Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club: Behold Images from a 15th-Century Fighting Manual

in Art, Books, Gender, History, Sports | January 30th, 2023

Wel­come to Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club.

The first rule of Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club is: you do not talk about Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club.

The sec­ond rule of Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club!

Why?

The Pub­lic Domain Review’s man­ag­ing edi­tor, Hunter Dukes, wise­ly argues that it’s because we have so lit­tle to go on, beyond these star­tling images of “judi­cial duels” between men and women in Ger­man fenc­ing mas­ter Hans Tal­hof­fer’s illus­trat­ed 15th-cen­tu­ry “fight books.”

The male com­bat­ant, armed with a wood­en mace, starts out in a waist-deep hole.

The female, armed with a rock wrapped in a length of cloth, stands above, feet plant­ed to the ground.

Their match­ing uni­sex gar­ments wouldn’t look out of place at the Met Gala, and pro­vide for max­i­mum move­ment as evi­denced by the acro­bat­ic, and seri­ous­ly painful-look­ing paces Tal­hof­fer puts them through.

Dukes is not alone in won­der­ing what’s going on here, and he doesn’t mince words when call­ing bull­shit on those respon­si­ble for “hasti­ly researched arti­cles” eager­ly pro­nounc­ing them to be action shots of divorce-by-com­bat.

Such bru­tal meth­ods of for­mal uncou­pling had been ren­dered obso­lete cen­turies before Tal­hof­fer began work on his instruc­tion­al man­u­als. 

In a 1985 arti­cle in Source: Notes in the His­to­ry of Art, Alli­son Coud­ert,  a pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Stud­ies at UC Davis, posits that Tal­hof­fer might have been draw­ing on the past in these pages:

I would sug­gest that no records of judi­cial duels between hus­bands and wives exists after 1200 because of both changes in the real­i­ty and the ide­al of what a woman could be and do. Before 1200, women may well have bat­tled their hus­bands. Women under­stood and defend­ed the impor­tance of their eco­nom­ic and admin­is­tra­tive roles in the house­hold. After the twelfth cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, law, cus­tom and reli­gion made mar­i­tal duels all but unthink­able.

Why would Tal­hof­fer both­er includ­ing archa­ic mate­r­i­al if the focus of his Fecht­buchs was giv­ing less expe­ri­enced fight­ers con­crete infor­ma­tion for their bet­ter­ment?

We like the notion that he might have been seek­ing to inject his man­u­scripts with a bit of an erot­ic charge, but con­cede that schol­ars like Coud­ert, who have PhDs, research chops, and actu­al exper­tise in the sub­ject, are prob­a­bly warmer when reck­on­ing that he was just cov­er­ing his his­tor­i­cal bases.

For now, let us enjoy these images as art, and pos­si­ble sources of inspi­ra­tion for avant-garde cir­cus acts, Hal­loween cou­ples cos­tumes, and Valen­tines.

Explore more images from the 15th-cen­tu­ry Fecht­buchs of Hans Tal­hof­fer here and here.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Cen­tu­ry Armor: A Reen­act­ment

Watch Accu­rate Recre­ations of Medieval Ital­ian Longsword Fight­ing Tech­niques, All Based on a Man­u­script from 1404

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Judith Butler on Nonviolence and Gender: Hear Conversation with The Partially Examined Life

in Philosophy, Podcasts | February 26th, 2020

A new Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life inter­view with Judith But­ler, Max­ine Elliot Pro­fes­sor of Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture at UC Berke­ley, dis­cuss­es the ethics and psy­chol­o­gy of non­vi­o­lence. This fol­lows a three-part treat­ment on the pod­cast of her ear­li­er work.

For a first-hand account of her new book, you can watch two 2016 lec­tures that she gave at UC Berke­ley on ear­ly ver­sions of the text:

Watch on YouTube. Watch the sec­ond lec­ture.

But­ler has been a tremen­dous­ly influ­en­tial (and con­tro­ver­sial) fig­ure in ongo­ing intel­lec­tu­al debates about gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty. Her 1990 book Gen­der Trou­ble argues that gen­der is a “per­for­mance,” i.e. a habit­u­al group of behav­iors that reflect and rein­force social gen­der norms. Prac­tices such as dress­ing in drag sat­i­rize this per­for­mance, show­ing how even in “nor­mal” sit­u­a­tions, “act­ing fem­i­nine” is not a reflec­tion of one’s inner essence but is a mat­ter of putting on a dis­play of cul­tur­al­ly expect­ed man­ner­isms. The drag per­former (on But­ler’s analy­sis) may con­vey an absur­di­ty that decon­structs the expect­ed accord of bio­log­i­cal sex, sex­u­al pref­er­ence, and gen­der iden­ti­ty: “I’m dress­ing like a woman but am real­ly a man; also, in my every­day life, I dress like a man but am real­ly (in the way I actu­al­ly feel about myself) am a woman.” Most con­tro­ver­sial­ly, as a post-struc­tural­ist, But­ler argues that it’s not the case that there is an uncon­tro­ver­sial bio­log­i­cal fact of sex that then cul­ture con­nects gen­der behav­iors to. Instead, all of our under­stand­ing of the so-called bio­log­i­cal fact comes through the cul­tur­al lens of gen­der; we lit­er­al­ly can’t under­stand any such raw, bio­log­i­cal fact apart from its cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. In oth­er words, it’s not just gen­der that’s a social con­struc­tion, but bio­log­i­cal sex itself.

This posi­tion has been attacked both from the posi­tion of naive, com­mon-sense sci­en­tism (of course bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences result­ing in babies isn’t just a mat­ter of what con­cepts a par­tic­u­lar soci­ety has hap­pened to devel­op) and as a moral haz­ard and exis­ten­tial threat: In 2017 while at a con­fer­ence in Brazil, far-right Chris­t­ian groups protest­ed her pres­ence and even burned her in effi­gy.

It should also be not­ed that But­ler’s take on gen­der departs from cur­rent, intu­itive expla­na­tions of the phe­nom­e­na of trans­gen­derism, i.e. that one might feel their “true gen­der” to be dif­fer­ent from what soci­ety has assigned them. For But­ler, there is no inner gen­der essence that may or may not be dis­played authen­ti­cal­ly. Instead, the “inner” is a cul­tur­al con­struc­tion, itself built out of our exter­nal per­for­mances and the dynam­ics of our psy­chic life, which she dis­cuss­es with­in the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic tra­di­tion.

This use of psy­cho­analy­sis to explain our cul­tur­al life per­sists in new­ly released book, The Force of Non­vi­o­lence: An Ethico-Polit­i­cal Bind. Though the the­o­ry of non­vi­o­lent polit­i­cal protest may seem a far-flung top­ic from gen­der stud­ies, both involve the process of defin­ing an iden­ti­ty. In the case of gen­der, one defines one­self as a par­tic­u­lar gen­der or as being of a par­tic­u­lar sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion (as opposed to leav­ing these attrib­ut­es ambigu­ous and flu­id) by grasp­ing onto a strict social divi­sion between the avail­able sex­u­al options and declar­ing that one of them is “not me.” In But­ler’s dis­cus­sion of non­vi­o­lence, she instead focus­es on what counts as “self” in the usu­al­ly excused excep­tion to non­vi­o­lence, self-defense. She’s crit­i­ciz­ing a posi­tion where most of us claim to be non­vi­o­lent (and claim that our gov­ern­ment is non­vi­o­lent) because we are not the aggres­sors: We will fight only when we are attacked or threat­ened.

It’s not that But­ler is cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly against using vio­lence to defend one­self, one’s loved ones, one’s coun­try, or any­one else who is in dan­ger of being seri­ous­ly harmed. She is, how­ev­er, argu­ing for an eth­ic of non­vi­o­lence that clear­ly under­stands our inter­re­lat­ed­ness with every­one else in the world, even and espe­cial­ly those that we might think out­side our cir­cle of con­cern. It’s too easy for us to define “self” as “peo­ple like us,” which then leaves out the rest of the pop­u­lace (and the non-human pop­u­la­tion, and the envi­ron­ment more gen­er­al­ly) from inclu­sion in our “self-defense” cal­cu­la­tions of when vio­lence might be jus­ti­fied. But­ler ana­lyzes the fear of immi­grants, for instance, as a “phan­tas­mat­ic trans­mu­ta­tion” that projects the poten­tial for vio­lence that always exists with­in our imme­di­ate social rela­tions (and even our own rage against our­selves) onto an invad­ing Oth­er. As in the case of gen­der, she wants us instead to under­stand the dynam­ics of these self-and-oth­er attri­bu­tions, to behave more ratio­nal­ly and humane­ly, and to chan­nel our unavoid­able rage con­struc­tive­ly into force­ful non-vio­lence, or what Gand­hi calls Satya­gra­ha, “polite insis­tence on the truth.” The goal of this type of polit­i­cal action is con­ver­sion, not coer­cion, and it’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect­ing even a hat­ed oth­er as a griev­able equal that pro­vides a real con­trast to vio­lence. She wants us to rec­og­nize the poten­tial for vio­lence with­in each rela­tion­ship, at each moment, and to choose oth­er­wise.

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast began a dis­cus­sion of the gen­er­al con­cept of social con­struc­tion back with in Oco­to­ber with episode 227, fol­low­ing this up with appli­ca­tions of this con­cept to race (dis­cussing Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Charles Mills with in episode 228 with guest Cole­man Hugh­es), to the devel­op­ment of sci­ence (con­sid­er­ing Bruno Latour on episode 230 with guest Pro­fes­sor Lyn­da Olman), and to gen­der (con­sid­er­ing Simone de Beau­voir’s The Sec­ond Sex for episode 232 with Pro­fes­sor Jen­nifer Hansen. Pro­fes­sor Hansen then con­tin­ued with hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, and Dylan Casey to dis­cuss But­ler’s Gen­der Trou­ble. For fur­ther expla­na­tion of The Force of Non­vi­o­lence, see episode 236 at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is the host of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, Pret­ty Much Pop, and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music pod­casts. He is a writer and musi­cian work­ing out of Madi­son, Wis­con­sin. Read more Open Cul­ture posts about The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life.

Image by Solomon Grundy.

A New Academic Hoax–Complete with Fake Articles Published in Academic Journals–Ventures to Show the “Corruption” of Cultural Studies

in Current Affairs, Education, Philosophy, Politics | October 11th, 2018

We should be sus­pi­cious when researchers assume their con­clu­sion; when the results of an aca­d­e­m­ic study mere­ly con­firm the author’s pre-exist­ing bias­es. Humans are wired to seek con­fir­ma­tion, a cog­ni­tive deficit so deeply engrained that it can be exploit­ed among laypeo­ple and spe­cial­ists alike. Art his­to­ri­ans have been fooled by forg­eries, his­to­ri­ans by fake man­u­scripts, and pale­on­tol­o­gists by pho­ny fos­sils. Physi­cist Steven Wein­berg ref­er­enced such high-lev­el hoax­es in a 1996 essay in The New York Review of Books, and he placed that year’s aca­d­e­m­ic scandal—known as the “Sokal Hoax”—among them.

The gist of the Sokal affair runs as fol­lows: NYU math­e­mat­i­cal physi­cist Alan Sokal sus­pect­ed that post-struc­tural­ist-influ­enced cul­tur­al stud­ies was jar­gon-laden, obfus­cat­ing BS, and he set out to prove it by author­ing his own “post­mod­ernist” text, an arti­cle full of mis­used ter­mi­nol­o­gy from quan­tum physics. He sent it off to the jour­nal Social Text, who pub­lished it in their Spring/Summer issue. Sokal then revealed in anoth­er jour­nal, Lin­gua Fran­ca, that the arti­cle had been a fraud, “lib­er­al­ly salt­ed with non­sense,” and had only been accept­ed because “(a) it sound­ed good and (b) it flat­tered the editor’s ide­o­log­i­cal pre­con­cep­tions.”

Sokal’s hoax, it was round­ly claimed, demon­strat­ed that cer­tain fash­ion­able quar­ters of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties had dete­ri­o­rat­ed into bab­ble, sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing more than rigid ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments and a gen­er­al dis­re­gard for the actu­al mean­ings of words and con­cepts. Wein­berg wasn’t so sure. At most, per­haps, it showed the edi­to­r­i­al fail­ings of Social Text. And while human­ists may abuse sci­en­tif­ic ideas, Wein­berg points out that sci­en­tists of the stature of Wern­er Heisen­berg have also been prone to slip­shod, qua­si-mys­ti­cal think­ing.

But the Sokal hoax did expose to the wider pub­lic a ten­den­cy among a coterie of aca­d­e­mics to indulge in mys­ti­fy­ing lan­guage, includ­ing the mis­use of jar­gon from oth­er fields of study, usu­al­ly in imi­ta­tion of French the­o­rists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kris­te­va, or Jacques Derrida—whom, it must be said, all wrote in a very dif­fer­ent intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture (one that expects, Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, at least “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble”). For a good many peo­ple in the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, this wasn’t much of a rev­e­la­tion. (Sokal has since pub­lished a more thor­ough­ly crit­i­cal book with the apt title Beyond the Hoax.)

Part of the prob­lem with his hoax as a seri­ous cri­tique is that it began with its con­clu­sion. Cul­tur­al stud­ies are rife with crap argu­ments, ide­ol­o­gy, and incom­pre­hen­si­ble non­sense, Sokal believed. And so, when his paper was accept­ed, he sim­ply rest­ed his case, mak­ing no effort to engage char­i­ta­bly with good schol­ar­ship while he ridiculed the bad. Which brings us to the cur­rent state of the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, and to a con­tem­po­rary, Sokal-like attack on them by a trio of writ­ers who rest their case on a slight­ly broad­er base of evidence—20 fraud­u­lent arti­cles sent out to var­i­ous niche cul­tur­al stud­ies jour­nals over a year: four pub­lished (since retract­ed), three accept­ed but not pub­lished, sev­en under review, and six reject­ed.

The authors—academic philoso­pher Peter Boghoss­ian and writ­ers Helen Pluck­rose and James A. Lindsay—revealed the hoax this week in an arti­cle pub­lished at the Pluck­rose-edit­ed Areo mag­a­zine. One needn’t read past the title to under­stand the authors’ take on cul­tur­al stud­ies in gen­er­al: “Aca­d­e­m­ic Griev­ance Stud­ies and the Cor­rup­tion of Schol­ar­ship.” While all three hoax­ers iden­ti­fy as left-lean­ing lib­er­als, the broad-brush char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of whole fields as “griev­ance stud­ies” reveals a prej­u­di­cial degree of con­tempt that seems unwar­rant­ed. In the arti­cle, they reveal their moti­va­tions and meth­ods, out­line the suc­cess­es of the project, and post the com­ments of the arti­cles’ ref­er­ees, along with a video of them­selves hav­ing a good laugh at the whole thing.

This last bit is unnec­es­sary and obnox­ious, but does the new hoax—“Sokal Squared” as it’s been called—genuinely under­mine the cred­i­bil­i­ty of cul­tur­al stud­ies as a whole? Is it “’hilar­i­ous and delight­ful,’” asks Alexan­der C. Kaf­ka at The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, or “an ugly exam­ple of dis­hon­esty and bad faith?” Har­vard polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Yascha Mounk tact­ful­ly finds in it a seri­ous case for con­cern: “Some aca­d­e­m­ic emperors—the ones who sup­pos­ed­ly have the most to say about these cru­cial top­ics [dis­crim­i­na­tion, racism, sexism]—have no clothes.”

This is a point worth pur­su­ing, and cer­tain recent scan­dals should give every­one pause to con­sid­er how bul­ly­ing and group­think man­i­fest on the aca­d­e­m­ic left at the high­est lev­el of pres­tige. But the great major­i­ty of aca­d­e­mics are not “emper­ors” and have very lit­tle social or eco­nom­ic pow­er. And Mounk is care­ful not to over­state the case. He points out how the hoax has unfor­tu­nate­ly giv­en wel­come “ammu­ni­tion” to right-wing con­ser­v­a­tive axe-grinders:

Many con­ser­v­a­tives who are deeply hos­tile to the sci­ence of cli­mate change, and who dis­miss out of hand the stud­ies that attest to deep injus­tices in our soci­ety, are using Sokal Squared to smear all aca­d­e­mics as biased cul­ture war­riors. The Fed­er­al­ist, a right-wing news and com­men­tary site, went so far as to spread the appar­ent ide­o­log­i­cal bias of a few jour­nals in one par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of acad­e­mia to most pro­fes­sors, the main­stream media, and Democ­rats on the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee.

The Fed­er­al­ist spe­cial­izes in irre­spon­si­ble con­spir­a­cy-mon­ger­ing, the kind of thing that sells ads and wins elec­tions but doesn’t belong in aca­d­e­m­ic debate. The ques­tion Mounk doesn’t ask is whether the hoax­ers’ own atti­tudes encour­age and share in such hos­til­i­ty, an issue raised by sev­er­al of their crit­ics. As physi­cist Sean Car­roll wrote on Twit­ter, “What strikes me about stunts like this is their fun­da­men­tal mean­ness. No attempt to intel­lec­tu­al­ly engage with ideas you dis­agree with; just trolling for the lulz.” McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal the­o­rist Jacob T. Levy expressed sim­i­lar reser­va­tions in an inter­view, notes The New York Times, say­ing

even some col­leagues who are not fans of iden­ti­ty-ori­ent­ed schol­ar­ship are look­ing at the hoax and say­ing ‘this is poten­tial­ly uneth­i­cal and doesn’t show what they think it is show­ing.’ Besides, he added, “We all rec­og­nized that this kind of thing could also be done in our dis­ci­plines if peo­ple were will­ing to ded­i­cate a year to do it.”

There­in lies anoth­er prob­lem with Sokal Squared. Hoax­es have been per­pet­u­at­ed by smart, ded­i­cat­ed forg­ers, con-artists, and pranksters in near­ly every field, show­ing up all sorts of experts as poten­tial dupes. The sin­gling out of cul­tur­al stud­ies for par­tic­u­lar ridicule—the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of stud­ies of race, gen­der, dis­abil­i­ty, etc. as “griev­ance studies”—reveals an aggriev­ed agen­da all its own, one that ignores the seri­ous prob­lems cor­rupt­ing oth­er dis­ci­plines (e.g. indus­try fund­ing in aca­d­e­m­ic sci­ences, or the gross overuse of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents as the main sub­jects of studies—groups that hard­ly rep­re­sent the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.)

Some, but not all, of the suc­cess­ful­ly-pub­lished hoax papers sound ludi­crous and ter­ri­ble. Some, in fact, do not, as Justin Wein­berg shows at Dai­ly Nous, and should not shame the edi­tors who pub­lished them. Some of the jour­nals have much high­er edi­to­r­i­al stan­dards than oth­ers. (An ear­ly hoax attempt by Boghoss­ian tar­get­ed an ill-reput­ed, pay-to-play pub­li­ca­tion.) The whole affair may speak to broad­er fail­ures in aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ing that go beyond a tiny cor­ner of the human­i­ties. In part, those fail­ures may stem from a gen­er­al trend toward over­worked, under­paid, increas­ing­ly pre­car­i­ous schol­ars whose dis­ci­plines, and fund­ing, have been under relent­less polit­i­cal attack since at least the 1990s and who must keep grind­ing out pub­li­ca­tions, some­times of dubi­ous mer­it, as part of the over­all dri­ve toward sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty as the sole mea­sure of suc­cess.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Explains What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy & French Intel­lec­tu­als, and How They End Up Sup­port­ing Oppres­sive Pow­er Struc­tures

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A New Interactive Visualization of the 165,000 Most-Frequently Assigned Texts in College Courses

in Education | July 22nd, 2019

For some of us, it’s been a lit­tle while since col­lege days. For oth­ers of us, it’s been a lit­tle while longer. We might find our­selves ask­ing, if we hear news of on-cam­pus activism and unrest (sure­ly unheard of in our day)—

“Do they still read the clas­sics down at old Alma Mater U.?”

Maybe that’s the prob­lem, eh? Too much Marx­ist the­o­ry, not enough Pla­to? Well, you may be pleased, or not, to learn that clas­sics still regularly—routinely, even—appear on col­lege syl­labi, includ­ing both The Repub­lic and the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, in cours­es taught all over the world, from San Anto­nio to Tokyo to Karl­skro­na, Swe­den.

As we informed Open Cul­ture read­ers in 2016, Colum­bia University’s Open Syl­labus Project culled data from over 1,000,000 syl­labi from uni­ver­si­ty web­sites world­wide, to find out which books have been most fre­quent­ly taught over the past decade or so. Since then, that num­ber has risen to 6,000,000 syl­labi. Still, the most-taught books at the top of the list remain large­ly unchanged.

As two of the project’s direc­tors point­ed out soon after the site’s launch, “tra­di­tion­al West­ern canon dom­i­nates the top 100, with Plato’s Repub­lic at No. 2, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo at No. 3, and Franken­stein at No. 5, fol­lowed by Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, [Sopho­cles’] Oedi­pus and [Shakespeare’s] Ham­let.” These num­bers have moved a lit­tle, edged down­ward by writ­ing and research guides, but not by very much.

William Strunk­’s clas­sic writ­ing guide Ele­ments of Style sits at num­ber one. Oth­er top titles include cal­cu­lus and anato­my text­books, oth­er works of Enlight­en­ment phi­los­o­phy, and texts now cen­tral to the West­ern crit­i­cal tra­di­tion like Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s “Let­ter from Birm­ing­ham Jail,” Michel Foucault’s Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish, and Edward Said’s Ori­en­tal­ism.

The top 50 is almost total­ly dom­i­nat­ed by male writ­ers, though some of the most fre­quent­ly-taught nov­el­ists include Jane Austen, Toni Mor­ri­son, Anne Moody, Leslie Mar­mon Silko, and Alice Walk­er. The most-taught books tend to fall into either phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture, text­book, or guide­book, but the over­all range in this list of 165,000 texts encom­pass­es the entire scope of acad­e­mia around the globe, with more con­tem­po­rary study areas like gen­der stud­ies, media stud­ies, dig­i­tal cul­ture, and envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies promi­nent along­side tra­di­tion­al depart­ments like physics and psy­chol­o­gy.

A new inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tion from Open Syl­labus turns this trove of data into a col­or-cod­ed stip­pling of dif­fer­ent-sized dots, each one rep­re­sent­ing a par­tic­u­lar text. Float over each dot and a box appears in the cor­ner of the screen, show­ing the num­ber of syl­labi that have assigned the text, and a link to a pro­file page with more detailed analy­sis. Called the “Co-Assign­ment Galaxy,” the info­graph­ic does what a list can­not: draws con­nec­tions between all these works and their respec­tive fields of study.

The Open Syl­labus Project was already an impres­sive achieve­ment, a huge aggre­ga­tion of freely acces­si­ble data for schol­ars and curi­ous laypeo­ple alike. The addi­tion of this user-friend­ly clus­ter map makes the site an even more indis­pens­able resource for the study of how high­er edu­ca­tion has changed over the past decade or so, and how it has, in some respects, remained the same. Enter the Open Syl­labus Project’s Co-Assign­ment Galaxy map here.

via John Over­holt

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Open Syl­labus Project Gath­ers 1,000,000 Syl­labi from Uni­ver­si­ties & Reveals the 100 Most Fre­quent­ly-Taught Books

The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time: No Spoil­ers

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch Seder-Masochism, Nina Paley’s Animated, Feminist Take on the Passover Holiday: The Animated Feature Film Is Free and in the Public Domain

in Animation, Gender, Law, Religion | March 25th, 2019

Seder-Masochism, copy­right abo­li­tion­ist Nina Paley’s lat­est ani­mat­ed release, is guar­an­teed to ruf­fle feath­ers in cer­tain quar­ters, though the last laugh belongs to this trick­ster artist, who shares writ­ing cred­it with ”God, Moses or a series of patri­ar­chal males, depend­ing on who you ask.”

Bypass­ing a com­mer­cial release in favor of the pub­lic domain goes a long way toward inoc­u­lat­ing the film and its cre­ator against expen­sive rights issues that could arise from the star-stud­ded sound­track.

It also lets the air out of any affront­ed par­ties’ cam­paigns for mass box office boy­cotts.

“The crit­i­cism seems equal­ly divid­ed between peo­ple that say I’m a Zion­ist and peo­ple that say I’m an anti-Zion­ist,” Paley says of This Land Is Mine, below, a stun­ning sequence of trib­al and inter-trib­al car­nage, mem­o­rably set to Ernest Gold’s theme for the 1960 epic Paul New­man vehi­cle, Exo­dus.

Released as a stand-alone short, This Land Is Mine has become the most viewed of Paley’s works. She finds the oppos­ing camps’ equal out­cry encour­ag­ing, proof that she’s doing “some­thing right.”

More both­er­some has been Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Gen­der Stud­ies Mimi Thi Nguyen’s social media push to brand the film­mak­er as trans­pho­bic. (Paley, no fan of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, states that her “crime was, months ear­li­er, shar­ing on Face­book the fol­low­ing lyric: ‘If a per­son has a penis he’s a man.’”) Nguyen’s actions result­ed in the fem­i­nist film’s ouster from sev­er­al venues and fes­ti­vals, includ­ing Ebert­fest in Paley’s home­town and a women’s film fes­ti­val in Bel­gium.

What would the ancient fer­til­i­ty god­dess­es pop­u­lat­ing both art his­to­ry and Seder-Masochism have to say about that devel­op­ment?

In Seder-Masochism, these god­dess fig­ures, whom Paley ear­li­er trans­formed into a series of free down­load­able GIFs, offer a most­ly silent rebuke to those who refuse to acknowl­edge any con­cep­tion of the divine exist­ing out­side patri­ar­chal tra­di­tion.

In the case of Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Nguyen, per­haps the god­dess­es would err on the side of diplo­ma­cy (and the First Amend­ment), fram­ing the dust-up as just one more rea­son the pub­lic should be glad the pro­jec­t’s lodged in the pub­lic domain. Any­one with access to the Inter­net and a desire to see the film will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so. Called out, maybe. Shut down, nev­er.

The god­dess­es sup­ply a depth of mean­ing to this large­ly com­ic under­tak­ing. Their ample curves inform many of the pat­terns that give motion to the ani­mat­ed cutouts.

Paley also gets a lot of mileage from repli­cat­ing super­nu­mer­ary char­ac­ters until they march with ant-like pur­pose or bedaz­zle in Bus­by Berke­ley-style spec­ta­cles. Not since Paul Mazursky’s Tem­pest have goats loomed so large in cin­e­mat­ic chore­og­ra­phy…

Paley’s use of music is anoth­er source of abid­ing plea­sure. She casts a wide net—punk, dis­co, Bul­gar­i­an folk, the Bea­t­les, Free to Be You and Me—again, fram­ing her choic­es as par­o­dy. “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” accom­pa­nies the sev­enth plague of Egypt (don’t both­er look­ing it up. It’s hail.) Ringo Starr’s famous “Hel­ter Skel­ter” aside (“I’ve got blis­ters on my fin­gers!”) boils down to an apt choice for plague num­ber six. (If you have to think about it…)

The ele­ments of the Seder plate are list­ed to the strains of “Tijua­na Taxi” because… well, who doesn’t love Herb Alpert and the Tijua­na Brass?

Paley’s own reli­gious back­ground is of obvi­ous inter­est here, and as with her pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Sita Sings the Blues—also in the pub­lic domain—the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ment is irre­sistible. A 2011 audio record­ing pro­vides the excuse to por­tray her father, Hiram, who died the year after the inter­view was con­duct­ed, as a Mon­ty Python-esque God. The senior Paley was raised in an obser­vant Jew­ish house­hold, but lost faith as a young man. An athe­ist who want­ed his chil­dren to know some­thing of their her­itage, Passover was the one Jew­ish hol­i­day he con­tin­ued to cel­e­brate. (He also for­bade the kids from par­tic­i­pat­ing in any sort of sec­u­lar Christ­mas activ­i­ties.)

A wist­ful God with the com­plex­ion of a dol­lar bill, Hiram is at times sur­round­ed by put­ti, in the form of his par­ents, his con­tentious Uncle Her­schel, and his own sweet younger self.

For these scenes, Paley por­trays her­self as a spir­it­ed “sac­ri­fi­cial goat.” This char­ac­ter finds an echo at film’s end, when “Chad Gadya,” the tra­di­tion­al Passover tune that brings the annu­al seder to a rol­lick­ing con­clu­sion, is brought to life using embroi­der­ma­tion, a form Paley may or may not have invent­ed.

Per­haps Paley’s most sub­ver­sive joke is choos­ing Jesus, as depict­ed in Juan de Juanes’ 1652 paint­ing, The Last Sup­per, to deliv­er an edu­ca­tion­al blow-by-blow of Passover rit­u­al.

Actu­al­ly, much like Audrey Hep­burn in My Fair Lady and Natal­ie Wood in West Side Sto­ry, Jesus was ghost-voiced by anoth­er performer—Barry Gray, nar­ra­tor of the mid­cen­tu­ry edu­ca­tion­al record­ing The Moishe Oysh­er Seder.

As you may have gleaned, Paley, despite the clean ele­gance of her ani­mat­ed line, is a max­i­mal­ist. There’s some­thing for every­one (except­ing, of course, Mimi Thi Nguyen)—a gleam­ing gold­en idol, a ball bounc­ing above hiero­glyph­ic lyrics, actu­al footage of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in a state of reli­gious fer­vor, Moses’ broth­er Aaron—a fig­ure who’s often shoved to the side­lines, if not left out­right on the cut­ting room floor.

We leave you with Paley’s prayer to her Muse, found freely shared on her web­site:

Our Idea

Which art in the Ether

That can­not be named;

Thy Vision come

Thy Will be done

On Earth, as it is in Abstrac­tion.

Give us this day our dai­ly Spark

And for­give us our crit­i­cisms

As we for­give those who cri­tique against us;

And lead us not into stag­na­tion

But deliv­er us from Ego;

For Thine is the Vision

And the Pow­er

And the Glo­ry for­ev­er.

Amen.

Watch Seder-Masochism in its entire­ty up top, or down­load it here. Pur­chase the com­pan­ion book here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sita Sings the Blues Now on YouTube

Cel­e­brate the Women’s March with 24 God­dess GIFs Cre­at­ed by Ani­ma­tor Nina Paley: They’re Free to Down­load and Remix

Watch Nina Paley’s “Embroi­der­ma­tion,” a New, Stun­ning­ly Labor-Inten­sive Form of Ani­ma­tion

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Odd Vintage Postcards Document the Propaganda Against Women’s Rights 100 Years Ago

in Gender, History, Politics | October 25th, 2016

The vicious, vit­ri­olic imagery and rhetoric of this elec­tion sea­son can seem over­whelm­ing, but as even casu­al stu­dents of his­to­ry will know, it isn’t any­thing new. Each time his­toric social change occurs, reac­tionary counter-move­ments resort to threats, appeals to fear, and demean­ing caricatures—whether it’s anti-Recon­struc­tion pro­pa­gan­da of the 19th cen­tu­ry, anti-Civ­il Rights cam­paigns 100 years lat­er, or anti-LGBT rights efforts today.

At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, the women’s suf­frage move­ment faced sig­nif­i­cant lev­els of abuse and resis­tance. One pho­to­graph has cir­cu­lat­ed, for exam­ple, of a suf­frage activist lying in the street as police beat her. (The woman in the pho­to is not Susan B. Antho­ny, as many claim, but a British suf­frag­ist named Ada Wright, beat­en on “Black Fri­day” in 1910.) It’s an arrest­ing image that cap­tures just how vio­lent­ly men of the day fought against the move­ment for wom­en’s suf­frage. [It’s also worth not­ing, as many have: the ear­ly suf­frage move­ment cam­paigned only for white women’s right to vote, and some­times active­ly resist­ed civ­il rights for African-Amer­i­cans.]

As you can see from the sam­ple anti-suf­frage post­cards here—dating from the late 19th to ear­ly 20th cen­turies— pro­pa­gan­da against the women’s vote tend­ed to fall into three broad cat­e­gories: Dis­turbing­ly vio­lent wish-ful­fill­ment involv­ing tor­ture and phys­i­cal silenc­ing; char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of suf­frag­ists as angry, bit­ter old maids, hatch­et-wield­ing har­ri­dans, or dom­i­neer­ing, shrewish wives and neglect­ful moth­ers; and, cor­re­spond­ing­ly, depic­tions of neglect­ed chil­dren, and hus­bands por­trayed as saint­ly vic­tims, emas­cu­lat­ed by threats to tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles, and men­aced by the sug­ges­tion that they may have to care for their chil­dren for even one day out of the year!

These post­cards come from the col­lec­tion of Cather­ine Pal­czews­ki, pro­fes­sor of women’s and gen­der stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North­ern Iowa. She has been col­lect­ing these images, from both the U.S. and Britain, for 15 years. On her web­site, Pal­czews­ki quotes George Miller’s com­ment that post­cards like these “offer a vivid chron­i­cle of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal val­ues and tastes.” Pal­czews­ki describes these par­tic­u­lar images as “a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­sec­tion [that] occurred between advo­ca­cy for and against woman suf­frage, images of women (and men), and post­cards. Best esti­mates are that approx­i­mate­ly 4,500 post­cards were pro­duced with a suf­frage theme.”

As she notes in the quote above, the post­cards print­ed dur­ing this peri­od did not all oppose women’s suf­frage. “Suf­frage advo­cates,” writes Pal­czews­ki, “rec­og­nized the util­i­ty of the post­card as a pro­pa­gan­da device” as well. Pro-suf­frage post­cards tend­ed to serve a doc­u­men­tary pur­pose, with “real-pho­to images of the suf­frage parades, ver­bal mes­sages iden­ti­fy­ing the states that had approved suf­frage, or quo­ta­tions in sup­port of extend­ing the vote to women.” For all their attempts at pre­sent­ing a seri­ous, infor­ma­tive coun­ter­weight to incen­di­ary anti-suf­frage images like those you see here, suf­frage activists often found that they could not con­trol the nar­ra­tive.

As Lisa Tick­n­er writes in The Spec­ta­cle of Women: Imagery of the Suf­frage Cam­paign 1907–1914, post­card pro­duc­ers with­out a clear agen­da often used pho­tos and illus­tra­tions of suf­frag­ists to rep­re­sent “top­i­cal or humor­ous types” and “almost inci­den­tal­ly” under­cut advo­cates’ attempts to present their cause in a news­wor­thy light. The image of the suf­fragette as a triv­ial fig­ure of fun per­sist­ed into the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry (as we see in Gly­nis Johns’ com­i­cal­ly neglect­ful Winifred Banks in Walt Disney’s 1964 Mary Pop­pins adap­ta­tion).

Palczewski’s site offers a brief his­to­ry of the “Gold­en Age” (1893–1918) of polit­i­cal post­cards and orga­nizes the col­lec­tion into cat­e­gories. One vari­ety we might find par­tic­u­lar­ly charm­ing for its use of cats and kit­tens actu­al­ly has a pret­ty sin­is­ter ori­gin in the so-called “Cat-and-Mouse Act” in the UK. Jailed suf­frag­ists had begun to stage hunger strikes, and jour­nal­ists pro­voked pub­lic out­cry by por­tray­ing force-feed­ing by the gov­ern­ment as a form of tor­ture. Instead, strik­ing activists were released when they became weak. “If a woman died after being released,” Pal­czews­ki explains, “then the gov­ern­ment could claim it was not to blame.” When a freed activist regained her strength, she would be rear­rest­ed. “On Novem­ber 29, 1917,” Pal­czews­ki writes, “the US gov­ern­ment announced it plans to use Britain’s cat and mouse approach.”

You can see many more his­tor­i­cal pro- and anti-suf­frage post­cards at Palczewski’s web­site, and you are free to use them for non-com­mer­cial pur­pos­es pro­vid­ed you attribute the source. You are also free, of course, to draw your own com­par­isons to today’s hyper­bol­ic and often vio­lent­ly misog­y­nist pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 239 Issues of Land­mark UK Fem­i­nist Mag­a­zine Spare Rib Free Online

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Down­load Images From Rad Amer­i­can Women A‑Z: A New Pic­ture Book on the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

in | April 24th, 2024

Take online cours­es from the world’s top uni­ver­si­ties for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online cours­es from uni­ver­si­ties like Yale, MIT, Har­vard, Oxford and more. Our site also fea­tures col­lec­tions of Online Cer­tifi­cate Pro­grams and Online Degree & Mini-Degree Pro­grams.

Note: This page includes a lot of Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs). If you want to enroll in a free ver­sion of a MOOC, please select the “Full Course, No Cer­tifi­cate” (edX) or “Audit” (Cours­era) option. If you take the course for a certificate/credential, you’ll be charged a fee, and we will receive a com­mis­sion from our affil­i­ate partners–Coursera, Future­Learn and edX.

200 Online Certificate & Microcredential Programs from Leading Universities & Companies

in | March 18th, 2021

Dis­cov­er a list of afford­able online Cer­tifi­cate, Micro­cre­den­tial and Nan­ode­gree pro­grams from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties & corporations–from insti­tu­tions like Har­vard, UC Berke­ley, George­town, Google, IBM and more. Most­ly focused on pro­fes­sion­al train­ing, the pro­grams cov­er busi­ness, com­put­er sci­ence, data sci­ence, envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies and more.

For a list of free cours­es, please vis­it our page, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. Click here for a list of Online Degree & Mini-Degree pro­grams.

Busi­ness & Man­age­ment

• AI for Busi­ness Lead­ers — Udac­i­ty
• AI in Prac­tice — Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy (TU Delft) via edX
• AI Prod­uct Man­ag­er — Udac­i­ty
• AI and Cloud Com­put­ing: Imple­men­ta­tion Strate­gies for Busi­ness - The Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia via edX
• Blockchain for Busi­ness — The Lin­ux Foun­da­tion via edX
• Busi­ness Ana­lyt­ics — Udac­i­ty
• Busi­ness Fun­da­men­tals — Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia via edX
• Busi­ness Man­age­ment: Fun­da­men­tals of Man­age­ment Account­ing - The Open Uni­ver­si­ty via Future­Learn
• Busi­ness Man­age­ment: Mar­ket­ing Prin­ci­ples and Prac­tice - The Open Uni­ver­si­ty via Future­Learn
• Busi­ness Mod­el Inno­va­tion — Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy (TU Delft) via edX
• Busi­ness Nego­ti­a­tion — Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty via edX

• Cor­po­rate Finance — Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty via edX
• Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment with Sales­force Train­ing — Coven­try Uni­ver­si­ty Lon­don + Future­Learn
• Data Ana­lyt­ics for Deci­sion Mak­ing — Queen Mary, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don + Future­Learn
• Data-Dri­ven Lead­er­ship Skills — The Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow via Future­Learn
• Data Sci­ence for Busi­ness Lead­ers — Udac­i­ty
• Data Sci­ence: Data-Dri­ven Deci­sion Mak­ing — Monash Uni­ver­si­ty + Future­Learn
• Dig­i­tal Mar­keter - Udac­i­ty
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing — Galileo Uni­ver­si­ty via edX
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing — Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land via edX
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and Cus­tomer Engage­ment — Tec­nológi­co de Mon­ter­rey via edX
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Fun­da­men­tals — The Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh via edX
• Eng­lish for Busi­ness Net­work­ing — Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton via edX
• Enter­prise Sales — Queens Uni­ver­si­ty via edX
• Entre­pre­neur­ial Mind­set and Lead­er­ship — Bab­son Col­lege via edX
• Face­book Social Media Mar­ket­ing Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Face­book via Cours­era
• Fin­Tech — The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong via edX
• Google Project Man­age­ment Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Growth Prod­uct Man­ag­er — Udac­i­ty
• Google UX Design Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Human-Cen­tered Design for Work at a Dis­tance — Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia via edX
• IT Fun­da­men­tals for Busi­ness Pro­fes­sion­als — Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Valen­cia via edX
• IT Project Man­age­ment — Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton via edX
• Inclu­sive Lead­er­ship — Cat­a­lyst via edX
• Inno­va­tion and Entre­pre­neur­ship — Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land via edX
• Intro­duc­tion to Man­age­ment and Lead­er­ship in Health Ser­vices — Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow via Future­Learn
• Lead­er­ship Essen­tials — Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy via edX
• Lean Six Sig­ma Green Belt Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion — Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­sität München via edX
• Lean Six Sig­ma Yel­low Belt: Quan­ti­ta­tive Tools for Qual­i­ty and Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty — Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­sität München via edX
• Machine Learn­ing Engi­neer — Udac­i­ty
• Merg­ers & Acqui­si­tions — New York Insti­tute of Finance via edX
• Mort­gage Backed Secu­ri­ties (MBS) — New York Insti­tute of Finance via edX
• Prac­ti­cal Project Man­age­ment — The Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow via Future­Learn
• PreM­BA Essen­tials for Pro­fes­sion­als — Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don via edX
• Prod­uct Design & Health — Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy (TU Delft) via edX
• Prod­uct Man­ag­er — Udac­i­ty
• Prod­uct Man­age­ment — Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land via edX
• Pro­gram Man­age­ment and the Art of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion — Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land via edX
• Project Finance and Pub­lic Pri­vate Part­ner­ships — New York Insti­tute of Finance via edX
• Project Man­age­ment Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — UC Irvine via Cours­era
• Re-Imag­in­ing Lead­er­ship — Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land via edX
• Retail and Omnichan­nel Man­age­ment — Dart­mouth via edX
• Sales­force Sales Devel­op­ment Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Sales­force via Cours­era
• Skills for Suc­cess — Full­bridge via edX
• Strate­gic Man­age­ment — Whar­ton via edX
• The Eco­nom­ics of Ener­gy Tran­si­tion — Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy (TU Delft) via edX
• The Sci­ence of Hap­pi­ness at Work — UC Berke­ley via edX

Com­put­er Sci­ence

• Agile Devel­op­ment Using Ruby on Rails — UC Berke­ley via edX
• Agile Soft­ware Devel­op­ment — Udac­i­ty
• AI Engi­neer­ing Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — IBM via Cours­era
• AI Pro­gram­ming with Python — Udac­i­ty
• Android Basics — Udac­i­ty
• Applied AI — IBM via edX
• Appli­ca­tions of Blockchain — Monash Uni­ver­si­ty via Future­Learn
• Applied AI Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate - IBM via Cours­era
• Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence — Udac­i­ty
• Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Trad­ing — Udac­i­ty
• Auto­mat­ed Soft­ware Test­ing — Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy (TU Delft) via edX
• AWS Cloud Archi­tect — Udac­i­ty
• Blockchain Devel­op­er — Udac­i­ty
• Blockchain Fun­da­men­tals — UC Berke­ley via edX
• C++ Devel­op­er - Udac­i­ty
• C Pro­gram­ming with Lin­ux — Dart­mouth via edX
• Cloud Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment Foun­da­tions — IBM via edX
• Cloud Com­put­ing Prac­ti­tion­er with AWS Acad­e­my Cloud Foun­da­tions — AWS Acad­e­my via Future­Learn
• Cloud Devel­op­er — Udac­i­ty
• Cloud DevOps Engi­neer — Udac­i­ty
• Cloud Engi­neer­ing with Google Cloud Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Com­put­er Sci­ence and Mobile Apps — Har­vard via edX
• Com­put­er Sci­ence for Web Pro­gram­ming — Har­vard via edX
• Com­put­er Sci­ence Essen­tials for Soft­ware Devel­op­ment — Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia via edX
• Com­put­er Sci­ence for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence — Har­vard via edX
• Com­put­er Sci­ence for Game Devel­op­ment — Har­vard via edX
• Com­put­er Vision — Udac­i­ty
• Cyber Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions - Udac­i­ty
• Data Prod­uct Man­ag­er — Udac­i­ty
• Data Sci­ence for Exec­u­tives — Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty via edX
• Data Struc­tures and Algo­rithms — Geor­gia Tech via edX
• Data Struc­tures and Algo­rithms - Udac­i­ty
• DeepLearning.AI Ten­sor­Flow Devel­op­er Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — DeepLearning.AI via Cours­era
• Deep Learn­ing — IBM via edX
• Deep Learn­ing — Udac­i­ty
• Devel­op­ing Blockchain-Based Iden­ti­ty Appli­ca­tions — The Lin­ux Foun­da­tion via edX
• DevOps Foun­da­tions: Soft­ware Devel­op­ment Opti­miza­tion — Uni­ver­si­dades Anáhuac via edX
• Essen­tials of Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty — Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton on edX
• Essen­tial Tech­nolo­gies for Busi­ness — IBM via edX
• Foun­da­tions of AI — IBM via edX
• Front-End Web Devel­op­er — Udac­i­ty
• Front-End Web Devel­op­er — W3Cx via edX
• Full Stack Web Devel­op­er — Udac­i­ty
• Cloud Archi­tec­ture with Google Cloud Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Google Cloud Net­work­ing Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Google Cloud Secu­ri­ty Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
• Google IT Automa­tion with Python Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Google via Cours­era
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Math

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The Breathtaking Courage of Harriet Tubman: An Animated History Lesson Speaks to Her Place on the $20 Bill

in Current Affairs, Economics, History | February 8th, 2021

I was a con­duc­tor on the Under­ground Rail­road, and I can say what many oth­ers can­not. I nev­er ran my train off the track, and I nev­er lost a pas­sen­ger.  —Har­ri­et Tub­man

Remem­ber how one of the Oba­ma administration’s final ini­tia­tives was to redesign the $20 bill, ban­ish­ing Andrew Jack­son, a slave­hold­er, to a minor role on the back of the bill, in favor of abo­li­tion­ist Har­ri­et Tub­man, who was born into slav­ery?

The announce­ment arrived on the heels of a con­tro­ver­sy, after then-Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Jacob J. Lew enraged Amer­i­can women by going back on a promise to install a woman on the face of a new­ly designed $10 bill.

The deci­sion to keep Alexan­der Hamil­ton, archi­tect of our finan­cial sys­tem and the country’s first Trea­sury Sec­re­tary, in place is rumored to owe rather a lot to his sta­tus as the sub­ject of a cer­tain hit musi­cal that had opened ear­li­er in the year.

The offi­cial design of the Tub­man bill was to have been unveiled in 2020, to coin­cide with the hun­dredth anniver­sary of the 19th Amend­ment, which guar­an­teed a wom­an’s right to vote. Had all gone accord­ing to plan, it would have been in wide cir­cu­la­tion lat­er this decade.

At the time Lew was untrou­bled by the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion might kill off the pro­posed makeover:

I don’t think somebody’s going to prob­a­bly want to do that — to take the image of Har­ri­et Tub­man off of our mon­ey? To take the image of the suf­frag­ists off?

It seems, how­ev­er, that some­one did want to do that.

In 2016, pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Don­ald Trump told NBC that replac­ing Jack­son with Tub­man was “pure polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness,” sug­gest­ing instead that a place might be found for Tub­man on the $2 bill… which is no longer print­ed.

He also report­ed­ly remarked to for­mer White House advis­er Omarosa Mani­gault New­man, “You want me to put that face on the twen­ty-dol­lar bill?”

The Trea­sury Depart­ment website’s revi­sion in the wake of the 2016 elec­tion scrubbed all ref­er­ences to planned changes to the cur­ren­cy.

Lew’s replace­ment, Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin, final­ly announced that the new $20 bill wouldn’t be ready until 2028, and that the fin­ished design might not include Tub­man at all. He attrib­uted this to tech­ni­cal rea­sons relat­ing to secu­ri­ty fea­tures, though a Trea­sury Depart­ment employ­ee told The New York Times that the engrav­ing plate for it was com­plet­ed “as recent­ly as May 2018” and that the design “appeared to be far along in the process.”

Cer­tain­ly, there were big­ger sto­ries in 2020 than the absence of the promised Har­ri­et Tub­man $20 bill, but the obfus­ca­tion and delay were mad­den­ing giv­en every­thing Tub­man, a woman of action, was able to accom­plish well over a hun­dred years ago.

Most of us are famil­iar with her promi­nence on the Under­ground Rail­road, which led to the sobri­quet “Moses of her peo­ple,” but there are sev­er­al things in the above ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son by Janell Hob­son, Depart­ment Chair of Wom­en’s, Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty Stud­ies at SUNY Albany, that may come as news to you.

Of par­tic­u­lar note, Tub­man was the first woman in US his­to­ry to plan and lead a mil­i­tary raid, result­ing in the lib­er­a­tion of near­ly 700 enslaved per­sons in South Car­oli­na.

Her sec­ond hus­band, Nel­son Davis, also born into slav­ery, had been a Union sol­dier, which enti­tled her to a pen­sion of $8 as a mil­i­tary wid­ow.

She fought hard for an increase on the basis of her own ser­vice to the Union Army, enlist­ing var­i­ous friends and sup­port­ers to lob­by on her behalf, includ­ing Lincoln’s Sec­re­tary of State, William Seward, who said, “I have known her long as a noble high spir­it, as true as sel­dom dwells in the human form.”

Final­ly, in 1899, her pen­sion was increased to $20 a month.

Pro­fes­sor Hob­son, whose les­son pre­dates Mnuchin’s announce­ment of the stall, called the denom­i­na­tion “a fit­ting twist of fate.”

As is the rub­ber stamp that artist Dano Wal cre­at­ed to help dis­gust­ed Amer­i­cans con­vert Jack­sons into Tub­mans with­out the help of the Trea­sury Depart­ment:

Who we choose to hon­or as a soci­ety affects the moral atti­tudes that are baked into us as we grow up. The impact that see­ing the face of Har­ri­et Tub­man star­ing back at you from a $20 bill should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. This sort of rep­re­sen­ta­tion can sub­tly but deeply affect some­one’s con­cep­tion of them­selves and their place in soci­ety. The slight­ly sub­ver­sive nature of it being cur­ren­cy that’s been hand-stamped by anoth­er human makes a dis­cov­ery of one of these bills all the more joy­ous.

Good news looms on the hori­zon. Less than a week into the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, the Trea­sury Depart­ment con­firmed that the agency is “explor­ing ways to resume” putting Har­ri­et Tub­man on the bill, as well as ways to has­ten their release. She will be the first female and first Black Amer­i­can to be fea­tured on our fold­ing mon­ey.

TED-Ed has a list of addi­tion­al resources for those who’d like to delve deep­er into Tubman’s life and lega­cy, as well as a dis­cus­sion as to whether putting Tubman’s face on the $20 bill is a fit­ting hon­or.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Cre­ates a 3D-Print­ed Stamp That Replaces Andrew Jack­son with Har­ri­et Tub­man on the $20 Bill

What the Text­books Don’t Tell Us About The Atlantic Slave Trade: An Ani­mat­ed Video Fills In His­tor­i­cal Gaps

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How the Bicycle Accelerated the Women’s Rights Movement (Circa 1890)

in History | January 14th, 2021

The ear­ly his­to­ry of the bicy­cle did not promise great things—or any­thing, really—for women at the dawn of the 19th cen­tu­ry. A two-wheeled bicy­cle-like inven­tion, for exam­ple, built in 1820, “was more like an agri­cul­tur­al imple­ment in con­struc­tion than a bicy­cle,” one bicy­cle his­to­ry notes. Made of wood, the “hob­by hors­es” and veloci­pedes of cycling’s first decades rolled on iron wheels. Their near-total lack of sus­pen­sion led to the epi­thet “bone­shak­er.” Some had steer­ing mech­a­nisms, some did not. Brak­ing was gen­er­al­ly accom­plished with the feet, or a crowd of pedes­tri­ans, a tree, or horse-drawn cart.

Lad­dish clubs formed and raced around Lon­don, Paris, and New York. No girls allowed. The ear­li­est bicy­cles for women were rid­den side-sad­dle…. But despite all this, it is entire­ly fair to say that few tech­nolo­gies in his­to­ry, ancient or mod­ern, have done more to free women from domes­tic toilage and bring them careen­ing into the pub­lic square, to the dis­may of the Vic­to­ri­an estab­lish­ment.

Bicy­cles “gave women a new lev­el of trans­porta­tion inde­pen­dence that per­plexed news­pa­per colum­nists” and the gen­er­al pub­lic, writes Adri­enne LaFrance at The Atlantic, quot­ing a San Fran­cis­co jour­nal­ist in 1895:

It real­ly does­n’t mat­ter much where this one indi­vid­ual young lady is going on her wheel. It may be that she’s going to the park on plea­sure bent, or to the store for a dozen hair­pins, or to call on a sick friend at the oth­er side of town, or to get a doily pat­tern of some­body, or a recipe for remov­ing tan and freck­les. Let that be as it may. What the inter­est­ed pub­lic wish­es to know is, Where are all the women on wheels going? Is there a grand ren­dezvous some­where toward which they are all head­ed and where they will some time hold a meet that will cause this wob­bly old world to wake up and read­just itself?

Women cyclists were seen as the advanced guard of a com­ing war. “Square­ly in the cen­ter of this bat­tle was one tool,” notes the Vox video above, “that com­plete­ly changed the game.” Both Susan B. Antho­ny and Eliz­a­beth Cady Stan­ton are cred­it­ed with declar­ing that ‘woman is rid­ing to suf­frage on the bicy­cle,’ a line that was print­ed and reprint­ed in news­pa­pers at the turn of the cen­tu­ry,” LaFrance writes. By the 1890s, every­one rode bicy­cles, the first Tour de France was only a few years away, and cycling tech­nol­o­gy had come so far that it would help cre­ate both the car—with its inno­v­a­tive pneu­mat­ic tires and spoked wheels—and the air­plane, through the exper­i­ments of Ohio bicy­cle-mak­ers the Wright Broth­ers.

The new bikes, orig­i­nal­ly called “safe­ty bikes” to con­trast them with giant-wheeled pen­ny-far­things that were briefly the norm, may not have devel­oped gear­ing sys­tems yet, but they were far lighter, cheap­er, and eas­i­er to ride (com­par­a­tive­ly) than the bicy­cles that had come before, which began as play­things for wealthy young men-about-town. The Nation­al Women’s His­to­ry Muse­um describes the scene:

At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, trains, auto­mo­biles, and street­cars were grow­ing in use in urban areas, but peo­ple still large­ly depend­ed on hors­es for trans­porta­tion. Hors­es, and espe­cial­ly car­riages, were expen­sive and women often had to depend on men to hitch up the hors­es for trav­el…. Sur­round­ed by inef­fi­cient and expen­sive forms of trav­el, bicy­cles arrived in cities with the promise of prac­ti­cal­i­ty and afford­abil­i­ty. Bicy­cles were rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive and pro­vid­ed men and women with indi­vid­ual trans­porta­tion for busi­ness, sports, or recre­ation.

Not only did bicy­cles give women equal access to per­son­al rapid tran­sit, but they did so for women of many dif­fer­ent social class­es. The lev­el­ing effects were sig­nif­i­cant, as were the changes to women’s fash­ion. Exposed calves (though still encased in var­i­ous cycling boots) pre­pared the way for trousers. Tra­di­tion­al­ists were out­raged, cease­less­ly mocked women on bikes, as they mocked the suf­frag­ists, and pushed for restric­tions on full free­dom of move­ment. “Whilst the 1890s saw dis­cours­es of mid­dle-class fem­i­nin­i­ty become rec­on­ciled with the notion of women on bicy­cles,” The Vic­to­ri­an Cyclist points out, “learn­ing to ride a bicy­cle required mid­dle-class women to care­ful­ly nav­i­gate their way through a set of high­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and rigid gen­der norms.”

Despite media efforts to tamp down or tame the rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial of the bicy­cle for women, the mar­ket that made the machines saw no prob­lem with increas­ing sales. Bicy­cle poster art and adver­tis­ing from the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry is dom­i­nat­ed by women cyclists, who are por­trayed as ordi­nary ram­blers about town, hip adven­tur­ers, ultra-mod­ern “New Women,” and, per­haps less pro­gres­sive­ly, nude god­dess­es. Whether we call it Gild­ed Age, Belle Epoque, or Fin de siè­cle, the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry pro­duced a trans­porta­tion rev­o­lu­tion that was also, through no par­tic­u­lar­ly con­scious design of the mak­ers of the bicy­cle, a rev­o­lu­tion in wom­en’s rights and thus human free­dom writ large.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Library of Con­gress Dig­i­tizes Over 16,000 Pages of Let­ters & Speech­es from the Women’s Suf­frage Move­ment, and You Can Help Tran­scribe Them

Odd Vin­tage Post­cards Doc­u­ment the Pro­pa­gan­da Against Women’s Rights 100 Years Ago

How Bicy­cles Can Rev­o­lu­tion­ize Our Lives: Case Stud­ies from the Unit­ed States, Nether­lands, Chi­na & Britain

The First 100 Years of the Bicy­cle: A 1915 Doc­u­men­tary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Endur­ing Design in 1890

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness