuries, it remained the lingua franca in the Ancient Near East. But then it was gradually squeezed out by Aramaic, and it faded into oblivion once Alexander the Great Hellenized (Greekified) the region.
Now, 2,000+ years later, Akkadian is making a small comeback. At Cambridge University, Dr. Martin Worthington, an expert in Babylonian and Assyrian grammar, has started recording readings of poems, myths and other texts in Akkadian, includingThe Epic of Gilgamesh. This clip gives you a taste of what Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature, sounds like in its mother tongue. Or, you can jump into the full collection of readings right here.
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