When the historian Timothy Snyder left Yale for the University of Toronto in 2024, he took with him the practice of occasionally putting his course lectures online, making them available to anyone who cares to learn from them. Above, you can watch ten lectures from his recent course Hitler and Stalin Today. In this course:
Snyder examines the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instruct us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. The course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century and what lessons we should carry forward.
This course is for “anyone interested in understanding the relationship between history and contemporary democracy.” You can stream the lectures above, or watch them on YouTube.
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!
Frank Lloyd Wright was often strapped for cash. In that respect, he had something in common with Vincent van Gogh, who passed most of his much shorter life in more dire circumstances. Unlike Wright, who enjoyed decades of fame at the pinnacle of the American architectural profession, van Gogh remained practically unknown until after his death. But if they’ve encountered one another in the afterlife, they’ve certainly discussed one subject above all others: their shared appreciation for Japanese woodblock prints. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the collection of 500 such works of art that van Gogh left behind. At the end of Wright’s life in 1959, he owned about 6,000, many of which his estate had to sell to pay both Japanese art dealers and American tax collectors.
We could say that Wright died as he lived, advanced age having not evidently diminished either his financial recklessness or his obsession with ukiyo‑e. The masters of that classical “art of the floating world” like Hokusai and Hiroshige were among his favorite artists of any kind. When still a teenager, Wright went to work for the architect Joseph Silsbee, who’d built a chapel for his uncle.
“Silsbee’s cousin, Ernest Fenollosa, happened to be the world’s leading Western expert on Japanese art at the time,” writes Kevin Nute at The Conversation. It isn’t certain how well the young Wright knew Fenollosa — or indeed when he began collecting ukiyo‑e, writes Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan author Julia Meech-Pekarik, though he may have seen both Hokusai and Hiroshige’s works at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, “about the time he opened his practice in Oak Park.”
Eight years later, “Wright made his first voyage to Japan in pursuit of prints, and he did indeed return with enough expertise to stage an exhibition of his own Hiroshige collection at the Art Institute of Chicago in March of 1906.” He returned for two months in 1913, making it clear that he was only interested in using that time to acquire more prints. Later, while working on the Imperial Hotel between 1917 and 1922, he spent a total of more than three years there, later writing that “the pursuit of the Japanese print became my constant recreation while in Tokio,” a quest whose “adventures and excursions would take place at night or sometimes call for a journey by day to distant places.” This positioned him well to take on a sideline as a dealer (or as he liked to call himself, a merchant) of Japanese art in a United States only just becoming aware of its beauty — an especially advantageous condition in architecturally lean years.
Wright valued ukiyo‑e, about which he published a book in 1912, for its sense of order, structure, nature, and simplicity. “Five lines where three are enough is stupidity,” he wrote. “Nine pounds where three are sufficient is stupidity. But to eliminate expressive words that intensify or vivify meaning in speaking or writing is not simplicity.” In his own form, he understood full well that “expressive changes of surface, emphasis of line, and especially textures of material, may go to make facts eloquent — forms more significant.” But it was Hokusai, Hiroshige, and countless other commercial artists of that earlier time and distant land that changed his approach to building in the first place. “When I saw the print and I saw the elimination of the insignificant and simplicity of vision, together with the sense of rhythm and the importance of design, I began to see nature in a totally different way.” And thus, thanks to Japanese art, did that most American of all architects begin taking shape.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” At the time, such a declaration was still fairly bold, as was the reasoning he provided for it. Nearly three decades thereafter, he included in his collection Portraits from Memory another, shorter piece, “Why I Am Not a Communist.” That description was safe to apply to oneself in 1954, at least in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. It would have been riskier for those who moved in intellectual circles, as a celebrated philosopher like Russell most certainly did. What’s more, his criticism extended not just to communism as then instantiated by certain societies in the world, but to the thought of Karl Marx himself.
Russell makes two charges against Marx: “one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.” In his view, the author of Capital commits intellectual fraud by opportunistically accepting Thomas Malthus’ dire prediction of population growth (while rejecting it at other times), as well as applying David Ricardo’s theory of value, which describes it as a kind of embodied labor, to wages but not the prices of manufactured goods.
“He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.” Marx sees their uprising against capitalists as inevitable due to his “extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago” and belief in “a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions.”
This dismissal of Marx’s worldview as “mere mythology” has something in common with Russell’s critique of Christianity, and not coincidentally so. “I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other,” he says in the clip above. “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt.” And “if a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat, but he really wanted is the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element that his philosophy produced disaster.” There are, perhaps, arguments to be made that communism, as practiced in, for example, the Soviet Union, took the form it did precisely because it departed from Marxist lines. Whether that was better or worse than the alternative is a matter no philosopher can settle.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Many who read this will remember watching television on a black-and-white set at some point in their lives. Fewer will remember doing so because only black-and-white sets existed. Of course, your own experience will depend upon your country of origin. The United States began the transition to color television in 1953, and more than half of its population owned color sets less than twenty years thereafter. France’s stations started to change over in 1967, and the last one did so in 1983. South Korea, where I live, started its own regular color broadcasts in 1980, though at that point, those from the American Forces Network, Japan, and even North Korea could already be tuned in for years.
Today we all take color TV for granted, but as the Primal Space video above explains, its invention was no simple matter. Still, it occurred much earlier than most of us would imagine. In 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird came up with the first television, which involved passing light through holes in a spinning disc onto a photoelectric cell for transmission through cables or radio waves. This system could only register the brightness of the light, producing a black-and-white image. But the mechanism itself suggested a means of introducing color: enlarge the disc, add separate sets of holes for red, green, and blue, and reproduce a frame of each in quick, cyclical succession at the other end, taking advantage of the human eye’s tendency to collapse them into a single image.
Baird first demonstrated his color television system in 1928. Though impressive, it also looked unlikely to perform at a scale that could produce a sharp, smooth moving picture. Other engineers saw more televisual promise in the technology of the cathode ray tube, or CRT, which Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi had already harnessed for his own black-and-white mechanical television in the year before. The key component was the iconoscope invented by Vladimir Zworykin in 1933. “Essentially the world’s first video camera,” it employed an internal electron gun to “scan” a captured image into a transmissible electrical signal. Still, the question remained: how to do it in color?
Enter the Radio Corporation of America, whose abbreviated name more than a few of us will remember from our childhood TV sets. Having developed a video camera “that took the incoming light and filtered it through special prisms to separate the red, green, and blue,” converting each into its own signal, RCA then faced the problem of delivering the result to viewers at home. None of the more than five million black-and-white sets already extant in the U.S. could receive those three signals at all. The solution involved using one electron gun per color, each of whose signals would be encoded so as to be hidden in the existing black-and-white television signal and then decoded by color sets. Consumers may not have taken up the technology all at once, but those who did in time for The Wizard of Oz’s first broadcast in 1956 surely understood that color TV had a future.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
At the height of their productivity as Beatles, neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon could read or write music notation. Clearly it didn’t keep them from making a cultural impact, and as with so much else in life, they regarded it humorously. As McCartney has said, they used to liken themselves to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who relied on scribes rather than being literate themselves. It’s worth considering whether, all things considered, this inability was really a deficiency: not being rigorously schooled in the traditions and conventions of music could have given them just the freedom they needed to create fresh songs. And if you’ve struggled with procrastination, have you considered likening yourself to Leonardo da Vinci?
“Leonardo’s difficulties with sticking to tasks were pervasive from childhood,” says a ScienceDaily summary of a 2019 paper by clinical neuroscientist Marco Catani. “Accounts from biographers and contemporaries show Leonardo was constantly on the go, often jumping from task to task.” Regarding his life at a distance of half a millennium, we may consider Leonardo not just a genius but a highly productive one, with a body of work including numerous inventions built and unbuilt as well as paintings like Lady with an Ermine, The Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa— which nearly joined the man’s pile of abandoned projects. As Nicolas Cole writes at Inc., scholarship suggests that Leonardo “painted the Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503, left it unfinished, and didn’t complete it until close to his death in 1519.”
“While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography Leonardo da Vinci. His explanation: “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” When the non-Renaissance men of the world say things like that, it comes off as self-aggrandizing excuse-making. Many, perhaps most of us have spent so much time telling ourselves we’re preparing for a task that it just became another means of procrastination. But “procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer,” notes Isaacson.
Not that the patrons frustrated by Leonardo’s failures to deliver could always keep that in mind. After he worked at the Vatican for three years, Pope Leo X dismissed him with the judgment that he would never accomplish anything, “for he begins by thinking of the end of the work, before the beginning.” Even Leonardo himself made a deathbed apology “to God and Man for leaving so much undone.” Having examined the nature of both Leonardo’s challenges and his brilliance, Catani comes to the conclusion that he exhibited traits consistent with a condition only given a name well within living memory, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). When we find ourselves compulsively fleeing from the incomplete work at hand, we’d do well to bear in mind not just Leonardo’s example, but also the words of aphorist Aaron Haspel: “We all suffer from a cluster of psychological disorders; it used to be known as personality.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Would anyone in their right mind sign up for a job that had a high risk of mortality/disability? Or a job where red hot metal is being hurled directly at your face? Back in the 1920s this was the lot of the men who built New York’s skyline, the men who constructed the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, giant phallic symbols of America’s burgeoning wealth and power.
In this short clip (remastered and quite decently colorized) from the Smithsonian Channel, we get a brief glimpse of the perils encountered daily on the building site. Nicknamed “roughnecks,” the narrator points out that they work without harnesses, safety ropes, or hard hats. Red hot rivets are thrown at men on the metal beams higher up and they are meant to catch them with what looks like a tin funnel. You can see the thinnest of ropes used to lift the now-iconic stainless steel art-deco eagles into place by men wearing felt hats and no gloves.
The workers came from Europe, many who had trained on ships. Some came from Montreal’s Kahnawake reservation. The latter, known as Iron Walkers, were Mohawk, known for working fearlessly at great heights.
“A lot of people think Mohawks aren’t afraid of heights; that’s not true,” Kyle Karonhiaktatie Beauvais said in 2002. “We have as much fear as the next guy. The difference is that we deal with it better.”
Much of this work was documented by photographer Lewis Hine, who captured a mix of brute strength and gravity-defying courage along with private moments of rest, catching a smoke or taking lunch. You can see many of his famous photos in this clip:
The Chrysler Building was completed in 1930, and reached a height of 1,046 feet (319 m), featuring 77 floors. It held its fame as the world’s tallest building for only 11 months. In 1931 workers completed the Empire State Building, standing at 1,454 feet (443.2 m) and housing 102 floors. (That’s dinky compared to the current record-holder: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which stands at 2,722 feet (829.8 m)).
Heads up: The Smithsonian Channel clip has some of the worst examples of YouTube comments among the videos we’ve highlighted over the years, as if people still don’t work in terrible and unsafe conditions in order to feed their families and pay rent. And look! Here’s a guy who walks out onto the Chrysler eagle just for fun. Don’t say we didn’t warn you:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
When it was published in the United States in 1998, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was retitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The jokes about the American reading public’s apparent allergy to the very word philosopher write themselves, but the change was also unfortunate for more substantial reasons. A “sorcerer’s stone” had no cultural resonance at all, whereas the philosopher’s stone had been sought after since, at the very latest, the dawn of the fourth century. Some sources claim that human knowledge of it goes all the way back to Adam, who got the word directly from God. In any case, it’s no mystery why the philosopher’s stone has long captured the collective imagination of humanity, given that it’s reputed to turn lead into gold.
Among the rumored possessors of the philosopher’s stone throughout history is Salomon Trismosin, a sixteenth-century Renaissance alchemist who taught the influential physician Paracelsus. He’s also credited, at least in legends, with writing Splendor Solis, a book once no less desirable than the next Harry Potter volume in that series’ heyday.
Nothing so mundane as “a list of instructions for whipping up a little alchemical soup in the hope of finding a nugget of artificial gold in the pot at the end,” writes Jörg Völlnagel at Medievalists.net, it rather “sets forth the philosophy of alchemy, a world view according to which the human being (the alchemist) exists and acts in harmony with nature, respecting divine creation and at the same time intervening in the processes underlying that creation, all the while supporting its growth with the help of alchemy.”
As “a — or rather the – prime example of an illuminated alchemical manuscript,” Splendor Solis has drawn the fascination of even such modern figures as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Umberto Eco. It also became an important work in the symbolic-cultural universe of Carl Jung, who, according to the Association of Jungian Analysts, “recognized the alchemical motifs and symbols as expressions of the individuation process, the transformation and integration of the psyche. Splendor Solis, with its rich symbolism and profound allegories, resonated with Jung’s understanding of the archetypal imagery and the transformative nature of the human psyche, contributing to his theories on analytical psychology.”
None of this is to say that Jung, or many other esteemed intellectuals of the past couple of centuries, believed that base metals really could be transmuted to gold and silver. But they did understand that the phenomenon of alchemy has much to reveal about the irresolvable existential negotiation between man and the world he inhabits. It resonates so deeply that it’s even worked in children’s literature, and to great commercial success at that. You can even feel some of it just by gazing upon Splendor Solis’ 22 gold-highlighted, book-of-hours-style illustrations at the web site of M. Moleiro, publisher of one facsimile edition. And who knows? If, as in the world of Harry Potter, the philosopher’s stone also grants immortality, perhaps Salomon Trismosin still walks somewhere among us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We’ve featured Egyptologist Ilona Regulski here on Open Culture a few times before. Once, she explained how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; another time, she told us what the Rosetta Stone actually says. It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would cross paths with Rob Watts, creator of the YouTube channel RobWords, whose videos we often post. When he made the journey to Berlin’s Neues Museum, and specifically to its Egyptian Museum, Regulski was the expert he sought out to tell him — and us — all about how hieroglyphs, literally “sacred carvings,” actually make words.
Faced with a stone chiseled full of hieroglyphs, where do we start? Ancient Egyptian texts are all read from top to bottom, but some go left to right, and others right to left. To know which way, Regulski says, we must first look for symbols with a clear front and back, such as those in human or animal shapes.
Some names are written in blocks, themselves read from top to bottom — unless they contain a sign referring to a god, which, of course, gets customarily elevated to the top. But even if we understand the exact order in which we should read a given string of hieroglyphs, the question remains: how do we actually do that reading?
Though many hieroglyphs do appear to be figurative, with their recognizable forms of birds, bugs, arms, legs, and such, only sometimes are they meant to represent what they look like. Regulski explains that some of these signs are letters, and can be pronounced in much the same way as our own alphabet. What looks like a mouth sounds like an r; a highly abstracted bread loaf, t; a horned viper, ph; an owl, m. There is, of course, more to it. Signs can be combined not just to indicate sound, but also to disambiguate meaning. As you may have noticed, hieroglyphic writing is also what Watts calls a “vowel-free zone.” Exactly which of those sounds go where is, like certain other unresolved aspects of hieroglyphs, a matter of ongoing expert inquiry. But Egyptologists, as seeing Regulski in action reminds us, are a dedicated bunch.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
