Search Results for "college"

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Masters, Mini Masters, Bachelors & Mini Bachelors from Top Universities

in | March 21st, 2021

Explore a col­lec­tion of online Degree and Mini Degree Pro­grams from major uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing MIT, Har­vard, UC Berke­ley & more.

The lists below include Online Mini Mas­ter’s Degrees, Online Mas­ter’s Degrees, Online Mini Bach­e­lor’s Degrees, and final­ly Online Bach­e­lor’s Degrees.

Many of these pro­grams are offered at a sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er price than tra­di­tion­al degree pro­grams.

Mini Mas­ter’s Pro­grams

To learn more about the val­ue of Micro­Mas­ters pro­grams from edX, and Mas­ter­Track Cer­tifi­cate pro­grams from Cours­era, read this arti­cle from Busi­ness Insid­er.

Busi­ness

Com­put­er Sci­ence

Data Sci­ence

Edu­ca­tion

Engi­neer­ing

Health

Humanities/Arts & Cul­ture

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty

UX Design

Sundry

Online Mas­ter’s Degrees

Busi­ness

Com­put­er Sci­ence & Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing

Data Sci­ence

Pub­lic Health

Sundry

 

Micro Bach­e­lor’s Degrees

Bach­e­lor’s Degrees

 

To explore a list of free cours­es, see our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021


What’s the world’s old­est com­put­er? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a cou­ple thou­sand years or so. The first known com­put­er may have been a hand­held device, a lit­tle larg­er than the aver­age tablet. It was also hand-pow­ered and had a lim­it­ed, but nonethe­less remark­able, func­tion: it fol­lowed the Meton­ic cycle, “the 235-month pat­tern that ancient astronomers used to pre­dict eclipses,” writes Rob­by Berman at Big Think.

The ancient arti­fact known as the Antikythera mech­a­nism — named for the Greek Island under which it was dis­cov­ered — turned up in 1900. It took anoth­er three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry before the secrets of what first appeared as a “cor­rod­ed lump” revealed a device of some kind dat­ing from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, mod­ern imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy had iden­ti­fied all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a vir­tu­al mod­el of it was released,” as we not­ed in an ear­li­er post.

The device could pre­dict the posi­tions of the plan­ets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the cen­ter of the uni­verse. Researchers study­ing the Antikythera mech­a­nism under­stood that much. But they couldn’t quite under­stand exact­ly how it worked, since only about a third of the com­plex mech­a­nism has sur­vived.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

Now, it appears that researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege of Lon­don have fig­ured it out, debut­ing a new com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports. “Ours is the first mod­el that con­forms to all the phys­i­cal evi­dence and match­es the sci­en­tif­ic inscrip­tions engraved on the mech­a­nism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engi­neer. In the video above, you can learn about the his­to­ry of the mech­a­nism and its redis­cov­ery in the 20th cen­tu­ry, and see a detailed expla­na­tion of Freeth and his team’s dis­cov­er­ies.

“About the size of a large dic­tio­nary,” the arti­fact has proven to be the “most com­plex piece of engi­neer­ing from the ancient world” the video informs us. Hav­ing built a 3D mod­el, the researchers next intend to build a repli­ca of the device. If they can do so with “mod­ern machin­ery,” writes Guardian sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple, “they aim to do the same with tech­niques from antiq­ui­ty” — no small task con­sid­er­ing that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have man­u­fac­tured such com­po­nents” with­out the use of a lathe, a tool they prob­a­bly did not pos­sess.

Image by Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don

The mech­a­nism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s mod­el works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there oth­er such devices? Hope­ful­ly, we won’t have to wait anoth­er sev­er­al decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Sci­en­tif­ic Reports arti­cle here. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

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

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Yo-Yo Ma Plays an Impromptu Performance in Vaccine Clinic After Receiving 2nd Dose

in Life, Music | March 14th, 2021

After get­ting his sec­ond dose of the COVID-19 vac­cine, Yo-Yo Ma “took a seat along the wall of the obser­va­tion area, masked and social­ly dis­tanced away from the oth­ers. He went on to pass 15 min­utes in obser­va­tion play­ing cel­lo for an applaud­ing audi­ence,” writes the Berk­shire Eagle. You can watch the scene above, which played out at Berk­shire Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege this week­end. And read more about it here.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yo-Yo Ma Per­forms the First Clas­si­cal Piece He Ever Learned: Take a 12-Minute Men­tal Health Break and Watch His Mov­ing “Tiny Desk” Con­cert

Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces 7‑Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Young­ster Per­form for John F. Kennedy (1962)

How Do Vac­cines (Includ­ing the COVID-19 Vac­cines) Work?: Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions

MIT Presents a Free Course on the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic, Fea­tur­ing Antho­ny Fau­ci & Oth­er Experts

 

 

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Google & Coursera Launch Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Analytics, Project Management and UX Design

in Education, Google, Online Courses | March 12th, 2021

We live in an age of less-than-total agree­ment as to the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion. Should it immerse stu­dents in the best that has been thought and said? Pro­vide an envi­ron­ment in which to come of age? Pro­duce “lead­ers”? Or should it, as increas­ing­ly many argue, first and fore­most secure pro­fes­sion­al futures? In the prac­tice of recent decades, high­er edu­ca­tion has done a bit of each, to the sat­is­fac­tion of some and the dis­sat­is­fac­tion of oth­ers. It has, in oth­er words, become an indus­try sub­ject to “dis­rup­tion” by oth­er play­ers offer­ing spe­cial­ized solu­tions of their own. Take for exam­ple the new Career Cer­tifi­cates offered by Google and the online edu­ca­tion plat­form Cours­era.

“Designed to pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months,” as Cours­era CEO Jeff Mag­gion­cal­da explains it, these new­ly-unveiled Career Cer­tifi­cates “don’t have any pre­req­ui­sites,” which means that most any­one inter­est­ed in earn­ing them can do so right now. This goes for “new grads land­ing their first job, front-line work­ers seek­ing sta­ble employ­ment, mid-career pro­fes­sion­als mak­ing a piv­ot, or par­ents plan­ning their return to the work­force,” and pre­sum­ably myr­i­ad oth­er walks of life besides.

Avail­able in Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment, and User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, “each cer­tifi­cate is com­plete­ly online, self-paced, and costs $39 per month” — sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than most exist­ing forms of high­er edu­ca­tion, even of the most pro­fes­sion­al­ly or tech­no­log­i­cal­ly ori­ent­ed vari­eties.

If you’ve dipped into our list of online cours­es, you’ve prob­a­bly encoun­tered Cours­era, a lead­ing plat­form for mas­sive online open cours­es (or MOOCs) used by some of the world’s best-known tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties. Its new pro­vi­sion of Google’s Career Cer­tifi­cates should go some way to mak­ing more famil­iar — at least to those us who’ve already learned online — a reimag­in­ing of pro­fes­sion­al edu­ca­tion. This pro­gram’s “dis­rup­tive” poten­tial, due not least to Google’s own con­sid­er­a­tion of these cer­tifi­cates as equiv­a­lent to a four-year degree, has already been well not­ed. “But while the new pro­grams offer a fast track to new skills and pos­si­bly even a new job in a frac­tion of the time of a degree pro­gram,” writes Inc.‘s Justin Bariso, “stu­dents should­n’t expect the cours­es to be a walk in the park.” And giv­en that they’re unlike­ly to get eas­i­er, any­one inter­est­ed in earn­ing a Career Cer­tifi­cate would do well to look into it today.

Below, you can find a list of the new Career Cer­tifi­cates.

  • User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate – UX design jobs are pro­ject­ed to steadi­ly grow over the com­ing years, with medi­an salaries for an entry-lev­el role around $82,000. This sev­en-course cer­tifi­cate explores UX prin­ci­ples, UX terms, and indus­try-stan­dard tools, includ­ing Fig­ma and Adobe XD. By the time they com­plete the pro­gram, learn­ers will have three port­fo­lio projects to use in their job appli­ca­tions.
  • Data Ana­lyt­ics Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate – In the U.S., there are near­ly 15,000 open entry-lev­el data ana­lyt­ics roles, with an annu­al medi­an entry-lev­el salary of more than $63,000. This sev­en-course cer­tifi­cate explores ana­lyt­i­cal skills, con­cepts, and tools used in many intro­duc­to­ry data ana­lyt­ics roles – includ­ing SQL, Tableau, RStu­dio, and Kag­gle.
  • Project Man­age­ment Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate – Employ­ers will need to fill near­ly 2.2 mil­lion new project-ori­ent­ed roles each year through 2027, accord­ing to the Project Man­age­ment Insti­tute. This six-course cer­tifi­cate pre­pares learn­ers to launch a project man­age­ment career. It cov­ers indus­try-stan­dard tools and meth­ods, includ­ing the agile project man­age­ment sys­tem, and key soft skills, such as stake­hold­er man­age­ment, prob­lem-solv­ing, and influ­enc­ing.
  • IT Sup­port Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — Pre­pare for an entry-lev­el job as an IT sup­port spe­cial­ist. In this pro­gram, you’ll learn the fun­da­men­tals of oper­at­ing sys­tems and net­work­ing, and how to trou­bleshoot prob­lems using code to ensure com­put­ers run cor­rect­ly. This is for you if you enjoy solv­ing prob­lems, learn­ing new tools, and help­ing oth­ers.
  • IT Automa­tion Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate — This is an advanced pro­gram for learn­ers who have com­plet­ed the Google IT Sup­port Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate. This is for you if you want to build on your IT skills with Python and automa­tion.

The new cer­tifi­cates have been added to our col­lec­tion, 200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”

Cours­era and Google Launch an Online Cer­tifi­cate Pro­gram to Help Stu­dents Become IT Pro­fes­sion­als & Get Attrac­tive Jobs

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Cours­era Part­ners with Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties to Offer Master’s Degrees at a More Afford­able Price

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Where Did the Metal Scream Come From? And How Do Metal Vocalists Avoid Destroying Their Vocal Cords?

in Music | March 3rd, 2021

Do met­al singers take vocal lessons? Sure­ly not the greats of old! Did Bruce Dick­in­son, Rob Hal­ford, and Ozzy Osbourne take lessons? Or did they dive into the debauch­ery head­first, scream­ing?

Iron Maiden’s Dick­in­son has been rumored to have received opera train­ing. This is not true. Instead, he stole his vocal tech­nique from his “den­tist ex-girl­friend,” he says. “As an ex-pupil of the very pres­ti­gious Chel­tenham Ladies’ Col­lege, she’d had quite exten­sive singing lessons, and she kept a note­book.” It changed his life.

Ozzy’s gui­tarist Zakk Wylde tells a fun­ny sto­ry of the Black Sab­bath legend’s wife Sharon order­ing him up a coach… just once… a “man with a brief­case,” says the burly shred­der, sent to take care of “our Joe Mon­tana.” But Osbourne did end up work­ing with a vocal coach, Kath­leen Rig­gs, more reg­u­lar­ly in lat­er years.

Judas Priest’s Hal­ford? He doesn’t men­tion a coach, but he does talk a lot about care and train­ing. “My form of extreme singing,” he says, “it’s like a work­out, you know…. Your vocal cords are mus­cles — they get burned out, they get tired.” As for his pio­neer­ing screams of over 40 years ago, he mus­es, “I some­times think that’s a bit of a curse that I sang and record­ed those cer­tain songs so long ago, when I was a younger guy with a younger set of vocal cords.” He near­ly wrecked his voice, he says, with cocaine and Jack Daniels.

It’s not opera, but met­al singing is a seri­ous­ly ath­let­ic activ­i­ty and has only become more so as its vocals have grown more extreme, even if its fash­ion sense has not. As clas­si­cal­ly trained singer and actress Melis­sa Cross — the “Queen of Scream” — relates in the video at the top, she first became a met­al vocal coach when a pro­duc­er friend called her in dis­may: the singers he was record­ing couldn’t get through a ses­sion with­out cough­ing blood.

Where did the met­al scream come from, and why is it so preva­lent if it’s such an unhealthy way to move one’s vocal folds day after day with­out train­ing and tech­nique? Vikings, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,”; Led Zep­pelin, Black Sab­bath, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, of course… babies…. These are all points of ori­gin for today’s extreme met­al singing, say hosts LA Buck­n­er and Nahre Sol in the PBS video fur­ther up.

The two talk to Cross about scream­ing with­out bleed­ing, and met­al vocal­ist Natal­ie Kreuger talks about how warmups and opera-like breath­ing tech­niques are essen­tial to main­tain­ing vocal fit­ness. And if you need more con­vinc­ing that met­al singing requires seri­ous pow­er and sta­mi­na, take a look at the 10 longest live screams in met­al, above. Let’s hope they all heed the exam­ple of the elder met­al gods.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Ori­gins of the Death Growl in Met­al Music

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

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

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Watch Chick Corea (RIP) Perform Intimate Acoustic Performances with Bobby McFerrin, Gary Burton, Hiromi Uehara & Others

in Music | February 18th, 2021

It seems impos­si­ble to talk about key­boardist Chick Corea, who passed away from can­cer on Feb­ru­ary 11 at age 79, with­out also talk­ing about Miles Davis. Davis hand picked him for the ground­break­ing albums In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew, and as a mem­ber of those ensem­bles, Corea helped shape the future of music and helped divide the jazz com­mu­ni­ty into those who embraced the psy­che­del­ic “fusion” of jazz, rock, and oth­er world musics and those who were fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of tra­di­tion.

Corea, how­ev­er, “had already gone through ear­ly explo­rative phas­es of his career,” writes Jim Bur­long at Jazz Views, before his “brief but not always hap­py” stint with Davis. He was on his way to the avant-garde direc­tion he would take with his lat­er group, Return to For­ev­er. Yet no mat­ter how far out there he went with Davis or the ridicu­lous­ly accom­plished RTF and hun­dreds of oth­er musi­cians he played with, Corea always stayed con­nect­ed to the music’s roots.

“Through­out his career,” Gio­van­ni Rus­sonel­lo writes at The New York Times, Corea “nev­er aban­doned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punc­til­ious touch and crisp sense of har­mo­ny made his play­ing imme­di­ate­ly dis­tinc­tive.” We hear it in com­po­si­tions like “Spain” (at the top in a beau­ti­ful­ly spare ver­sion with Bob­by McFer­rin), “500 Miles High,” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” all of which have “become jazz stan­dards, marked by his dreamy but bright­ly illu­mi­nat­ed har­monies and ear-grab­bing melodies.”

We hear Corea’s “dreamy” acoustic piano through­out Return to Forever’s 1976 Roman­tic War­rior, an album that fea­tures 29 or so addi­tion­al instru­ments among its four musi­cians, includ­ing a Min­i­Moog, Micro­moog, Poly­moog, Moog 15, ARP Odyssey, and an alarm clock and slide whis­tle on the quirky, medieval “The Magi­cian.” This descrip­tion alone might make purists cringe, but charges that jazz fusion albums are over­stuffed and over­ly busy don’t tend to stick to Corea’s best record­ings.

The sound of Return to For­ev­er on Roman­tic War­rior, an album that influ­enced “bands to come on both sides of the Atlantic,” is “nev­er crowd­ed,” Bur­long writes, “and the over­all ambiance from all com­bi­na­tions of the thir­ty some­thing instru­ments used is most­ly one of con­trolled urgency.” Graced with a finesse that shines equal­ly in weird, Sci­en­tol­ogy-inspired elec­tric albums and tra­di­tion­al acoustic trios, Corea’s “ver­sa­til­i­ty is sec­ond to none when it comes to the jazz world,” says his long­time friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor, vibra­phon­ist Gary Bur­ton.

Corea resist­ed the idea that funk and rock instru­men­ta­tion in pro­gres­sive jazz meant the inven­tion of a new sub-genre. “It’s the media that are so inter­est­ed in cat­e­go­riz­ing music,” he said in 1983, “the media and the busi­ness­men, who, after all, have a vest­ed inter­est in keep­ing mar­ket­ing clear cut and sep­a­rate. If crit­ics would ask musi­cians their views about what is hap­pen­ing, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts tak­ing place… a con­tin­u­al merg­ing of dif­fer­ent streams.”

His advice to fel­low musi­cians who might feel con­strained by tra­di­tion or the stric­tures of the mar­ket is price­less (or “cheap but good,” he wrote), includ­ing the advice he gave a grad­u­at­ing class at Berklee Col­lege of Music in his home state of Mass­a­chu­setts in 1997: “It’s all right to be your­self. In fact, the more your­self you are, the more mon­ey you make.” As a musi­cian, Corea was nev­er any­thing less than him­self, though he didn’t seem in it for the mon­ey, shar­ing com­po­si­tion cred­it equal­ly among the musi­cians on many of his ensem­ble albums.

Corea’s ver­sa­tile musi­cal approach won him 23 Gram­mys (“more than almost any oth­er musi­cian,” writes Rus­sonel­lo), three Latin Gram­mys, and the endur­ing respect and admi­ra­tion of fans and fel­low musi­cians. See more of his flaw­less chops in the inti­mate live per­for­mances above, includ­ing a Tiny Desk Con­cert with Bur­ton, a full con­cert in Spain from 2018 with his acoustic trio, and a duel­ing piano per­for­mance of “Spain” live in Tokyo with pianist Hiro­mi Uehara, just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Chick Corea (RIP) Offers 16 Pieces of “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group” (1985)

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Miles Davis’ Bitch­es Brew Turns 50: Cel­e­brate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Mas­ter­piece

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

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A New Database Will Document Every Slave House in the U.S.: Discover the “Saving Slave Houses Project”

in Archives, History | February 9th, 2021

In cen­tral North Car­oli­na, not far from where I live, sits the Franklin­ton Cen­ter at Bricks, a 224-acre edu­ca­tion­al cam­pus and con­fer­ence cen­ter built on the remains of a his­toric “Agri­cul­tur­al, Indus­tri­al, and Nor­mal School,” then junior col­lege, for the descen­dants of enslaved peo­ple. These schools were them­selves built on the land of a for­mer cot­ton plan­ta­tion, on for­mer ter­ri­to­ry of the Tus­caro­ra Nation. The cam­pus acts as a palimpsest of South­ern U.S. his­to­ry. Each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion on the site after the Civ­il War has built memo­ri­als along­side mod­ern insti­tu­tions of learn­ing and activism. The mod­el is rare. As his­to­ri­an Dami­an Par­gas of Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty tells Atlas Obscura’s Sab­ri­na Imbler, “slav­ery is large­ly invis­i­ble in the [cur­rent] South­ern land­scape, and there­fore easy to ignore or for­get.”

Even at the Franklin­ton Cen­ter, the rem­nants of the slave past con­sist only of a whip­ping post, the focus of a remem­brance area on the cam­pus, and an ante­bel­lum slave ceme­tery a short dis­tance away. All traces of slave quar­ters and hous­es have been wiped away. Where they remain in the U.S., writes Imbler, such build­ings often “bear no vis­i­ble trace of their past; many have been con­vert­ed into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cas­es the struc­tures have fall­en into ruin or van­ished entire­ly, leav­ing behind a depres­sion in the ground.” Since 2012, Jobie Hill, a preser­va­tion archi­tect, has tried to change that with her project Sav­ing Slave Hous­es.

Hill is deter­mined to build a first-of-its-kind data­base that hon­ors and pre­serves these spaces in more than mem­o­ry, and to unite the hous­es with the sto­ries of peo­ple who once inhab­it­ed them. As she sees it, such a repos­i­to­ry is long over­due. “There has nev­er been a nation­al sur­vey of slave hous­es, except for the one I’m try­ing to do,” Hill says.

Hous­es, says Hill, in her TEDx talk above, “can tell us a lot about the peo­ple that lived there…. Each slave house has a valu­able sto­ry to tell.” A slave house, Hill writes, on the project’s site, “was a place where enslaved peo­ple found strength and com­fort from one anoth­er; but at the same time, it was a place that imposed phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions and psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma.”

The project grew out of Hill’s master’s the­ses in preser­va­tion archi­tec­ture and through an intern­ship for the His­toric Amer­i­can Build­ings Sur­vey (HABS), “a fed­er­al pro­gram estab­lished in 1933 to employ archi­tects and drafts­men” dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, Imbler notes. She has been able to iden­ti­fy slave hous­es by their small size, loca­tion on a prop­er­ty, “and if the build­ing has a fire­place or chim­ney,” she says, not­ing that such build­ings were rarely includ­ed in sur­veys. She has also cross-ref­er­enced sur­veys with the “largest, best-known col­lec­tion of inter­views from for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple: the 1936–1938 WPA Slave Nar­ra­tive Col­lec­tion.”

These inter­views “paint a grim pic­ture of the cru­el and cramped quar­ters enslaved peo­ple were forced to live in.” But slave hous­es are not only mark­ers of a painful past. “A slave house simul­ta­ne­ous­ly embod­ies suf­fer­ing, yet per­se­ver­ance and strong fam­i­ly bonds,” writes Hill. They are sym­bols of sur­vival against daunt­ing odds, and like the mag­no­lia tree that marks the remem­brance site at the Franklin­ton Cen­ter, they can “serve as a reminder that we too must do more than sur­vive. We must find a way to thrive.” Learn more about Hill’s Sav­ing Slave Hous­es project here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Hear the Voic­es of Amer­i­cans Born in Slav­ery: The Library of Con­gress Fea­tures 23 Audio Inter­views with For­mer­ly Enslaved Peo­ple (1932–75)

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

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

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

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Watch Amanda Gorman Read “The Hill We Climb,” “Making Mountains As We Run,” “Fury and Faith,” and More

in Current Affairs, Poetry | January 27th, 2021

Led by celebri­ty host Tom Han­ks, the Biden inauguration’s enter­tain­ers, A‑listers all, were safe bets, reli­able sta­di­um-fillers with instant mass appeal. They “did exact­ly what we need­ed them to do,” remarked Stephanie Zacharek at TIME, offer­ing the reas­sur­ance that “we no longer need to live in dread.” They were “singers you actu­al­ly know,” Alex­is Petridis wrote at The Guardian. The com­ment was a dig at the pre­vi­ous administration’s C and D‑list line­up, and also, per­haps, an admis­sion that what Amer­i­cans most crave is the famil­iar, which, of course, means, first and fore­most, a nation­al focus on celebri­ties we all know and love.

For a moment, how­ev­er, this rep­e­ti­tion of com­fort­ing house­hold names was punc­tu­at­ed by an entire­ly new young face and voice—that of a poet, no less, a stan­dard bear­er of the form that has held the nation’s rapt atten­tion in the work of Whit­man, Frost, Hugh­es, and Angelou.

Aman­da Gor­man, cho­sen as the first Nation­al Youth Poet Lau­re­ate in 2017, chan­neled a tra­di­tion of Amer­i­can lyric writ­ing about Amer­i­ca in her inau­gu­ra­tion poem, and she brought to it her own expe­ri­ences as a Gen Z black fem­i­nist and activist who over­came a speech imped­i­ment to address the coun­try at one of the most sig­nif­i­cant tele­vised pub­lic events in recent his­to­ry.

Gorman’s resume is a tes­ta­ment to her generation’s com­mit­ment to art and activism in the face of com­pound­ing crises, and to her per­son­al com­mit­ment to change in a coun­try that promis­es lit­tle for young black artists in par­tic­u­lar. Named youth poet lau­re­ate of Los Ange­les in 2014 at age 16, she pub­lished her first book of poet­ry, The One for Whom Food is Not Enough, the fol­low­ing year. She then went on to found a non­prof­it writ­ing and lead­er­ship pro­gram, open the lit­er­ary sea­son for the Library of Con­gress in 2017, and grad­u­ate cum laude from Har­vard Col­lege with a degree in soci­ol­o­gy in 2020.

While chart­ing her own lit­er­ary path, Gor­man learned to use her voice as “a polit­i­cal choice,” as she says in her TED-Ed stu­dent talk above, in which she con­fi­dent­ly asks a small audi­ence of her peers, “whose shoul­ders do you stand on?” and “what do you stand for?” These are the ques­tions she asks stu­dents in work­shops, she says, to shake them out of the idea that poet­ry is for “dead white men who were just born to be old.” Then she shares her own answers. Gorman’s pub­lic appear­ances tend to focus on process as much as on pol­i­tics and prosody. In a talk on “Pre­sen­ta­tion and Read­ing” at the Acad­e­my of Arts & Sci­ences in Cam­bridge below, she reads a poem, then has a brief dis­cus­sion of “how it came to be.”

Gor­man is as skilled a sto­ry­teller as she is a poet and edu­ca­tor. In her 2017 Moth Grand­SLAM appear­ance in Boston, fur­ther up, she tells the sto­ry of try­ing to catch her big break audi­tion­ing for Broad­way, an aspi­ra­tion shaped by her child­hood love of The Lion King. Her inau­gur­al poem, she tells PBS, was writ­ten to “be acces­si­ble to any­one who might be watch­ing, that they can feel that they are rep­re­sent­ed and well-estab­lished in this poem,” an act of writ­ing she calls “a real­ly dif­fi­cult dance to do.” The effort did not blunt the poem’s most inci­sive lines, how­ev­er, includ­ing its ref­er­ence to “the bel­ly of the beast,” in which “we’ve learned that qui­et isn’t always peace.”

For Gor­man, speak­ing out is a per­son­al imper­a­tive she honed as “a form of a pathol­o­gy,” over­com­ing her speech issues “by embark­ing on spo­ken word over and over and over again and recit­ing my poems. No mat­ter how ter­ri­fied I was, because I had the sup­port of oth­ers, I was able to kind of slow­ly climb my way to the place I am at today.”

For mil­lions of young peo­ple who watched the inau­gu­ra­tion, it will be Gorman’s sto­ry of per­se­ver­ance, com­mu­ni­ty, per­son­al growth, and refusal to be pas­sive and silent in the face of social injus­tice that will most res­onate, per­haps for the rest of their lives, amidst cel­e­bra­tions of a longed-for return to the famil­iar. See Gor­man read more of her poet­ry above and below, includ­ing a poem for anoth­er inau­gu­ra­tion, that of Har­vard Pres­i­dent Lawrence S. Bacow, in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Joy Har­jo, New­ly-Appoint­ed U.S. Poet Lau­re­ate, Reads Her Poems, “Remem­ber,” “A Poem to Get Rid of Fear,” “An Amer­i­can Sun­rise” and More

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

Ani­mat­ed Poet­ry by US Poet Lau­re­ate

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

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Behold an Interactive Online Edition of Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants (1868)

in Books, History, Science | January 8th, 2021

Of all the var­ied objects of cre­ation there is, prob­a­bly, no por­tion that affords so much grat­i­fi­ca­tion and delight to mankind as plants. —Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing

“Who owned nature in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry?” asks Lon­da Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stan­ford his­to­ri­an of sci­ence calls “colo­nial bio­prospect­ing in the Atlantic World.” The ques­tion was large­ly decid­ed at the time by “hero­ic voy­ag­ing botanists” and “biopi­rates” who claimed the world’s nat­ur­al resources as their own. The mat­ter was set­tled in the next cou­ple cen­turies by mer­chants like Thomas Twin­ing and his descen­dants, pro­pri­etors of Twin­ings tea. Found­ed as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the com­pa­ny went on to become one of the largest pur­vey­ors of teas grown in the British colonies.

One of Twining’s descen­dants, Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing, car­ried on the lega­cy as what Schiebinger calls one of many “arm­chair nat­u­ral­ists, who coor­di­nat­ed and syn­the­sized col­lect­ing from sinecures in Europe,” a role often tak­en on by women who could not trav­el the world. Twin­ing aimed, how­ev­er, not to cre­ate tax­onomies of the world’s plants but those of her own coun­try in a com­par­a­tive analy­sis.

Her 1868 Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, she wrote in her intro­duc­tion, was “the first work which has thus done due hon­our to our British plants by con­nect­ing with oth­ers, and plac­ing them when­ev­er pos­si­ble at the head of the Order to be illus­trat­ed.”

Twining’s reval­u­a­tion of local British plants was in keep­ing with the reformist spir­it of the age, and she her­self was such a reformer. “Apart from her artis­tic endeav­ors,” writes Nicholas Rougeaux, Twin­ing “was a notable phil­an­thropist,” estab­lish­ing almshous­es and tem­per­ance halls, found­ing “mother’s meet­ings” in Lon­don, and help­ing to found the Bed­ford Col­lege for Women. She was inspired by Curtis’s The Botan­i­cal Mag­a­zine and “she prac­ticed by mak­ing sketch­es from works in the Dul­wich Pic­ture Gallery, and toured famous muse­ums thanks to her father’s patron­age.”

Twin­ing authored and illus­trat­ed sev­er­al botan­i­cal books, “most notably,” Rougeux writes, “the two vol­ume Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, which includ­ed a total of 160 hand-col­ored lith­o­graphs, roy­al folio, report­ed­ly based on obser­va­tion at the Roy­al Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in Kew and at Lex­den Park in Colch­ester.” Rougeux has done for her work what the design­er pre­vi­ous­ly did for oth­er illus­trat­ed clas­sics of sci­ence and math (see the relat­ed links below): dig­i­tiz­ing the illus­tra­tions and translit­er­at­ing the text into a dig­i­tal for­mat, with hyper­links and shar­ing fea­tures.

Rougeux’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants offers itself as “a com­plete repro­duc­tion and restora­tion… enhanced with inter­ac­tive illus­tra­tions, descrip­tions, and posters fea­tur­ing the illus­tra­tions.” The first two vol­umes of the orig­i­nal book were pub­lished in 1849 and 1855. Rougeux’s online ver­sion of the text is based on the 1868 sec­ond edi­tion “with re-drawn illus­tra­tions based on her orig­i­nals.” (See pages from the text above and below.) Rougeux’s dig­i­tized text is thus two steps removed from Twining’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, but we can see the care and atten­tion she put into clas­si­fy­ing the flo­ra of her native coun­try.

“Twin­ing chose to illus­trate plants using the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem cre­at­ed by Augustin-Pyra­me de Can­dolle based on mul­ti­ple char­ac­ter­is­tics of plants—rather than the more wide­ly used sys­tem by Carl Lin­naeus which was focused on plants’ repro­duc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics,” notes Rougeux, “because the De Can­dolle sys­tem was new­er and she want­ed her read­ers to be up to date as clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems were evolv­ing.”

Although bio­log­i­cal tax­onomies have changed con­sid­er­ably since her time, Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants remains an intrigu­ing “snap­shot in time” that depicts not only the lat­est ideas about plant clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry but also the atti­tudes a promi­nent mem­ber of the British rul­ing class adopt­ed toward nature as a whole. See Rougeux’s online edi­tion of Twin­ing’s text here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of the Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed, 200-Year-Old British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy

A Beau­ti­ful­ly-Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Col­ors of the Nat­ur­al World

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

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Wonder Woman 1984 in Context — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #76

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | January 7th, 2021

The hol­i­day film release sea­son has now passed, hav­ing issued only one real block­buster, which is the return of Won­der Woman. This week’s Pret­ty Much Pop like­wise offers a return­ing hero:  Our col­lege-going guest from ep. 33 on hero­ine jour­neys has now grown into a grad stu­dent in comics his­to­ry, and she brings her deep WW knowl­edge to con­sid­er with your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt.

Part of the rel­e­vant con­text is the 2017 biopic Pro­fes­sor Marston and the Won­der Women, which revealed the unortho­dox views of WW’s cre­ator, and so of course this shows up in how WW judges us: She’s not just a Cap­tain Amer­i­ca-style patri­ot, but a for­eign­er who in the new film com­pas­sion­ate­ly con­demns our 80s greed and dis­hon­esty. But do the themes actu­al­ly make sense? And what’s with hav­ing her love inter­est return from the dead, hijack­ing anoth­er man’s body with no acknowl­edg­ment that that’s very skeevy?

Also, how does the depic­tion of WW’s home­land com­pare to oth­er fem­i­nist utopias like Her­land and “Sul­tana’s Dream”? Does it mat­ter that WW was cre­at­ed by and ini­tial­ly aimed pri­mar­i­ly at males? We learn a lit­tle about the post-Marston WW (who could­n’t join the Jus­tice League, which was for boys only!) and talk about the ’70s TV show, the out­fits, the vil­lains, and WW in love.

Here are a few sup­ple­men­tary arti­cles:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

 

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