The Hidden History of “Hand Talk,” the Native American Sign Language That Predated ASL by Centuries
No one person can take credit for the invention of American Sign Language. Its history reaches back to the early 19th century, when forms of sign developed among Deaf communities in New England. Early attempts at a signed form of English that replicated phonetic sounds gave way to a pure sign language with no reference to speech, combining forms of sign used by Deaf communities in New England with LSF (Langue des Signes Française), a French system invented in 1760. By 1835, ASL had become the standard language of Deaf instruction. 20 years later over 40% of teachers were also themselves deaf users of ASL.
The “origins of the American Deaf-World” — as Harlan Lane, Richard Pillard, and Mary French write in an article for Sign Language Studies – has “major roots in a triangle of New England Deaf communities.” Here, the first school for the Deaf that used ASL was founded by Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc; annual conventions brought together Deaf students and educators from all around the country; periodicals were founded; and, at one time, a Deaf commonwealth was proposed and “debated at length at the 1858 meeting of the New England Gallaudet Association.”
However, as the Vox video explainer points out, there’s another, far deeper history – notably the previous existence of Indigenous sign languages all over North America. One form of “Hand Talk” called Plains Indians Sign Language (PISL) represents “one of the oldest languages in North America.” It was not only a system of sign for the Deaf but also operated as a lingua franca among different language groups. PISL “was the means for commerce,” says PISL educator Lanny Real Bird. “It was the means for economics.… Plains Indian Sign Language was the medium for communication of intertribal nations.”
Melanie McKay-Cody, Professor at the University of Arizona and member of the Cherokee Nation West, shows how many of the gestures of Hand Talk more generally — or “North American Indian Sign Language” — can be found in ancient rock writing. Hand Talk has regional variations all over the continent, including a Northeast Indian Sign Language covering what is now New England, the upper Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. Researchers like McKay-Cody believe that this variant significantly influenced ASL through Native American children forced to attend the American School for the Deaf, which was then called the American Asylum for Dead Mutes.
The video presents compelling evidence for North American Indian Sign Language’s influence on ASL, and on American culture more generally, including a 1930 film of the Indian Sign Language Grand Council, “one of the largest gatherings of intertribal Indigenous leaders ever filmed.” Organized by General Hugh L. Scott, the purpose of the council was to preserve PISL. Concerned that “young men are not learning your sign language,” as he signed to the tribal leaders, Scott worried “it will disappear from this country.”
It so happened that ASL itself might have disappeared in the 1870s and 80s when fierce opponents of sign language — called “Oralists” and lead by Alexander Graham Bell — attempted to ban ASL and force Deaf students to communicate with speech and lip-reading. Graham’s mother was Deaf; his father invented a system of symbols called “Visible Speech” which Graham himself taught at a private school. Despite his efforts, ASL thrived.
As you’ll learn in the video, however, Scott and the tribal leaders he gathered had reason for concern all the way back in 1930. Few users of Indigenous sign languages remain after the generation of students forced to assimilate “were told,” McKay-Cody says, “that ASL was superior to whatever their Native sign was.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction
Asked to name our favorite concrete building, many of us would struggle to hold back a sneer. Though the copious use of that material by mid-twentieth-century style known as Brutalism has lately gained new generations of enthusiasts, we still more commonly hear it lamented as a source of architectural “monstrosities.” But as a building material, concrete goes back much further in history than the decades following World War II. To find a universally beloved example, we need merely look back to second-century Rome. There we find the Pantheon, looking much the same as it does in twenty-first century Rome today.
The best-preserved monument of ancient Rome, the Pantheon (not to be confused with the Greek Parthenon) has remained in continuous use, first as “a temple to the gods, then sanctified and made into a church. Now, of course, it’s a major tourist attraction.” So says scholar Steven Zucker in the Khan Academy video above, a brief photographic tour he leads alongside his colleague Beth Harris.
“As soon as you walk in, you notice that there’s a kind of obsession with circles, with rectangles, with squares, with those kinds of perfect geometrical shapes,” says Harris. “Because of the Roman use of concrete, the idea [obtained] that architecture could be something that shaped space and that could have a different kind of relationship to the viewer.”
You can go deeper into the Pantheon (built circa 125 AD) through the tour video by Youtuber Garrett Ryan, creator of the ancient-history channel Told in Stone. Calling the Pantheon “arguably the most influential building of all time,” he goes on to support that bold claim by examining a host of structural and aesthetic elements (not least its sublimely spherical rotunda) that would inspire architects in the Renaissance, a time dedicated to making use of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge, and in some sense ever after. This may come as a surprise to viewers with only a casual interest in architecture — more than it would to the Emperor Hadrian, commissioner of the Pantheon, who seems not to have been given to great doubts about the durability of his legacy.
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The First Transit Map: a Close Look at the Subway-Style Tabula Peutingeriana of the 5th-Century Roman Empire
The first subway train, as we know such things today, entered service in 1890. Its path is now part of the Northern line of the London Underground, itself the first urban metro system. The success of the Tube, as it’s commonly known, didn’t come right away; the whole thing was on the brink of failure, in fact, before creations like 1914’s Wonderground Map of London Town aided its public understanding and bolstered its public image.
At the time, Britain still commanded a great empire with London as its capital; the Wonderground Map placed the London Underground in the context of the city, making legible the still fairly novel concept of an underground train system with copious whimsical detail.
Nor was the Roman Empire anything to sneeze at, even during the fourth and fifth centuries after its decline had set in. Though it came up with some still-impressive inventions, including long-lasting concrete and monumental aqueducts, the technology to build and operate a subway system still lay some way off.
But that didn’t stop Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a general, architect, and friend of emperor Augustus, from commissioning a map of the empire that read more or less like Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map of the New York subway. That ambitious work of cartography, historians now believe, inspired the Tabula Peutingeriana, which survives today as the only large world map from antiquity. The video above from Youtuber Jeremy Shuback approaches the Tabula Peutingeriana as “the first transit map,” despite its dating from the thirteenth century, and even then probably being a copy of a fourth- or fifth-century original.
While the Roman Empire didn’t have electric trains and payment cards, they did, of course, have transit: the word descends from the Latin transire, “go across.” Many a Roman had to go across, if not the whole empire, then at least large stretches of it. In theory, they would have found a map like Tabula useful, with its simplification of geography in order to emphasize city-to-city connections. But that wasn’t its primary purpose: as Shuback puts it, this oversized map of all lands dominated by the Romans was “made to brag.” Whoever owned it surely wanted to imply that they possessed not just a map, but the world itself.
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Get the First Biography of Hilma af Klint at a 40% Discount (for a Limited Time)
A quick heads up: The University of Chicago Press will soon publish the first biography of the Swedish avant-garde painter Hilma af Klint–an artist we have explored here many times before. Written by Julia Voss, the 440-page biography features nearly 100 images of Klint’s life and art. Until October 27th, you can get 40% of the new book if you use the code VOSS40 at this site.
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Read More...Hear Queen Elizabeth II Give Her Very First Speech to the British People, During World War II (1940)
“Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say,” sings Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ “Her Majesty.” That comic song closes Abbey Road, the last album the band ever recorded, and thus puts a cap on their brief but wondrous cultural reign. In 2002 McCartney played the song again, in front of Queen Elizabeth II herself as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations. Earlier this year her Platinum Jubilee marked a full 70 years on the throne, but now — 53 years after that cheeky tribute on Abbey Road — Her Majesty’s own reign has drawn to a close with her death at the age of 96. She’d been Queen since 1953, but she’d been a British icon since at least the Second World War.
In October 1940, at the height of the Blitz, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked King George VI to allow his daughter, the fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, to make a morale-boosting speech on the radio. Recorded in Windsor Castle after intense preparation and then broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour, it was ostensibly addressed to the young people of Britain and its empire.
“Evacuation of children in Britain from the cities to the countryside started in September 1939,” says BBC.com, with ultimate destinations as far away as Canada. “It is not difficult for us to picture the sort of life you are all leading, and to think of all the new sights you must be seeing and the adventures you must be having,” Princess Elizabeth tells them. “But I am sure that you, too, are often thinking of the old country.”
In the event, millions of young and old around the world heard the broadcast, which arguably served Churchill’s own goal of encouraging American participation in the war. But it also gave Britons a preview of the dignity and forthrightness of the woman who would become their Queen, and remain so for an unprecedented seven decades. As Paul McCartney implied, Queen Elizabeth II turned out not to be given to prolonged flights of rhetoric. But though she may not have had a lot to say, she invariably spoke in public at the proper moment, in the proper words, and with the proper manner. Today one wonders whether this admirable personal quality, already in short supply among modern rulers, hasn’t vanished entirely.
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...When Sliced Bread Got Banned During World War II
Home baked sourdough had its moment during the early days of the pandemic, but otherwise bread has been much maligned throughout the 21st century, at least in the Western World, where carbs are vilified by body-conscious consumers.
This was hardly the case on January 18, 1943, when Americans woke up to the news that the War Foods Administration, headed by Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard, had banned the sale of sliced bread.
The reasons driving the ban were a bit murky, though by this point, Americans were well acquainted with rationing, which had already limited access to high-demand items as sugar, coffee, gasoline and tires.
Though why sliced bread, of all things?
Might depriving the public of their beloved pre-sliced bread help the war effort, by freeing up some critical resource, like steel?
Not according to The History Guy, Lance Geiger, above.
War production regulations prohibited the sale of industrial bread slicing equipment for the duration, though presumably, existing commercial bakeries wouldn’t have been in the market for more machines, just the odd repair part here and there.
Wax paper then? It kept sliced bread fresh prior to the invention of plastic bags. Perhaps the Allies had need of it?
No, unlike nylon, there were no shortages of waxed paper.
Flour had been strictly regulated in Great Britain during the first World War, but this wasn’t a problem stateside in WWII, where it remained relatively cheap and easy to procure, with plenty leftover to supply overseas troops. 1942’s wheat crop had been the second largest on record.
There were other rationales having to do with eliminating food waste and relieving economic pressure for bakers, but none of these held up upon examination. This left the War Production Office, the War Price Administration, and the Office of Agriculture vying to place blame for the ban on each other, and in some cases, the American baking industry itself!
While the ill considered ban lasted just two months, the public uproar was considerable.
Although pre-sliced bread hadn’t been around all that long, in the thirteen-and-a-half years since its introduction, consumers had grown quite dependent on its convenience, and how nicely those uniform slices fit into the slots of their pop up toasters, another recently-patented invention.
A great pleasure of the History Guy’s coverage is the name checking of local newspapers covering the Sliced Bread Ban:
An absence of data did not prevent a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal from speculating that “it is believed that the majority of American housewives are not proficient bread slicers.”
One such housewife, having spent a hectic morning hacking a loaf into toast and sandwiches for her husband and children, wrote a letter to the New York Times, passionately declaring “how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household.”
The more stiff upper lipped patriotism of Vermont home economics instructor Doris H. Steele found a platform in the Barre Times:
In Grandmother’s day, the loaf of bread had a regular place at the family table. Grandmother had an attractive board for the bread to stand on and a good sharp knife alongside. Grandmother knew that a steady hand and a sharp knife were the secrets of slicing bread. She sliced as the family asked for bread and in this way, she didn’t waste any bread by cutting more than the family could eat. Let’s all contribute to the war effort by slicing our own bread.
Then, as now, celebrities felt compelled to weigh in.
New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia found it ludicrous that bakeries should be prevented from putting their existing equipment to use.
And Hollywood actress Olivia de Havilland approved of the ban on the grounds that packaged slices were too thick.
Watch more of the History Guy’s videos here.
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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...See the First 8K Footage of the Titanic, the Highest-Quality Video of the Shipwreck Yet
First the Titanic was claimed by the ocean; now it’s being eaten by the ocean. “The iconic ocean liner that was sunk by an iceberg is now slowly succumbing to metal-eating bacteria,” the Associated Press’ Ben Finley reported last year. “Holes pervade the wreckage, the crow’s nest is already gone and the railing of the ship’s iconic bow could collapse at any time.” Given the loss to bacteria of “hundreds of pounds of iron a day,” some predictions indicate that “the ship could vanish in a matter of decades as holes yawn in the hull and sections disintegrate.”
This makes the documentation of this best-known of all shipwrecks a more pressing matter than ever — and, incidentally, provides a convenient reason for enterprising ocean-explorers to promote and sell the experience of Titanic tourism.
“OceanGate, a privately owned underwater exploration company founded in 2009, began offering annual journeys to the wreck of the Titanic in 2021,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Michelle Harris. “This year, civilian ‘mission specialists’ paid $250,000 each for the privilege of joining diving experts, historians and scientists on the expedition.”
OceanGate’s latest expedition produced the video above. It features a brief clip of footage of the Titanic in 8K resolution, the highest-quality video yet used to shoot the ship in its final resting place two and a half miles beneath the North Atlantic. (Stephen Low’s 1992 documentary Titanica used IMAX film, an extremely high-resolution medium but one difficult to compare with modern digital video.) That level of detail captures aspects of the Titanic previously only suggested in photographs, or indeed never before seen — at least not in this ruinous and eerily majestic suboceanic state. The survivors of the sinking are all long gone, but how long will the ship itself be able to reveal its secrets to us?
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...When Mikhail Gorbachev, the Last Soviet Leader, Starred in a Pizza Hut Commercial (1998)
Mikhail Gorbachev, the 8th and final leader of the Soviet Union, died last month at age 91, a news event that triggered responses ranging from “Who?” to “Wow, was he still alive?” The first response reflects poorly on the teaching of history: journalists reporting on Gorbachev’s death have been obliged to explain his significance to many American readers just a few decades after his name filled U.S. headlines. But it’s also true that Gorbachev left a thoroughly ambiguous legacy that seems to grow only more muddled with time.
As historian Richard Sakwa wrote on the 20th anniversary of the short-lived Soviet empire’s collapse, Gorbachev is remembered in the U.S. — depending on who’s remembering — as either a “magnificent failure” or a “tragic success.” Some former Soviets, especially those more partial to the authoritarianism of a Stalin or Putin, omit any positive descriptions of Gorbachev’s major achievement – to wit, reforming the U.S.S.R. out of existence in the late 1980s with little need, really, for Reagan’s extravagant nuclear posturing.
Putin himself calls the fall of the U.S.S.R. “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the previous century, an assessment shared by many who agree with him on nothing else. At the end of the 80s, however, an emerging generation of Russians had no clear sense of what was happening as their country fell apart. “I was 6 when the Soviet Union broke up,” Anatoly Kurmanaev writes at The New York Times. “I had no idea at the time that the person most responsible for the overwhelming changes transforming my hometown in Siberia was a man called Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember standing in line for bread in the dying days of Communism, but I don’t remember much discussion of his ‘perestroika.’ ”
Mixed admiration and contempt for Gorbachev trickled down to a younger generation a few years later. “The snatches of conversation I could hear were about people being fed up,” writes Kurmanaev, “not about the man with a distinctive birthmark sitting in the Kremlin…. Ironically, my first distinct, independent memory of Mr. Gorbachev, as perhaps for many of my generation, dates to a 1998 commercial for Pizza Hut,” an ad made by the U.S. fast-food company to celebrate the opening of a restaurant near Red Square, and made by Gorbachev because… well, also ironic, given the ad’s premise… he needed the money.
Written by Tom Darbyshire of ad agency BBDO, the commercial stages a debate between patrons at the restaurant before Gorbachev’s arrival calms things down. “Meant to be tongue-in-cheek,” Maria Luisa Paul writes at The Washington Post, the ad intended to show that “pizza is one of those foods that brings people together and bridges their differences,” says Darbyshire. In yet another irony, Gorbachev himself — who negotiated for a year before agreeing to the spot — refused to eat pizza on camera, allowing his granddaughter the honor instead.
Though he wouldn’t touch the stuff, Gorbachev defended himself against critics, including his own wife, Raisa, by saying “pizza is for everyone. It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.” What was the talk at Gorbachev’s local Pizza Hut on the day he popped in with his grandchild to socialize? Why, it was talk of Gorbachev.
“Because of him, we have economic confusion!” one diner alleges.
“Because of him, we have opportunity!” retorts another.
“Because of him, we have political instability,” the first responds.
An older woman breaks the impasse by stating their obvious mutual affinities for pizza, to which all reply, “Hail to Gorbachev!”
Try as they might, not even Pizza Hut could heal the wounds caused by the country’s economic confusion and political instability.
The ad has circulated on social media, and in history classes, before and after Gorbachev’s death as an example of mass media that “still reflects his legacy,” writes Paul. Gorbachev may be largely forgotten — at least in the U.S. — decades after the Pizza Hut ad aired, but it wouldn’t be his last attempt to leave his mark in advertising, as we see in the 2007 Louis Vuitton ad above, featuring a product much less accessible than pizza to the average Russian.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...An AI-Generated Painting Won First Prize at a State Fair & Sparked a Debate About the Essence of Art
Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by Jason Allen Jason Allen via Discord
The technology behind artificial intelligence-aided art has long been in development, but the era of artificial intelligence-aided art feels like a sudden arrival. Since the recent release of DALL‑E and other image-generation tools, our social-media feeds have filled up with elaborate artworks and even photorealistic-looking pictures created entirely through the algorithmic processing of a simple verbal description. We now live in a time, that is to say, where we type in a few words and get back an image nobody has ever before imagined, let alone seen. And if we do it right, that image could win a blue ribbon at the state fair.
“This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture,” reports the New York Times’ Kevin Roose. “But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics.” The work, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, “took home the blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for emerging digital artists,” and it does look, at first glance, like an impressionistic and ambience-rich past-future vision that could grace the cover of one of the better class of science-fiction or fantasy novels.
Reactions have, of course, varied. Roose finds at least one Twitter user insisting that “we’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes,” and an actual working artist claiming that “this thing wants our jobs.” Allen himself provides a helpfully brash closing quote: “This isn’t going to stop. Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” Over on Metafilter, one commenter makes the expected reference: “It has a sort of Duchamp-submitting-Fountain vibe, only in reverse. Instead of the proposition being that the jury would wrongly fail to recognize something trivial and as art, now we have the proposition that the jury would wrongly fail to recognize that the art is something trivial.”
However little desire you may have to hang Théâtre D’opéra Spatial on your own wall, a moment’s thought will surely lead you to suspect that, on another level, the conditions that brought about its victory are anything but trivial. Midjourney, as the original poster on Metafilter explains, “can be run on any computer with a decent GPU, a Google collab, or run through their own servers.” The ability to generate more-or-less convincing works of art (often littered, it must be said, with the bizarre visual glitches that have been the technology’s signature so far) out of just a few keystrokes will only become more powerful and more widespread. And so the “real” artists must find a new form too vital for the machines to master — just as they’ve had to do all throughout modernity.
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Listen to Music Playlists to Help You Study Like Nietzsche, Socrates, Kant & Other Great Thinkers
The great thinkers of the past knew nothing of Youtube — which, we might be tempted to say today, enabled them to become great thinkers in the first place. This is, of course, uncharitable: surely the rise of streaming media counts among the most important developments in the history of education. Many college students today may genuinely wonder how previous generations got by without Youtube’s background-music mixes engineered, as the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich wrote not long ago, “to facilitate and sustain a mood, which in turn might enable a task: studying, folding laundry, making spreadsheets, idly browsing the Internet.”
If Youtube had been available to important minds of previous centuries — indeed, previous millennia — what sort of studying music would it have served to them? This is, in some sense, a philosophical question, and a philosophy channel has been providing answes: a host of answers, in fact, each in the form of a themed Youtube mix.
On Filosofia Acadêmica you’ll find a playlist to study like “a seventeenth-century philosopher” (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Tartini), like “a medieval philosopher having the truth revealed by divine grace” (Gregorian chants), and like “Socrates after discovering from the Oracle of Delphi that he is the wisest” (lots of harp and boat sounds).
Uploaded over the past year, these playlists have proven to be the biggest hits on Filosofia Acadêmica (a Brazilian channel also offering interviews like “Filosofia da Matemática com Oswaldo Chateaubriand” and “Filosofia da Religião com Domingos Faria,”). Its creator Elan Marinho has also put effort into crafting music mixes after particular thinkers in such notable moments as “Newton sticking needles in his eyes to test hypotheses about light,” “Turing inventing the computer” and “Nietzsche over the abyss in a tightrope between the animal and the übermensch” (opening, naturally, with “Ride of the Valkyries”). Many of these selections dispense with period accuracy, departing wildly from the subject’s time and place. But then, hasn’t imaginative license has always been a key component of great thought?
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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, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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