The Gilded Age: A Free Historical Documentary That Helps Make Sense of Our Own Fraught Times
Ever-increasing economic inequality, rapid technological change, the creation of dominant corporations controlled by a small business elite, politicians in the pocket of big business leaders, and the rise of populism and nativism. These are all features of American life in 2025. But our nation has also seen this movie play before, most notably back in the Gilded Age, which ran from the 1870s through the late 1890s. Above, we have a free two-hour documentary on the Gilded Age created by PBS. They write:
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, during what has become known as the Gilded Age, the population of the United States doubled in the span of a single generation. The nation became the world’s leading producer of food, coal, oil, and steel, attracted vast amounts of foreign investment, and pushed into markets in Europe and the Far East. As national wealth expanded, two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life. These disparities sparked passionate and violent debate over questions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best distributed, and by what process? Does government exist to protect private property or provide balm to the inevitable casualties of a churning industrial system? Should the government concern itself chiefly with economic growth or economic justice? The battles over these questions were fought in Congress, the courts, the polling place, the workplace and the streets. The outcome of these disputes was both uncertain and momentous, and marked by a passionate vitriol and level of violence that would shock the conscience of many Americans today. The Gilded Age presents a compelling and complex story of one of the most convulsive and transformative eras in American history.
To a certain degree, this documentary will help you make better sense of our own fraught times and perhaps feel more optimistic about where we might end up. (It’s worth keeping in mind that the disruptions of the Gilded Age eventually gave way to the reforms of the Progressive Era.) What’s more, if you’re watching the excellent HBO series, The Gilded Age, the film provides historical background that will directly add to your appreciation of the show. You can watch the film online above, or find it in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive Featuring 90,000 Artifacts from His Life & Career
With the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death coming up early next year, more than a few fans will have their minds on a pilgrimage to mark the occasion. Perhaps with that very time frame in mind, the V&A East Storehouse in London has just opened the David Bowie Center. Run by the Victoria and Albert Museum, to which Bowie left an archive of about 90,000 of his possessions, this new institution will show a few hundred of those artifacts at a time, and even make a range of them available on request to visitors. As for what exactly is in there, Jessica the Museum Guide makes a brief survey of the Bowieana currently on display in the video above.
Some of the featured objects, like the suits Bowie wore in his videos for “Life on Mars?” and “Let’s Dance” or the crystal ball he held aloft as Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, may well be recognizable even to casual Bowie appreciators. Longer-term fans will surely recognize the outlandish but elegant Kansai Yamamoto-designed costumes that visually defined personae like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, the Alexander McQueen-designed Union Jack frock from the cover of Earthling, and perhaps even the metal angel wings Bowie donned onstage during the highly ambitious but much-derided Glass Spider Tour of the late nineteen-eighties.
Going deeper, there’s also the Stylophone, a kind of toy electronic instrument from the late sixties, that Bowie used on “Space Oddity” (and had to repurchase on eBay); the much more professional-grade EMS suitcase synthesizer given to him by Brian Eno, which he used on the “Berlin trilogy” albums they made together; the personal deck of Oblique Strategies, co-created by Eno, that shows signs of intensive use in Bowie’s own creative process; his correspondence with Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers (a curator of the Bowie Center’s current exhibition), about their second album Black Tie White Noise; and materials from Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the computer game to which he contributed music as well as a digitized performance in the late nineties.
The collection that Bowie donated to the V&A already came carefully organized and cataloged, which shows a meticulousness uncommon to rock stars, and a deliberateness about not just cultivating his public image at any given cultural moment, but also actively curating the materials of his own historical narrative. It seems Bowie always had one eye on the past: his own, of course, but also more distant eras, rich with disused aesthetics to revive and make his own. The other eye he kept on the future, especially as the internet was growing into a cultural force. The David Bowie Center has his personal notes on the subject, which include a reference to BowieNet, the internet service provider he founded around the turn of the millennium. BowieNet is now long gone, of course, but Bowie’s legacy — especially now that it’s been institutionally enshrined and made so accessible to the public — will outlast us all.
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The Art Collection of David Bowie: An Introduction
Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture
The Musical Career of David Bowie in One Minute … and One Continuous Take
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for Criticizing the American Establishment and the Vietnam War (1969)
Rigorously clean-cut, competent on the acoustic guitar and double bass, and seldom dressed in anything more daring than cherry-red blazers, Tom and Dick Smothers looked like the antithesis of nineteen-sixties rebellion. When they first gained national recognition with their variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, they must have come off to many young viewers as the kind of act of which their mother — or even grandmother — would approve. But the brothers’ cultivatedly square, neo-vaudevillian appearance was deceiving, as CBS would soon find out when the two took every chance to turn their program into a satirical, relentlessly authority-challenging, yet somehow wholesome showcase of the counterculture.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour premiered in February of 1967, and its first season “featured minimal controversial content,” writes Sarah King at U.S. History Scene. Thereafter, “the show became increasingly political. The brothers invited activist celebrities onto their show, including folk singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and singer-actor Harry Belafonte.
The show also produced its own political material criticizing the Vietnam War and the politicians who supported it,” not least President Lyndon Johnson. Bringing on Seeger was a daring move, given that he’d been blacklisted from network television for the better part of two decades, though CBS’s censors made sure to cut out the most politically sensitive parts of his act.
Even more so was the brothers’ own performance, with George Segal, of Phil Ochs’s “Draft Dodger Rag,” which they ended by urging their audience to “make love, not war.” All this can look fairly tame by today’s standards, but it locked the show — which had become top-rated, holding its own in a time slot against the cultural phenomenon that was Bonanza — into a grudge match with its own network. Before the third season, CBS’ higher-ups demanded that each show be turned in ten days in advance, ostensibly in order to undergo review for sensitive material. In one instance, they claimed that the deadline hadn’t been met and aired a re-run instead, though it may not have been entirely irrelevant that the intended program contained a tribute by Baez to her then-husband, who was being sent to prison for refusing to serve in the military.
CBS did broadcast Baez’s performance on a later date, after clipping out the reference to the specific nature of her husband’s offense. A similar struggle took place around the “sermonettes” delivered by David Steinberg, one of which you can see in the video above. The irreverence toward U.S. foreign policy, religion, and much else besides in these and other segments eventually proved too much for the network, which fired the brothers after it had already given the green light to a fourth season of the Comedy Hour. Though they successfully sued CBS for breach of contract thereafter, they never did regain the same level of televisual prominence they’d once enjoyed, if enjoy be the word. At any rate, the fallout of all this controversy firmly installed the Smothers Brothers in the pantheon of twentieth-century free-speech warriors, and their experience reminds us still today that, without the freedom to give offense, there can be no comedy worthy of the name.
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When The Who (Literally) Blew Up The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...A 107-Year-Old Irish Farmer Reflects on the Changes He’s Seen During His Life (1965)
Talk to a clear-headed 107-year-old today, and you could expect to hear stories of adolescence in the Great Depression, or — if you’re lucky — the Jazz Age seen through a child’s eyes. It’s no common experience to have been formed by the age of radio and live deep into the age of the smartphone, but arguably, Michael Fitzpatrick lived through even greater civilizational transformation. Born in Ireland in 1858, he sat for the interview above 107 years later in 1965, which was broadcast on television. That device was well on its way to saturating Western society at the time, as the automobile already had, while mankind was taking to the skies in jetliners and even to the stars in rocket ships.
The contrast between the world into which Fitzpatrick was born and the one in which he eventually found himself is made starker by his being a son of the land. A lifelong farmer, he can honestly reply, when asked to name the biggest change he’s seen, “Machinery.”
Not all of his answers come across quite so clearly, owing to his thick dialect that must surely have gone extinct by now, even in rural Ireland. Luckily, the video comes with subtitles, making it easier to understand what he has to say about the advent of the “mowing machine” and his memories of the Bodyke evictions of the eighteen-eighties, when mêlées broke out over a local landlord’s attempt to oust his destitute tenants.
One can come up with vaguely analogous events to the Bodyke evictions in the modern world, but in essence, they belong to the long stretch of history when to be human meant to engage in agriculture, or to oversee it. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen at the same pace everywhere at once, and indeed, Fitzpatrick lived the first part of his life in an effectively pre-industrial reality, before witnessing the scarcely believable process of mechanization take place all around him. He experienced, in other words, the arrival of the civilization into which we were all born, and to which we know no alternative. As for those of us of a certain age today, we can expect to be asked six or seven decades hence — assuming we can go the distance — what life was like with only dial-up internet.
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A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language
We may take it for granted that the earliest writing systems developed with the Sumerians around 3400 B.C.E. The archaeological evidence so far supports the theory. But it may also be possible that the earliest writing systems predate 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by several thousand years. And what’s more, it may be possible, suggests paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, that those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji.
The study of symbols carved into cave walls all over the world—including penniforms (feather shapes), claviforms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could eventually push us to “abandon the powerful narrative,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of history as total darkness until the Sumerians flip the switch.” Though the symbols may never be truly decipherable, their purposes obscured by thousands of years of separation in time, they clearly show humans “undimming the light many millennia earlier.”
While burrowing deep underground to make cave paintings of animals, early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents. Von Petzinger spent years cataloguing these symbols in Europe, visiting “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Alison George, “in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The symbols she found ranged from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, hand stencils, something called a tectiform that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feather shapes called penniforms.”
She discovered 32 signs found all over the continent, carved and painted over a very long period of time. “For tens of thousands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ancestors seem to have been curiously consistent with the symbols they used.” Von Petzinger sees this system as a carryover from modern humans’ migration into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlocking the mysteries of the world’s oldest symbols.
In her TED Talk at the top, von Petzinger describes this early system of communication through abstract signs as a precursor to the “global network of information exchange” in the modern world. “We’ve been building on the mental achievements of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to forget that certain abilities haven’t already existed,” long before the formal written records we recognize. These symbols traveled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung together in an ancient necklace.
Von Petzinger believes, writes George, that “the simple shapes represent a fundamental shift in our ancestors’ mental skills,” toward using abstract symbols to communicate. Not everyone agrees with her. As the Bradshaw Foundation notes, when it comes to the European symbols, eminent prehistorian Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or nearly always) associated with animal figures and thus cannot be said to be the first steps toward symbolism.”
Of course, it’s also possible that both the signs and the animals were meant to convey ideas just as a written language does. So argues MIT linguist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology last year. Cave art might show early humans “converting acoustic sounds into drawings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at National Geographic. Lesure says her research “suggests that the cognitive mechanisms necessary for the development of cave and rock art are likely to be analogous to those employed in the expression of the symbolic thinking required for language.”
In other words, under her theory, “cave and rock [art] would represent a modality of linguistic expression.” And the symbols surrounding that art might represent an elaboration on the theme. The very first system of writing, shared by early humans all over the world for tens of thousands of years.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Everything That Went Wrong During The Wizard of Oz’s Seriously Troubled Production
The Wizard of Oz is now showing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a version of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the picture’s countless fans. “The beloved 1939 film starring Judy Garland, widely considered one of the greatest Hollywood classics, has been stretched and morphed and adapted to fit the enormous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson. This entailed an extension “upward and outward with the help of A.I. as well as visual effects artists. The cool tornado created by Arnold Gillespie for the original has been traded for something digital, and eventually you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the funnel. New performances and vistas have also been generated,” which is “at best questionable” ethically, to say nothing of the aesthetics.
Yet even given the considerable modifications to — and excisions from — the original film, “most audiences will gladly overlook all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spectacle.” The Wizard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “magic” that endures through even great deficiencies in presentation.
That quality first became apparent in 1956, seventeen years after the movie’s release in cinemas, when it first aired on television. Though the dramatic transition from black-and-white to color would have been lost on most home viewers at the time, “45 million people tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in theaters,” says the narrator of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Another broadcast, in 1959, did even better, and thereafter The Wizard of Oz became an “annual must-see event” on TV, which eventually made it “the most-watched film in history.”
That status justifies the movie’s infamously troubled production, which is the video’s central subject. From its numerous rewrites all the way through to its feeble box office performance, The Wizard of Oz encountered severe difficulties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that continue to haunt it: that an actor died from poison makeup, for example, or that one of the munchkins committed suicide in view of the camera. While the production caused no fatalities — at least not directly — it did come close more than once, to say nothing of the psychological toll the combination of high ambition and persistent dysfunction must have taken on many, if not most, of its participants. Even hearing enumerated only its clearly documented problems is enough to make one wonder how the picture was ever completed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years later, its Sphere reinterpretation is raking in $2 million in ticket sales per day: an act of wizardry if ever there was one.
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The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order
The Complete Wizard of Oz Series, Available as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books
Hear Waiting for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Production Starring The Wizard of Oz’s Bert Lahr
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...How Erik Satie Invented Modern Music: A Visual Explanation
Once you hear Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, you never forget it. Not that popular culture would let you forget it: the piece has been, and continues to be, reinterpreted and sampled by musicians working in a variety of genres from pop to electronic to metal. In versions that sound close to what Satie would have intended when he composed it in 1888, it’s also been featured in countless films and television shows. It’s even heard with some frequency in YouTube videos, though in the case of the one from The Music Professor above, it’s not just the soundtrack, but also the subject. Using an annotated score, it explains just what makes the piece so enduring and influential.
Upon “a simple iambic rhythm with two ambiguous major 7th chords,” Gymnopédie No. 1 introduces a melody that “floats above an austere procession of notes,” then “moves down the octave from F# to F#.” With its lack of a clear key, as well as its lack of development and drama that the orchestral music of the day would have trained listeners to expect, the piece was “as shocking as the dance of naked Spartans it was meant to evoke.”
The melody makes its turns, but never quite arrives at its seeming destinations, going around in circles instead — before, all of a sudden, swerving into the “minor and dissonant” before ending in “profound melancholy.”
Despite music in general having long since assimilated the daring qualities of Gymnopédie No. 1, the original piece still catches our ears — in its subtle way — whenever it comes on. So, in another way, do the less recognizable and more experimental Gnossiennes with which Satie followed them up. In the video above, the Music Professor provides a visual explanation of Gnossienne No. 1, during whose performance “soft dissonance hangs in the air” while “a curious melody floats over gentle syncopations in the left hand” over just two chords. The score comes with “surreal comments”: “Très luisant,” “Du bout de la pensée,” “Postulez en vous-même,” “Questionez.” Satie is often credited with pioneering what would become ambient music; could these be proto-Oblique Strategies?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...The Advanced Technology of Ancient Rome: Automatic Doors, Water Clocks, Vending Machines & More
Ancient Rome never had an industrial revolution. Granted, certain historians have objected now and again to that once-settled claim, gesturing toward large heaps of pottery discovered in garbage dumps and other such artifacts clearly produced in large numbers. Still, the fact remains that Ancient Rome never had an industrial revolution of the kind that fired up toward the end of the eighteenth century, but not due to a complete absence of the relevant technology. As explained in the new Lost in Time video above, Romans had witnessed the power of steam harnessed back in the first century — but they dismissed it as a novelty, evidently unable to see its power to transform civilization.
That’s just one of a variety of examples of genuine high Roman technology featured in the video, many or all of which would seem implausible to the average viewer if inserted into a story set in ancient Rome.
Take the set of automatic doors installed in a temple, triggered by a fire that heats an underground water tank, which in turn fills up a pot attached to a cable that — through a system of pulleys — throws them open. (When the fire cools down, the doors then shut again.) This was the work of the Greek-born inventor Hero of Alexandria, who would bear comparison in one sense or another with everyone from Rube Goldberg to Leonardo da Vinci.
It was also Hero who came up with that early steam turbine, called the aeolipile. He came along too late, however, to take credit for the “self-healing” Roman concrete previously much-featured here on Open Culture, the material of buildings like the Pantheon, “still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.” Another invention highlighted in the video comes from Alexandria, but well before Hero’s time, and even before that of the Roman Empire itself: the accurate water clock engineered by Ctesibius, whose underlying design remained influential in the Roman era. Hydraulic power was also used in Roman mills, which made possible complex factory systems, even in a civilization that never reached an industrial revolution proper. And if a Roman factory worker got thirsty at break time, maybe he could drop a coin into one of Hero’s wine vending machines.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hear the First Masterpiece of Electronic Music, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge
Karlheinz Stockhausen appears, among many other cultural figures, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His inclusion was more than a trendy gesture toward the European avant-garde; anyone who knows that pathbreaking electronic composer’s work will notice its influence on the album at first listen. Paul McCartney himself went on record with his notion that assuming the alter egos of the title would allow him and his fellow Beatles to branch out both culturally and intellectually in their music, incorporating pastiches of Ravi Shankar, B. B. King, Albert Ayler, the Doors, the Beach Boys, and indeed Stockhausen, whose Gesang der Jünglinge had already inspired “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver.
Literally “Song of the Youths,” Gesang der Jünglinge was an early work for Stockhausen, who composed it in 1954, when he was still a PhD student in communications at the University of Bonn. Inspired by not just his technological interests but also his devout Catholicism, he decided to create a mass for electronic sounds and voices, with the intent to debut it at Cologne Cathedral. (Legend has it that he was rebuffed by religious authorities, who insisted that loudspeakers had no place in a house of worship, but sources disagreed on whether he actually sought their permission in the first place.)
He drew its words from a passage of the Old Testament story of three boys cast into the fire by King Nebuchadnezzar for their refusal to worship a golden idol and kept unharmed by the praise to God they sang amid the flames.
In Stockhausen’s high-tech rendering, the boys are represented by the voice of twelve-year-old Josef Protschka (who would grow up to become an acclaimed vocalist in his own right), and the fire by a collage of electronic sounds. Though the composer’s manipulations, part design and part chance, the human and mechanical halves of the piece become one: Protschka’s vocals break apart and reform into fragments of language never before heard, and the artificially generated tones bend uncannily toward the sound of sung vowels. All this, to say nothing of its playback in five-channel sound in a time when stereo was still a novelty, would have sounded deeply, even disturbingly unfamiliar to the audience at Gesang der Jünglinge’s premiere — and its impact probably hadn’t been much diminished by the time of the 2001 performance above. Stockhousen’s music may have been after the shock of the new, but it also faced the eternal.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...The World’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on the World’s Largest Fully Operational Pipe Organ
The world’s most famous organ piece, played on the world’s largest fully functioning pipe organ. That’s what you have above. Here, organist Dylan David Shaw performs Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the famous Wanamaker organ.
Originally built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the organ ended up in Philadelphia’s Wanamaker’s department store in 1911. More than a century later, the organ still resides in the same store. But Macy’s eventually took over Wanamaker’s, and Macy’s now plans to close the store, leaving the fate of the organ unknown. Where will the 28,000-pipe organ find a new home? That’s still TBD, something that’s likely to get resolved in the months to come.
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