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For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the variety of religions that have existed throughout human history, it starts looking downright kaleidoscopic. Or rather, it looks something like the faintly psychedelic but also information-rich Histomap of Religion above, created in 1943 by chemist John B. Sparks, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his original Histomap depicting 4,000 Years of World History and his subsequent Histomap of Evolution.
The UsefulCharts video below explains Sparks’ Histomap of Religion in detail, but it also cites his Histomap of Evolution, an example of how his worldview fails to align with current perceptions of these subjects. Even the newer Histomap of Religion is by now more than 80 years old, during which time scholarship in religion and related fields has made certain discoveries and clarifications that necessarily go unreflected in Sparks’ work. But if you bear this in mind while looking at the Histomap of Religion, you can still gain a new and useful perspective on how the beliefs that mankind has held highest have changed and intermingled over the millennia.
The chart begins in prehistory, dividing the then-extant faiths into the categories “magic and fetishism,” “tabu and totemism,” “ancestor worship,” “tribal gods and divine kings,” “propitiation of nature spirits,” and “fertility cults.” Though Sparks’ information may on the whole be “based on theories about the origins of religion which have now been either rejected or at least seriously revised,” explains UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker, “the general ideas expressed by these six types are still somewhat valid.” The expansion and contraction of adherence to these types of early religion through time are reflected by changes in the width of the colored columns that represent them. Follow these columns downward through history, and new, more familiar religions emerge: Taoism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity both Catholic and Protestant.
Thereafter come other movements and figures perhaps not immediately recognizable as religious in nature: “humanism,” for example, whose representatives include Shakespeare and Rousseau. Later, the ideas of Russian intellectuals Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen branch off to become, after about a century, the “corrupt philosophy” of communism, with its “God-less propaganda” supporting a “police state aimed at world domination.” Baker objects that, if Sparks counts communism as a religion, then surely he should count capitalism as a religion as well. This is a fair-enough point, though behold this dense chart of “cults, faiths, and ethical philosophies” long enough, and you’ll start to wonder if everything humanity has ever done isn’t, in some sense, ultimately religious in nature.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of changing their names, however foreign they sounded. You can learn this and much else besides by paying a visit to the National Immigration Museum on Ellis Island, which opened in 1990, 36 years after the closure of the immigrant inspection and processing station itself. But if Frank Lloyd Wright had had his way, you could live on Ellis Island — and what’s more, you’d never need to leave it.
“After Ellis Island was decommissioned in 1954 as the nation’s gateway to the world’s huddled masses, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) chose an all-American path: opening the site to developers,” write Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin at the Gotham Center for New York City History. When NBC radio and television announcer Jerry Damon and director Elwood Doudt pitched to Wright the ambitious idea of redeveloping the disused island into a “completely self-contained city of the future,” the architect replied that the project was “virtually made to order for me.” Alas, Wright died just before they could all meet and hammer out the details, but not before he’d drawn up a preliminary but vivid plan.
Damon and Doudt carried on with what the late Wright has named the “Key Project.” “Its Jules Verne-esque design, based on Wright’s sketches, was resolutely futuristic,” write Lubell and Goldin. A “circular podium” on the island would support “apartments for 7,500 residents, rising like a stack of offset, alternating dishes. Above these dwelling floors, and separated by sundecks, would be a crescent of seven corrugated, candlestick-shaped towers containing more apartments and a 500-room hotel.” At the center of it all, Wright placed “a huge globe, seemingly pockmarked by eons of meteor collisions, and held aloft by plastic canopies protecting the plazas below.”
It’s easy to imagine the execution of this Space Age urban utopia not quite living up to Wright’s vision — and, indeed, to imagine it having fallen by now into just as thorough a state of dilapidation as did Ellis Island’s original buildings. But it’s also fascinating to consider what could have been Wright’s final commission as the acme of the evolution of his thinking about the urban space itself. A quarter-century earlier, he’d been obsessed with the quasi-rural development he called Broadacre City; just a few years before his death, he came up with the Illinois Mile-High Tower, a megastructure that would practically have constituted a metropolis in and of itself. The Key Project, as Damon and Doudt promoted it, would have offered “casual, inspired living, minus the usual big-city clamor”: the kind of marketing language we hear from developers still today, though not backed by the genius of the most renowned architect in American history.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.” Introducing the new project (otherwise known as oVert), the museum writes:
Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members took CT scans of more than 13,000 specimens, with representative species across the vertebrate tree of life. This includes more than half the genera of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes and mammals. CT scanners use high-energy X‑rays to peer past an organism’s exterior and view the dense bone structure beneath. Thus, skeletons make up the majority of oVert reconstructions. A small number of specimens were also stained with a temporary contrast-enhancing solution that allowed researchers to visualize soft tissues, such as skin, muscle and other organs.
The models give an intimate look at internal portions of a specimen that could previously only be observed through destructive dissection and tissue sampling.
In the coming years, the openVertebrate team will “CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens from U.S. museum collections, producing high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.” The project will also make digital images and 3D mesh files available to download and 3D print.
The video below provides a short, visual introduction to the digital collection. You can learn more about the project here.
In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most famous building, which — as of tomorrow — has been under construction for 142 years. When it first broke ground in 1882, Gaudí wasn’t involved at all, but when he took over the project the following year, he re-envisioned it in a distinctive combination of the Gothic and Art Nouveau styles. The rest, as they say, is history: a troubled, unpredictable history continuing to this day, explained by architecture-and-history Youtuber Manuel Bravo in the video above.
Though it isn’t yet complete, you can visit Sagrada Família; indeed, it’s long been the most popular tourist attraction in Barcelona. The experience of marveling at the basilica’s astonishing degree of detail and not-quite-of-this-Earth structure is worth the price of admission, which has helped to fund its ongoing construction. But you’ll appreciate it on a higher level if you go with someone who can explain its many unusual features, both architectural and religious — someone with as much knowledge ad enthusiasm as Bravo, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, Venice, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and the Duomo di Firenze.
With Sagrada Família’s pyramidal shape, Bravo explains, Gaudí “hoped to suggest a connection between the human and the divine.” Its three façades are dedicated to the birth, death, and eternal life of Jesus Christ, to whom the central and tallest of its planned eighteen towers will be dedicated. The cathedral’s exterior alone constitutes an “authentic Bible of stone,” but it can hardly prepare you to step into the interior, with its “beautiful play of space, light, and color.” As Bravo puts it, “the protagonist here is the space itself,” envisioned by Gaudí as “a huge forest” involving no un-nature-like straight lines. All of it showcases “the combination of aesthetics and efficiency” that defines the architect’s work.
Bravo’s video runs a bit over twenty minutes, but you could spend much, much longer appreciating every aspect of Sagrada Família, those completed in Gaudí’s lifetime as well as those completed by the many devoted artisans who have continued his work for almost 100 years now. The architect “knew quite well that he would not live to see the temple completed,” says Bravo, hence his having “left behind so many models and drawings” for his successors to go on. They’re working on a 2026 deadline, but as Bravo notes, given the interruptions inflicted by COVID-19, “that date seems unlikely.” But then, has there ever been as unlikely a building as Sagrada Família?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802—where it remains today. The animated video above, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, explains “how scholars decoded the ancient message of the Rosetta Stone,” a painstaking process that took decades to complete. By the 1850s, philologists had unlocked the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs and, with them, the secrets of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around to any other details, that it involved no smartphones. But even the flashiest new technologies have long evolutionary histories, and, in certain notable respects, even the smartphone has a medieval ancestor. That would be the astrolabe, an especially fascinating eleventh-century example of which was recently discovered at the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona. It was identified by University of Cambridge historian Federica Gigante, who’s been making the media rounds to explain the context and function of this striking and historic device.
“It’s basically the world’s earliest smartphone,” Gigante says in an NPR All Things Considered segment. “With one simple calculation, you can tell the time, but you can also do all sorts of other things.” In a visual New York Times feature, Franz Lidz and Clara Vannucci add that astrolabes, which resembled “large, old-fashioned vest pocket watches,” also allowed their users to determine “distances, heights, latitudes and even (with a horoscope) the future.”
Gigante tells them that, when she got the chance to pay the Miniscalchi-Erizzo astrolabe closer scrutiny, she could identify Arabic inscriptions, “faint Hebrew markings,” and Western numerals, which made this particular artifact “a powerful record of scientific exchange between Muslims, Jews and Christians over nearly a millennium.”
In the video above, Seb Falk, author of The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, demonstrates how to use an astrolabe to calculate the time. It is, admittedly, a more complicated affair than glancing at the screen of your phone, analogies to which have become irresistible in these discussions. “Like the smartphone, the astrolabe came into being during times of economic prosperity — in that case, likely during the height of the Roman Empire,” writes Smithsonian ‘s Laura Poppick. Though functional astrolabes were made of ordinary wood or metals, the surviving examples tend to be ornately engraved brass, which provided status value to the high-end market. In that respect, too, the astrolabe resembles the “conceptual ancestor to the iPhone 7” — a device that, in the eyes of technophiles here in 2024, now looks fairly medieval itself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Book of Colour Conceptswill soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep dive — with Taschen’s characteristic visual lavishness — into one of the truly universal languages: that of color. Throughout its two volumes, The Book of Colour Concepts presents more than 1000 images drawn from four centuries’ worth of “rare books and manuscripts from a wealth of institutions, including the most distinguished color collections worldwide.”
Reproduced within are selections from more than 65 books and manuscripts, including such “seminal works of color theory” as Isaac Newton’s Opticks and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, as previously featured here on Open Culture.
Kate Mothes at Colossal adds that “readers will also find studies from Color Problems, the early 20th-century handbook by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, which described theories that would trend in subsequent decades in design and art, like Joseph Albers’s series Homage to the Square.” In The Book of ColourConcepts’ 800 pages also appear a variety of works that don’t belong, strictly speaking, to the field of color theory, such as a botanical notebook by the spiritualist and early abstract artist Hilma af Klint.
Co-authors Sarah Lowengard and Alexandra Loske bring serious credentials to this endeavor: Lowengard is a historian of technology and science with more than 40 years’ experience as an “artisan color-maker,” and Loske is an art historian and curator who specializes in “the role of women in the history of color.” Both would no doubt agree on the special value of revisiting the history of this particular subject here in the early twenty-first century, with all its discourse about the disappearance of color from our everyday lives. It’s worrisome enough that spoken and written languages outside the English-French-German-Spanish league seem to be declining; relegating ourselves to an ever-narrowing vocabulary of color would be an even graver loss indeed.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past and future. Inspired by Christian revivalism, the drawings depict a timeline from the Flood of Noah to what Dunant believed was an impending Apocalypse. The diagrams fuse mystical references with biblical, historic and scientific events, while also setting up a clear opposition between Geneva, as the centre of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church.”
The image above is the first drawing out of a series of four, made with colored pencils, ink, India ink, wax crayons, and watercolors. Writes Messy Nessy, Dunant “spent considerable time on the drawings, organising the symbolic elements according to a strict logic, making preparatory sketches and painstakingly incorporating drawings and colourings into his chronology.” All along, he was driven by the belief that the Apocalypse was in the offing, just a short time way.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who recognize the phrase “corny dialogue that would make the pope weep,” and those who don’t. If you fall into the former category, your mind is almost certainly filled with images of bleak Midwestern winters, modest trailer homes, hooded figures smashing an already-junkyard-worthy car, and above all, one man trying — and trying, and trying — to put another man’s head through a kitchen cabinet. If you fall into the latter category, it’s high time you watched American Movie, Chris Smith and Sara Price’s documentary about a hapless aspiring Wisconsin horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt that has, in the 25 years since its release, become a minor cultural phenomenon unto itself.
American Movie rightfully occupies the top spot in the new Cinema Cartography video above, which ranks the fifteen greatest documentaries of all time. The list features well-known works by the most acclaimed documentary filmmakers alive today, like Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, which captures a talent show at an institution for the “criminally insane”; Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, which proved instrumental in solving the very murder case it examines; and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, which deals in Herzog’s signature heightened yet matter-of-fact manner with the ironic fate of an eccentric bear enthusiast.
Documentary film has experienced something of a popular renaissance over the past few decades, beginning in 1994 with Steve James’ Academy Award-winning Hoop Dreams (which comes in at number seven). More recent examples of documentaries that have gone relatively mainstream include Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (number three), in which participants in Indonesia’s mass political violence of the nineteen-sixties recall their own brutality in detail, and O.J.: Made in America (number five), which revisits the “trial of the century” now so close and yet so far in our cultural memory. There are also intriguing films of a much lower profile, like William Greaves’ chaotic Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and the late Jonas Mekas’ epically but modestly autobiographical As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.
If you watch only one of these fifteen documentaries, make it American Movie, which repays repeated viewings over a quarter-century (as I can personally confirm) with not just its comedy — intentional or unintentional — but also its insight — again, intentional or unintentional — into the nature of creation, friendship, and human existence itself. “If ever, in your creations, there’s doubt, or you ever feel like you’ve lost your way, if there was ever a film to watch, to realign yourself, it is AmericanMovie,” says The Cinema Cartography creator Lewis Bond. Even those of us not dedicated to any particular art form could stand to be reminded on occasion that, as Borchardt memorably puts it, “life is kinda cool sometimes.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edition.
A recreation can be found and closely examined at the David Rumsey Map Collection, which allows you to zoom in on any part of the original timeline, which stretched to 23 feet in length and was designed for schoolhouses as a one-stop shop for all of history.
As Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton describe it in their book Cartographies of Time:
The Synchronological Chart is a great work of outsider thinking and a template for autodidact study; it attempts to rise above the station of a mere historical summary and to draw a picture of history rich enough to serve as a textbook in itself.
Adams was a voracious reader and a good Christian, and in the top half of the chart he attempts to untangle the spaghetti-like genealogy of Adam and Eve’s children from Abel (“The First Martyr”) through to Solomon (whose temple looks very Gothic), all the way through to Jesus and beyond.
At the same time he presents a detailed description of archaeological history “after the flood,” from Stone Age tools through the earliest civilizations, mentioning major battles, inventions, philosophers, and advances in science. Adams’ starting date of all history comes from the Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who, in 1654 declared, after years of study, that the earth was created on “nightfall on 22 October 4004 BC.” (Now that’s certainty!)
The map is colorful and filled with beautiful illustrations from the self-taught Adams, from a drawing of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream to the current world leaders and a list of United States Presidents up to James Garfield. There’s even a section at the far end for “Eminent Men not elsewhere mentioned on the Chart,” the sign of a true completist (except for the part where he leaves out women).
Adams lived far from the epicenters of American education. He grew up in a Presbyterian family in Ohio, and, when he showed a skill for teaching later in life, he made the trek out west, nearly dying on the Oregon Trail. He settled in Salem, Oregon and began teaching while also working on his chart. When it was ready to print, he traveled back to Cincinnati to hire the esteemed lithographers Strobridge & Co., who published Civil War scenes, maps, and circus posters. Initially he sold the chart himself, but its popularity led to several American and British printers producing copies into the 20th century. Even Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft owned a copy.
It remains a riotous work of art, history, religion, and self-determination, and facsimiles can still be purchased online. Adams later left teaching to become president of an insurance company, and died of “la grippe” (i.e. the flu) in 1898.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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