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the-attitudes-of-animals-in-motion-illustrated-with-the-zoopraxiscope-1882

The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope (1882) Nov 4, 2011 Published lecture given by the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge on March 13th 1882 at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell out audience that included members of the Royal Family, notably the future King Edward VII. He displayed his photographs on screen and described his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. Learn more about Muybridge's groundbreaking research into human and animal locomotion, and see the wonderful photographs, in Taschen's epic 2014 tome Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs. Also see our post on his tennis photographs.

public-domain-review

Nov 4, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:06.462369

dutch-fashion-reel-1969

Dutch Fashion Reel (1969) Sep 18, 2011 Strange little fashion film from 1969 courtesy of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision via Open Images. From the site: "Dressed in a circle shaped plastic cape, model Joke de Kruijf gets on tram line 8 to The Hague at the Gevers-Doynoot square in Scheveningen. Somewhat later a similiar tram rides through Madurodam, where De Kruijf walks between the minature houses as part of a fashion show with clothing by designer Pierre Cardin. Also with a woman's suit, jersey men's wear, woollen checked men's wear and evening gowns. Cardin looks on."

public-domain-review

Sep 18, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:06.924546

cyrano-de-bergerac-1950

Cyrano De Bergerac (1950) Oct 22, 2011 José Ferrer received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, the charismatic swordsman-poet with the absurd nose and "crowned with the white plume freedom". This film adaptation directed by Michael Gordon of the 1897 French Alexandrine verse drama by Edmond Rostand, uses poet Brian Hooker's 1923 English blank verse translation as the basis for its screenplay. The story tells the tale of our large-nosed hero Cyrano falling in love with the beauteous Roxane; she, in turn, confesses to Cyrano her love for the handsome but tongue-tied Christian. The chivalrous Cyrano sets up with Christian an innocent deception, with tragic results.

public-domain-review

Oct 22, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:07.267865

american-day-in-tripoli-libya-1962

American Day in Tripoli, Libya (1962) Oct 22, 2011 Filmed at Tripoli International Fairground eleven years after independence from Italian colonial rule and seven years before a group of military officers led by a 28 year old Muammar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d’état against King Idris bringing the monarchy to an end and beginning Gadaffi's 42 year rule. National Archives and Records Administration - ARC Identifier 37715 / Local Identifier 151.56 - [AMERICAN DAY IN] TRIPOLI, LIBYA - Department of Commerce. (1913 - ). Silent. DVD copied by IASL Master Scanner Timothy Vollmer.

public-domain-review

Oct 22, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:07.707164

kitab-al-bulhan-or-book-of-wonders-late-14thc

Kitab al-Bulhan or Book of Wonders (late 14th C.) Nov 17, 2011 The Kitab al-Bulhan, or Book of Wonders, is an Arabic manuscript dating mainly from the late 14th century A.D. and probably bound together in Baghdad during the reign of Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad (1382-1410). The manuscript is made up of astrological, astronomical and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani, as well as a dedicated section of full-page illustrations, with each plate titled with "A discourse on....", followed by the subject of the discourse (a folktale, a sign of the zodiac, a prophet, etc.).

public-domain-review

Nov 17, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:08.179472

five-minutes-to-live-1961

Five Minutes To Live (1961) Oct 2, 2011 Bank heist movie starring country star Johnny Cash as a guitar playing, sadistic psycho-killer, as well as Vic Tayback, a young Ron Howard, and country music great, Merle Travis.

public-domain-review

Oct 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:08.666421

the-diary-of-a-nobody-1919-edition

The Diary of a Nobody (1919 edition) Oct 28, 2011 This fictitious diary details fifteen months in the life of Mr. Charles Pooter, a middle aged city clerk of lower middle-class status but significant social aspirations, living in the fictional 'Brickfield Terrace' in London. The diary was written by George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith who also contributed the illustrations. It first appeared in Punch magazine through the years 1888 – 89, and was first printed in book form in 1892. Due to much of the humour deriving from Mr. Pooter's comical tendency toward self-importance, the book has spawned the word "Pooterish" to describe the taking of oneself excessively seriously.

public-domain-review

Oct 28, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:08.979584

world-war-ii-from-the-air

World War II from the Air Oct 13, 2011 A selection of World War II aerial photographs collected from Wikimedia Commons, including the Allied bombing of Hamburg, scenes from Operation Market Garden, and views of Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. Each photograph links through to its Wikimedia Commons page where you will find more information on the image and higher resolution versions.

public-domain-review

Oct 13, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:09.445509

buffalo-dance-1894

Buffalo Dance (1894) Oct 1, 2011 Short Edison film featuring Native American Indian dancers from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The first appearance of Native Americans on film.

public-domain-review

Oct 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:09.919082

hydriotaphia-urn-burial-and-the-garden-of-cyrus-1658

Hydriotaphia/Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus (1658) Sep 21, 2011 Sir Thomas Browne (19 October 1605 – 19 October 1682), an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric, conceived of these two books as a diptych. The nominal subject of the first book, Hydriotaphia (Urn-Burial), was the discovery of a Roman urn burial in Norfolk which prompts Browne to deliver, first, a careful description of the antiquities found, and then a careful survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware. The most famous part of the work, though, is the fifth chapter, where Browne quite explicitly turns to discuss man's struggles with mortality, and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in this world and the next, to produce an extended funerary meditation tinged with melancholia. A piece of exquisite baroque prose that George Saintsbury called "the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world," Hydriotaphia displays an astonishing command of English prose rhythm and diction. It has been admired by Charles Lamb, Samuel Johnson, John Cowper Powys, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said of it that it "smells in every word of the sepulchre." The Garden of Cyrus is Browne's mystical vision of the interconnection of art, nature and the Universe via numerous symbols including the number five, the quincunx pattern, the figure X and Network pattern. Its slender but compressed pages of imagery, symbolism and associative thought are evidence of Sir Thomas Browne's complete understanding of a fundamental quest of Hermetic philosophy, namely proof of the wisdom of God. (Note: this text taken from the excellent Wikipedia articles on the two books, see them here and here) (HTML version of the books can be found here)

public-domain-review

Sep 21, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:10.398717

apollo-11-onboard-recordings-1969

Apollo 11 Onboard Recordings (1969) Nov 2, 2011 From NASA: Apollo 11 Onboard Audio Highlights - These are not necessarily major milestones of the mission but are some of the more interesting and clearly recorded conversations the crew members had among themselves as the mission progressed. Highlight clip 1(mission time: 1:24-1:29, tape 11-03302) As the crew members complete their first orbit of Earth after launch, they talk about the beauty of the planet below. Highlight clip 2(mission time: 003:03:48-003:04:00, tape 11-03348) The crew members debate the color of the moon before, and after, they fire Columbia's engines to enter lunar orbit. Highlight clip 3(mission time: 003:04:03-003:04:16, tape 11-03348) After entering lunar orbit, the crew members are amazed at the lunar terrain as they fly 60 miles above the back side of the moon and await Earthrise and to resume communications with Mission Control. Highlight clip 4(mission time: 004:03:42-004:03:47, tape 11-03352) As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin prepare to depart for the lunar surface in the lunar module Eagle, Mike Collins, in the command module Columbia, bids them farewell ... and tells them to take it easy. Highlight clip 5(mission time: 005:04:21-005:04:33, tape 11-03330) Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin lift off from the moon to rejoin Mike Collins in lunar orbit.

public-domain-review

Nov 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:10.879501

across-the-zodiac-the-story-of-a-wrecked-record-1880

Across the Zodiac: the Story of a Wrecked Record (1880) Sep 30, 2011 Centering around the creation of a substance called "apergy", a form of anti-gravitational energy, Percy Greg's novel details a flight to Mars taken in 1830. They discover the planet to be inhabited by diminutive beings who, convinced that life couldn't exist any where else apart from on their world, refuse to believe that the unnamed narrator is actually from Earth - deciding instead he is an unusually tall Martian from some remote corner of their planet. The book is notable as containing what is probably the first alien language in any work of fiction to be described with linguistic and grammatical terminology. It also contains what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word "Astronaut", which features as the name of the narrator's spacecraft. In 2010 a crater on Mars was named Greg in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars. Volume 2 available here.

public-domain-review

Sep 30, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:11.172336

engravings-by-dominicus-custos

Engravings by Dominicus Custos Nov 1, 2011 Dominicus Custos (1560 - 1612), was a Flemish artist, printer and copperplate engraver, who specialised in depicting notable figures of his time - producing books akin to a 16th century "Who's Who". The most famous of these was the "Atrium heroicum" which he made between 1602 and 1604; a collection of 171 engraved portraits of rulers, nobles, statesmen, dignitaries, celebrities, military leaders and important businessmen of the time.

public-domain-review

Nov 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:11.623178

the-eccentric-mirror-reflecting-a-faithful-and-interesting-delineation-of-male-and-female-characters-ancient-and-modern-1807

The Eccentric Mirror (1807) Nov 12, 2011 Reports on a marvellous menagerie of weird and wonderful characters from the past and Georgian-present, including Daniel Lambert, a gaol keeper and animal breeder from Leicester, famous for his unusually large size, more than 50 stone, and the Polish-born 3-foot 3-inch Józef Boruwłaski who toured in European and Turkish courts, (and who incidentally met Mr Lambert amid much public interest in 1782).

public-domain-review

Nov 12, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:12.066824

arnoldus-montanus-new-and-unknown-world-1671

Arnoldus Montanus’ New and Unknown World (1671) Sep 29, 2011 A selection of from the 125 copper engravings featured in Dutch explorer, missionary, and theologian Arnoldus Montanus' monumental De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (1671). The rather impressive full title of the work in English reads "The New and Unknown World: or Description of America and the Southland, Containing the Origin of the Americans and South-landers, remarkable voyages thither, Quality of the Shores, Islands, Cities, Fortresses, Towns, Temples, Mountains, Sources, Rivers, Houses, the nature of Beasts, Trees, Plants and foreign Crops, Religion and Manners, Miraculous Occurrences, Old and New Wars: Adorned with Illustrations drawn from the life in America, and described by Arnoldus Montanus". Never himself actually travelling beyond Europe, Montanus borrowed from descriptions of those who had, repeating many fantastic conceptions along the way. The same goes for the illustrations, with Montanus' engraver-publisher Jacob van Meurs likely basing many of the images entirely from descriptions alone (note the unicorn in the fifth picture down).

public-domain-review

Sep 29, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:12.511680

superstitions-about-animals-1904

Superstitions About Animals (1904) Oct 14, 2011 Author's Note: My sole object in writing this little book has been to do something towards arousing a more general interest in a subject which has at no time obtained the attention it deserves. Yet there is no subject which so fully repays the thoughtful student as that of Natural History. In bringing together some of the most common superstitions about animals, and dealing with them in a light and popular way, I trust my object will in some measure be attained. If by the publication of this unpretentious work only a little of the prevalent superstition is swept away, and further interest is created in the wonders of the animal kingdom, I shall be more than amply rewarded. FRANK GIBSON. Bishop Auckland, July 1904.

public-domain-review

Oct 14, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:12.994529

your-name-here-1960

Your Name Here (1960) Nov 8, 2011 Bizarre film from Calvin Communications, in which they satirise their own formulaic approach to industrial promotional films, showing how the idea of the "American Dream" is utilised to sell products. A real insight into the humour and tongue-in-cheek attitude lying behind a lot of the industrial films of the 50s and 60s.

public-domain-review

Nov 8, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:13.476215

kodak-no-1-circular-snapshots

Kodak No.1 Circular Snapshots Nov 10, 2011 Popular photography can properly be said to have started 120 years ago with the introduction of the Kodak camera, the invention of an American, George Eastman (1854-1932). It was a simple, leather-covered wooden box – small and light enough to be held in the hands. Taking a photograph with the Kodak was very easy, requiring only three simple actions; turning the key (to wind on the film); pulling the string (to set the shutter); and pressing the button (to take the photograph). There wasn’t even a viewfinder - the camera was simply pointed in the direction of the subject to be photographed. The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’

public-domain-review

Nov 10, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:14.011914

the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-1920

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) Nov 19, 2011 A silent horror film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. It is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and is often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the silent era - notable for having introduced the 'twist ending' in cinema and for its weird and distorted set design. Our hero Francis grapples with the deranged Dr.Caligari in a world which is not quite all that it seems...

public-domain-review

Nov 19, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:14.350251

thief-of-bagdad-1924

Thief of Bagdad (1924) Oct 2, 2011 This swashbuckler film, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph. The film, strong on special effects of the period (flying carpet, magic urn and fearsome monsters) and featuring massive Arabian-style sets, also proved a stepping stone for a scantily-clad Anna May Wong, who portrayed a Mongol slave. Fairbanks considered this to be his personal favorite of all of his films, according to his son.

public-domain-review

Oct 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:14.815454

vd-is-for-everybody-1969

VD is for Everybody (1969) Oct 15, 2011 From the Internet Archive courtesy of the A/V Geeks: "The American Social Health Association was always experimenting with new ways to educate the public about venereal disease. They helped produce the first VD education film, "Fit to Fight", in 1918 in order to educate soldiers being shipped abroad to fight in the first World War. Although this popular TV public service announcement informs the public that everybody is susceptible to venereal disease, strangely, it also seems to imply that having VD will make you successful, attractive and happy. Also, the song is quite infectious...".

public-domain-review

Oct 15, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:15.264044

the-medical-aspects-of-death-and-the-medical-aspects-of-the-human-mind-1852

The Medical Aspects of Death, and the Medical Aspects of the Human Mind (1852) Aug 2, 2011 A fascinating book containing countless anecdotes relating to strange manners of death with an additional book relating to interesting states of mind.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:16.257286

chopin-s-funeral-march-the-edison-concert-band-1906

Chopin’s Funeral March - The Edison Concert Band (1906) Aug 2, 2011 Chopin's "Funeral March" is the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2. It was used at the state funerals of John F. Kennedy and those of Soviet leaders, including Leonid Brezhnev. It was played at the graveside during Chopin's own burial at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1849 with Napoléon Henri Reber's instrumentation.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:16.743484

infant-s-cabinet-of-birds-and-beasts-1820

Infant’s Cabinet of Birds and Beasts (1820) Aug 2, 2011 This little book of fine animal engravings was published in 1820 by Harvey & Darton, a publisher set up by two Quakers in London in 1791 with the intention of disseminating Quaker works. They began dabbling in children's book and by the early 1800s were the established leader in the field. If early literature for children piques your curiosity, have a read of our essay on arguably the very first children's picture book — The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures (1658).

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:17.194679

houdini-on-his-water-torture-cell-1914

Houdini on his Water Torture Cell (1914) Aug 2, 2011 Houdini made the only known recordings of his voice on Edison wax cylinders on October 29, 1914, in Flatbush, New York. On them, Houdini practices several different introductory speeches for his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell. In the trick, Houdini's feet would be locked in stocks, and he would be lowered upside down into a tank filled with water. The mahogany and metal cell featured a glass front, through which audiences could clearly see Houdini. The stocks would be locked to the top of the cell, and a curtain would conceal his escape. In the earliest version of the Torture Cell, a metal cage was lowered into the cell, and Houdini was enclosed inside that. While the escape was advertised as "The Chinese Water Torture Cell" or "The Water Torture Cell", Houdini always referred to it as "the Upside Down" or "USD". The first public performance of the USD was at the Circus Busch in Berlin, on September 21, 1912. Houdini continued to perform the escape until his death in 1926.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:17.718709

the-great-train-robbery-1903

The Great Train Robbery (1903) Aug 2, 2011 Considered to be one of the first significant early US narrative films. Greatly influenced by the British film "Daring Daylight Robbery" (1903) it introduced many new cinematic techniques (cross cutting, double exposure, camera movement and location shooting) to American audiences. It was directed by Edwin S Porter and stars Justus D. Barnes as the head bandit, G. M. Anderson as a slain passenger and a robber, Walter Cameron as the sheriff.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:18.201885

collected-works-of-billy-jones-ernest-hare-1920s

Collected Works of Billy Jones & Ernest Hare (1920s) Aug 1, 2011 Tenor Billy Jones (1889-1940) and bass/baritone Ernie Hare (1881-1939) sang as The Happiness Boys in a radio program of the same name which ran in the early 1920s. Dave Kaplan was usually the team's pianist on records. Fannie Heinline, regarded as the best American female banjoist at the turn of the century, made guest appearances on The Happiness Boys as banjoist and vocalist.

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:18.647162

wonderful-balloon-ascents-1870

Wonderful Balloon Ascents (1870) Aug 5, 2011 A wonderful book of balloon travel tracing the rise of "Balloonomania", the huge fad in hot air balloons that originated in France in the late 18th century and continued into the 19th century, during the advent of hot air balloon flights. The interest began with the first flights of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, and quickly spread in France and across the channel in England. (Read more at Wikipedia). Wikicommons has a collection of the amazing illustrations in the book here.

public-domain-review

Aug 5, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:19.109328

hungarian-rag-pietro-deiro-1913

Hungarian Rag - Pietro Deiro (1913) Aug 1, 2011 "The Daddy of the Accordion", Pietro Deiro, plays Julius Lenzberg's Hungarian Rag

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:19.586044

the-unappreciated-joke-1903

The Unappreciated Joke (1903) Aug 2, 2011 A very short silent comedy from Edison's studios, directed by Edwin S. Porter

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:20.058102

princess-nicotine-1909

Princess Nicotine (1909) Aug 1, 2011 Comedic short from J. Stuart Blackton and Albert S. Smith that pits a smoker against a tiny fairy, brought to life through early special effects. In his Moving Pictures, How They Are Made And Worked (1912), Frederick Arthur Ambros Talbot referred to the film as being "one of the finest trick films made in the United States... mystifying from beginning to end."

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:20.359034

frankenstein-1910

Frankenstein (1910) Text by Hunter Dukes Aug 2, 2011 This 1910 Edison Manufacturing Company production, newly restored by the Library of Congress, is the only extant nitrate print of the first film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Subtitled “a liberal adaptation”, Frankenstein bears only a vague resemblance to its source text. Directed by J. Searle Dawley and shot in three days, the film downplays the social aspects of Shelley’s novel in favor of a story about the creature as an uncanny doppelgänger of its creator. “Instead of a perfect human being”, the intertitles tell us, “the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster.” Rather than being “born” innocent and made monstrous through the dark mirror of prejudice, this creature is violent by design. His creation in what looks to be a steaming cauldron or crucible — staged with still-terrifying special effects, as he waves a semi-animate arm — anticipates the creepy mechanical bodies of later horror villains such as Chucky and Jigsaw. And yet, once the creature assumes its human form, he looks more like a lost member of Kiss. The film culminates with a kind of integration of Frankenstein’s shadow material, with a plot device that feels closer to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray than Shelley’s Frankenstein. Escaping into a mirror, the creature looks back at his creator. Suddenly, he vanishes with a jump cut, and Frankenstein is left pointing an accusatory finger at himself. Part of the “monstrous” nature of Shelley’s novel is its bricolage form. Like the creature himself, we read a patchwork story composed of different nested accounts, letters, and voices. The book only comes “alive” under the reader’s attentive observation, as we work to create a unity out of scavenged parts. Of course, translating this story from text to film requires accommodation, but something of the same effect might have been achieved through the kind of psychological techniques employed by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon (1950): using the uncertainty of subjective memory and visual perspective to preserve Shelley’s ambiguities. This is asking a lot of a ten-minute silent film created in 1910. Yet its legacy is perhaps partly to blame for the violent intensifications of subsequent filmic adaptations of this novel, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), where the creature is less a Miltonian Satan, more simply satanic. None of this mattered to contemporary audiences, for the film was well-received primarily because of its infidelity. A review in the Fairmont West Virginian noted how the filmmakers “carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale”. Wherever the story was changed, the reviewer proceeds to note, it is solely for the benefit of motion picture audiences — and the results spoke for themselves. Writing about the creation scene, he calls it “probably the most weird, mystifying and fascinating scene ever shown on a film.” Salt Lake City’s Herald-Republication agreed: “the scene in the laboratory where the monster seems to gradually assume human semblance is probably the most remarkable ever”. For audiences today, the story of this nitrate print’s acquisition is almost more exciting than the film it contains, notes Wendi Maloney. It was unknowingly acquired by Alois F. “Al” Dettlaff of Wisconsin — remembered for dressing as Father Time at cinema conventions, complete with scythe and hourglass — as part of a larger trove in the 1950s. Only when the American Film Institute put Frankenstein on its list of lost movies in 1980 did Dettlaff realize what he had been sitting on. From there, the Library of Congress recovered the missing credits from the Edison Company’s archives, and commissioned a composer to score the film.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

Hunter Dukes

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2024-05-01T21:39:20.844112

an-account-of-the-late-improvements-in-galvanism-1803

An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism (1803) Aug 2, 2011 Giovanni Aldini (April 10, 1762 – January 17, 1834), an Italian physicist, became professor of physics at Bologna in 1798. His work was chiefly concerned with galvanism and its medical applications, with the construction and illumination of lighthouses, and with experiments for preserving human life and material objects from destruction by fire. He engaged in public demonstrations of galvanism, such as on the executed criminal George Forster at Newgate in London.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:21.308195

meet-john-doe-1941

Meet John Doe (1941) Aug 1, 2011 A comedy drama directed and produced by Frank Capra and starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The film, about a "grassroots" political campaign, created unwittingly by a newspaper columnist and pursued by a wealthy businessman, became a box office hit and was nominated for an Academy Award for best original story (for Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr).

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:21.791448

enrico-caruso-a-dream

Enrico Caruso - A Dream Aug 2, 2011 Enrico Caruso made approximately 290 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. This was one of

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:22.235825

letters-from-a-cat-1879

Letters From A Cat (1879) Aug 2, 2011 H.H. was the alias of Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (October 18, 1830 – August 12, 1885), an American writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government. She detailed the adverse effects of government actions in A Century of Dishonor (1881). Her novel Ramona dramatized the federal government's mistreatment of Native Americans in Southern California and attracted considerable attention to her cause, although its popularity was based on its romantic and picturesque qualities rather than its political content. She also wrote about a cat.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:22.679148

wolf-blood-1925

Wolf Blood (1925) Aug 2, 2011 Dick the lumberjack gets a blood transfusion with unexpected results. Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is the oldest surviving werewolf movie. Starring and directed by George Chesebro.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:23.147356

last-of-the-mohicans-1920

Last of the Mohicans (1920) Aug 1, 2011 First film adaptation from the James Fenimore Cooper novel of the same name. This film also features one of Boris Karloff's earliest film appearances in a small uncredited role as a Native American.

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:23.612635

quarles-emblems-1886

Quarles’ Emblems (1886) Aug 2, 2011 Francis Quarles (8 May 1592 – 8 September 1644) was an English poet most famous for his emblem book entitled Emblems. It was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. Each "emblem" consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the 'Christian Fathers', and concluding with an epigram of four lines. In the 19th century a new edition of the Emblems was published, embellished with new illustrations by Bennett and Rogers.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

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2024-05-01T21:39:24.088193

old-french-fairytales-illustrated-by-virginia-frances-sterrett-1920

Old French Fairytales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920) Aug 2, 2011 In 1920, at the tender age of 19, Chicago-born artist Virginia Frances Sterrett received her first commission from The Penn Publishing Company to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales — a collection of works from the nineteenth-century French author, Comtesse de Ségur (Sophie Fedorovna Rostopchine). Shortly after completing the work Sterrett was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She would manage a few other commissions, including illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales the following year, and for a 1928 edition of Arabian Nights, but her failing health meant she could only work in short bursts. She eventually passed away in 1931, at the age of 30. Upon her death the St Louis Post-Dispatch paid this tribute to her life and work: Her achievement was beauty, a delicate, fantastic beauty, created with brush and pencil. Almost unschooled in art, her life spent in prosaic places of the West and Middle West, she made pictures of haunting loveliness, suggesting Oriental lands she never saw and magical realms no one ever knew except in the dreams of childhood ...Perhaps it was the hardships of her own life that gave the young artist's work its fanciful quality. In the imaginative scenes she set down on paper she must have escaped from the harsh actualities of existence.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:24.548707

the-execution-of-mary-queen-of-scots-1895

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) Aug 2, 2011 This re-enactment — just 18 seconds long — of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, is among the first films to use trained actors, as well as one of the first to use editing for the purposes of special effects. Produced by Thomas Edison and directed by Alfred Clark, the film shows a blindfolded Mary (played by Robert Thomae, secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope Company) being led to the execution block. When the executioner's axe is raised, an edit occurs during which Thomae is replaced by a mannequin, the head of which is then summarily lopped off. It is the very first death scene (of many) in the history of cinema.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:25.012440

beela-boola-electric-city-4-1920

Beela Boola - Electric City 4 (1920) Aug 1, 2011 Test pressing of Joe Rosey's "Beela Boola", by the Electric City 4 on Edison matrix 7596-B, recorded October 20/9, 1920

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:25.461270

the-general-1926

The General (1926) Aug 2, 2011 A Buster Keaton classic. Johnnie loves his train ("The General") and Annabelle Lee. When the Civil War begins he is turned down for service because he's more valuable as an engineer. Annabelle thinks it's because he's a coward. Union spies capture The General with Annabelle on board. Johnny must rescue both his loves.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:25.870404

armata-a-fragment-1817

Armata: a fragment (1817) Aug 2, 2011 Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, (10 January 1750 – 17 November 1823) was a British lawyer and politician who served as Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom between 1806 and 1807 in the Ministry of All the Talents. In his retirement, as well as fighting for animal rights, Greek independence, and the defence of Queen Caroline, he wrote Armata, a strange tale of a man sailing to the moon upon a highway of ocean.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:26.320957

plan-9-from-outer-space-1959

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) Aug 2, 2011 Written and directed by infamous director Edward D. Wood, Jr. The film features Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, Tor Johnson and Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, and also bills Bela Lugosi posthumously as a star, although silent footage of the actor had been shot by Wood for other, unfinished projects just before Lugosi's death in 1956. The plot of the film is focused on extraterrestrial beings who are seeking to stop humans from creating a doomsday weapon that would destroy the universe. In the course of doing so, the aliens implement "Plan 9", a scheme to resurrect Earth's dead as what modern audiences would consider zombies (called "ghouls" in the film itself) to get the planet's attention, causing chaos. Wood was posthumously awarded the Medveds' Golden Turkey Award as the worst director ever.

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:26.804785

battleship-potemkin-1925

Battleship Potemkin (1925) Aug 12, 2011 Considered one of the most important films in the history of silent pictures, as well as possibly Eisenstein's greatest work, Battleship Potemkin brought Eisenstein's theories of cinema art to the world in a powerful showcase; his emphasis on montage, his stress of intellectual contact, and his treatment of the mass instead of the individual as the protagonist. The film tells the story of the mutiny on the Russian ship Prince Potemkin during the 1905 uprising.

public-domain-review

Aug 12, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:27.724754

the-kiss-1896-film

The Kiss (1896) Aug 13, 2011 "An osculatory performance by May Irwin and John Rice".... Scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. The first ever kiss to be caught on film.

public-domain-review

Aug 13, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:28.210430

experiments-in-the-revival-of-organisms-1940

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) Aug 13, 2011 A film documenting Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms, research which in the film appears to be successful. The experiments were conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko in 1939 at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. The film includes an introduction by the renowned British scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane. Read a Time Magazine account of the 1943 première shown to US scientists here.

public-domain-review

Aug 13, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:28.678794

sessions-for-the-blind-at-sunderland-museum

Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum Aug 9, 2011 From 1913, John Alfred Charlton Deas, a former curator at Sunderland Museum, organised several handling sessions for the blind, first offering an invitation to the children from the Sunderland Council Blind School, to handle a few of the collections. They were so successful that Deas went on to develop and arrange a course of regular handling sessions, extending the invitations to blind adults.

public-domain-review

Aug 9, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:29.160254

eugene-von-guerard-s-australian-landscapes

Eugène von Guérard’s Australian Landscapes Aug 15, 2011 Selection from Eugène von Guérard's Australian landscapes: a series of 24 tinted lithographs illustrative of the most striking and picturesque features of the landscape scenery of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia & Tasmania, printed and published by Hamel & Ferguson in 1867. Von Guerard hailed originally from Austria but moved to Australia in 1852 to try his luck on the goldfields of Victoria. The venture proved unsuccessful, but he soon realised there were opportunities to pursue a career as an artist in Australia. He started undertaking commissions recording the houses and properties of wealthy pastoralists, and his reputation grew. In 1870, he became the very first Master of the School of Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria.

public-domain-review

Aug 15, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:29.595118

cat-and-bird-stories-from-the-spectator-1896

Cat and bird stories from the “Spectator” (1896) Aug 5, 2011 A sequel to Dog Stories from The Spectator, this book brings us mysteries and anecdotes relating to cats, birds, and other animals which found there way into the pages of The Spectator.

public-domain-review

Aug 5, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:30.058188

the-snows-of-kilimanjaro-1952

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Aug 14, 2011 Film based on Hemingway's classic short story, directed by Henry King, and starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Susan Hayward. The story centers on the memories of a writer (Gregory Peck) who is slowly dying after developing a dangerous wound from a thorn prick while on Safari in Africa. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards; for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction (Lyle Wheeler, John DeCuir, Thomas Little, Paul S. Fox)

public-domain-review

Aug 14, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:30.512803

rhapsody-in-blue-paul-whiteman-and-george-gershwin-original-1924-recording

Rhapsody In Blue - Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin (Original 1924 recording) Aug 15, 2011 This is the original recording of Gershwin's masterpiece, acoustic as opposed to the later more famous and more well known electrically recorded version. In 2 parts.

public-domain-review

Aug 15, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:30.939191

operation-doorstep-1953

Operation Doorstep (1953) Aug 8, 2011 The first nuclear blast broadcast live on television took place March 17, 1953, in northwestern Nevada. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) called this weapons test Operation Upshot–Knothole Annie. In conjunction with it they also conducted a civil defense test they called Operation Doorstep. Operation Doorstep was meant to determine the effect of a 16-kiloton nuclear explosion on fifty automobiles, two wood-frame houses, eight backyard bomb shelters, and a goodly number of mannequins. The houses were built specially for the test, and the other objects were carefully arranged, as though for a dollhouse. The ostensible purpose of all this was “to show the people of America what might be expected if an atomic burst took place over the doorsteps of our major cities”. In the booklet published in 1953 (which can be read above), FCDA administrator Val Peterson reported on the findings. He assured his fellow Americans that “the family automobile would be relatively safe outside a ten-block radius…provided that some windows were left open to prevent the roof from caving in on the passengers”. The wood-frame houses, built at various distances from ground zero, “performed” as predicted: The one built 3,500 feet away from the blast was destroyed (though the basement was found, as predicted, to provide protection) and the other, built 7,500 feet away, was charred and damaged but remained intact. To measure levels of gamma radiation and “excessive temperature”, film badges and fusion strips were placed in the houses and shelters. The many mannequins, weighted with sand — except for a child mannequin — were also placed in these structures, as well as in some of the cars. “Lack of funds prevented instrumentation of the…interiors for air pressure, mannequin motion, and wall and roof displacement,” the booklet tells us. (Lack of funds is one of the booklet’s much-repeated themes!) However, based on the evidence provided by the badges, strips, and the post-blast distribution of dummies, the FCDA concluded that, while persons on the upper floors of the house at 3,500 feet would have been critically injured or killed, either by flying debris or radiation sickness, persons in the house at 7,500 feet and in most of the basement and backyard underground shelters. In the end, these backyard underground shelters were most highly recommended. The photographs taken of the Operation Doorstep sites, before and after the explosion, were made available to the public in a booklet sold for twenty-five cents. These photographs, especially the ones of aftereffects, are eerie to say the least. Some of them are also slightly absurd — for example, the photograph of the mannequin at the window of one of the houses, which features the caption: “This mannequin can only stay in the position in which he was placed, staring through the window at the coming disaster. A real occupant of this house could prepare — and survive.” Obviously, the idea of Operation Doorstep was to inform the American public about “the coming disaster.” But as with many similarly intended Cold War projects, one wonders whether the effect wasn’t to make people more terrified than ever. The sight of a charred car in a desert landscape being tended by a man in a radiation suit and a gas mask is not exactly reassuring. You can see more photographs from Operation Doorstep below and watch a US Department of Energy film about the operation (as well as the 1955 Operation Cue) here.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:31.238231

orson-welles-show-1941

Orson Welles Show (1941) Aug 7, 2011 Welles' first almanac/variety radio show, as sponsored by Illinois-based cosmetic maker Lady Esther, and featuring members of his Mercury Theatre. The show sought to provide something new to radio listeners. Unfortunately, the program format proved unpopular with the target audience of Lady Esther (ie middle class women), and the show eventually settled into a "story of the week" format. Originally scheduled for 26 weeks, the show ended prematurely when Welles left on his ill-fated It's All True trip to Brazil.

public-domain-review

Aug 7, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:31.703759

dr-julius-neubronner-s-miniature-pigeon-camera

Dr Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera Text by Ned Pennant-Rea and Adam Green Aug 8, 2011 Photographing the earth from above in the early twentieth century required great ingenuity. One hundred years before drones, the two best ways both had their drawbacks. Balloons and kites could take a camera but were very restricted in their movement and speed. The stage was set for a faster, rangier kind of aerial reconnaissance. In 1907 the apothecary and amateur pigeon fancier Dr Julius G. Neubronner presented a solution to the German patent office — the pigeon camera. Since 1903 Neubronner had been using pigeons to exchange prescriptions and urgent medications with a sanatorium a few miles from his home in Kronberg near Frankfurt. A pigeon lost during one of these flights had delighted Neubronner by returning to its dovecote four weeks later, safe and sound. The episode gave Neubronner the idea of creating lightweight, wearable cameras to record his couriers’ flights. He built several models which included a pneumatic timing mechanism to activate the shutter at set intervals, leather harness, and aluminium breastplate. Neubronner would take the pigeons up to 60 miles away before releasing them, knowing that they would want to take the most direct route home to unburden themselves. To increase the mobility of his fleet, he also built a horse-drawn dovecote with an attached darkroom. The German patent office objected to Neubronner’s application on the grounds that domestic pigeons could not possibly carry a 75 gram load. Neubronner countered the objection with photographic evidence and, in 1908, finally gained his patent. The invention brought Neubronner international notability after he presented it at expositions in Dresden, Frankfurt, and Paris in 1909–11. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the camera-equipped carrier pigeons, and the photos were immediately developed and turned into buyable postcards. The photos – with their skewed angles and random framing – share a live, wild quality familiar to Generation GoPro but completely novel at the time. One in particular (the first of the aerial shots featured below), of the Schlosshotel in Kronberg, became famous for accidentally capturing the wing tips of its intrepid creator. The German military considered the images sufficiently impressive to test the pigeon cam on the battlefields of the Western Front. However, rapid improvements in aeroplane reconnaissance consigned Neubronner’s birds to their traditional role of carrying messages. Pigeons would go on to also play a similar role in the Second World War, as detailed in this amusing documentary. Below we feature a selection of the fruits of Neubronner’s pigeon cam. Rorhof has published a wider selection in their 2017 book The Pigeon Photographer.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2011

Ned Pennant-Rea and Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:32.171432

fats-waller-and-his-orchestra-live-at-the-yacht-club-1938

Fats Waller and His Orchestra live at The Yacht Club (1938) Aug 7, 2011 Fats Waller and His Orchestra live at The Yacht Club in New York: "You Can't Be Mine and Somebody Else's Too", "Monday Morning", "What Do You Know About Love?", and "I Had To Do It". Also included is a live recording "Hold My Hand".

public-domain-review

Aug 7, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:32.633016

huexotzinco-codex-1531

Huexotzinco Codex (1531) Aug 9, 2011 The Huexotzinco Codex is an eight-sheet document on amatl, a pre- European paper made in Mesoamerica. It is part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521. Huexotzinco (Way-hoat-ZINC-o) is a town southeast of Mexico City, in the state of Puebla. In 1521, the Nahua Indian people of the town were the allies of the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés, and together they confronted their enemies to overcome Moctezuma, leader of the Aztec Empire. After the conquest, the Huexotzinco peoples became part of Cortés’estates. During 1529-1530 when Cortés was out of the country, Spanish colonial administrators intervened in the daily activities of the community and forced the Nahuas to pay excessive taxes in the form of goods and services. When Cortés returned, the Nahuas joined him in a legal case against the abuses of the Spanish administrators. The plaintiffs were successful in their suit in Mexico, and later when it was retried in Spain. The record shows [in a document uncovered in the collections of the Library of Congress] that in 1538, King Charles of Spain agreed with the judgement against the Spanish administrators and ruled that two-thirds of all tributes taken from the people of Huexotzinco be returned.

public-domain-review

Aug 9, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:33.117971

art-in-art

Art in Art Aug 9, 2011

public-domain-review

Aug 9, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:33.573079

la-paloma-1903

La Paloma (1903) Aug 7, 2011 Zélie de Lussan (21 December 1861 – 18 December 1949) was an American opera singer of French descent. This is her singing the oft recorded classic La Paloma, originally composed around 1863 by Spanish composer Sebastián Iradier.

public-domain-review

Aug 7, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:34.080293

english-as-she-is-spoke-1884

English As She Is Spoke (1884) Text by Adam Green Aug 15, 2011 Pedro Carolino wrote this classic in the genre of unintentional humour to help Portuguese students peer into the murky bubble of English. Instead he added considerably to the murk. It seems Carolino knew next to no English and had no Portuguese–English dictionary to hand. Thus he was forced to embark on a convoluted workaround. For each entry he first consulted a Portuguese–French phrasebook, then a French–English dictionary. This complicated translatory journey led to some hilarious results. Carolino tried to cover his tracks by claiming in the preface to have made his book “clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases.” As just a quick glance at the book's pages betrays, this was more than wishful thinking on Carolino's part. His failure is, however, comedy's success — the book is now known and loved for just the despoliation he tried to avoid. In the first part of the book Carolino introduces the key English vocab and phrases, such as "You come too rare", "He was the word for to laugh", and "I am catched cold in the brain". In the second part, Familiar Dialogues, he features conversations to help the student-reader put a native English speaker at their ease. When out on a walk the reader is encouraged to comment, "You hear the bird's gurgling? Which pleasure! which charm! The field has by me a thousand charms." And what to do if their walking companion gifts them some fruit? “These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.” Next there is a series of letters from famous personages, a collection of anecdotes, and finally the perfectly titled "Idiotisms and Proverbs." Mark Twain, who wrote the introduction to the first English edition (published a year before the one we are featuring) declared: “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.” We can't help but agree.

public-domain-review

Aug 15, 2011

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:34.516903

reefer-madness-1938

Reefer Madness (1938) Aug 8, 2011 Considered the archetypal sensationalized anti-drug movie but can also be seen as an exploitation film made to capitalize on the hot taboo subject of marijuana use while skirting the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 which forbade the portrayal of immoral acts like drug use. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:35.015316

the-spirit-photographs-of-william-hope

The Spirit Photographs of William Hope Aug 8, 2011 This remarkable collection of photographs was unearthed in a Lancashire antiquarian bookshop by one of the curators at the National Media Museum. Known as "spirit photographs", they were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope. Born in 1863 in Crewe, Hope started his working life as a carpenter, but in 1905 became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend. He went on to found and lead a group of six spirit photographers known as the Crewe Circle. Following World War I, support for the group, and demand for its services, grew as the grieving relatives of those lost to the war sought a means of contacting their loved ones. By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he established himself as a professional medium. The work of the Crew Circle was investigated on various occasions, the most famous of these taking place in 1922, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate. Price collected evidence that Hope was substituting glass plates bearing ghostly images in order to produce his spirit photographs. Later the same year Price published his findings, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote The Case for Spirit Photography, in response to Price's claims of fraud. Hope continued to practice, despite his exposure, until his death in 1933.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:35.427699

the-danger-of-premature-interment-1816

The Danger of Premature Interment (1816) Aug 15, 2011 "The Danger of Premature Interment proved from many remarkable instances of people who have recovered after being laid out for dead, and of others entombed alive, for want of being properly examined prior to interment. Also a description of the manner the ancient Egyptians, and other nations preserved and venerated their dead, and a curious account of their sepulchral ever burning lamps and mausoleums. Likewise the pernicious effects of burying in the body of churches, and confined church yards pointed out, whereby many valuable lives have been lost to the public, and their friends."

public-domain-review

Aug 15, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:35.883928

the-adventures-of-louis-de-rougemont-1899

The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (1899) Aug 5, 2011 "De Rougemont" was born Henri Louis Grin in 1847 in or near Paris, France. In 1898 he began to write about his invented adventures in the British periodical "The Wide World Magazine" under the name Louis De Rougemont. He described his alleged exploits in search of pearls and gold in New Guinea and claimed to have spent thirty years living with Indigenous Australians in the Australian outback. He claimed that the tribe with whom he had lived had worshipped him as a god. He also claimed to have encountered the Gibson expedition of 1874. "Truth is stranger than fiction But De Rougemont is stranger than both" —The Wide World Magazine, June 1899, No. 14

public-domain-review

Aug 5, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:36.326015

the-book-of-topiary-1904

The Book of Topiary (1904) Aug 5, 2011 "The most perfect specimen of topiary work with which we are acquainted is at Levens in Westmoreland. At that place a profusion of yews, hollies, and other evergreens have been transformed into more shapes than Proteus would trouble himself to assume, unless he happened to be in a more than usually changeable humour. Here is Madame la Reine with her arms most royally akimbo, opposite to Monsieur le Roi bearing the semblance (we will not say how near) of a kingly crown. Not far distant are some trees like gigantic chessmen. The smaller shrubs, of which there is a vast number, greenly shadow forth cones, cubes, vases, foaming tankards, &c."

public-domain-review

Aug 5, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:36.775785

tokyo-rose-1944

Tokyo Rose (1944) Aug 7, 2011 Tokyo Rose was a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately a dozen English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. The intent of these broadcasts was to disrupt the morale of Allied forces listening to the broadcast. American servicemen in the Pacific often listened to the propaganda broadcasts to get a sense, by reading between the lines, of the effect of their military actions. Farther from the action, stories circulated that Tokyo Rose could be unnervingly accurate, naming units and even individual servicemen. The name "Tokyo Rose" is most strongly associated with Iva Toguri D'Aquino. D'Aquino broadcast as "Orphan Ann" during the 15-20 minute D.J. segment of the 75-minute program The Zero Hour on Radio Tokyo (NHK). The program consisted of propaganda-tinged skits and slanted news reports as well as popular American music. After the war the US born D'Aquino was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for treason. She was given a pardon from President Ford in 1977. Read more about the life and trial of Iva Toguri D'Aquino here.

public-domain-review

Aug 7, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:37.281230

the-maps-of-piri-reis

The Maps of Piri Reis Aug 8, 2011 Piri Reis was a sixteenth-century Ottoman Admiral famous for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1513 he produced his first world map, based on some 20 older maps and charts which he had collected, including charts personally designed by Christopher Columbus which his uncle Kemal Reis obtained in 1501 after capturing seven Spanish ships off the coast of Valencia in Spain with several of Columbus’ crewmen on board.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:37.714670

rudolph-valentino-1923

Rudolph Valentino (1923) Aug 15, 2011 Two songs from Rudoph Valentino: "El Relicario" and "Kashmiri Song". Rudolph Valentino (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926) was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik. His sudden death at age 31 caused mass hysteria among his female fans, with reported resultant suicides, and an estimated 100,000 people lining the streets of New York City to pay their respects at his funeral.

public-domain-review

Aug 15, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:38.173856

how-it-feels-to-be-run-over

“Mother Will Be Pleased”: How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 6, 2022 From their beginning, movies have been fascinated with motion and its termination — the play between stasis and animation that is inherent to how we perceive the rapid transit of still images across a screen. Nearly a century before David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), a novel in which characters yearn for “the ecstasies of head-on collisions”, Cecil Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over found pleasure in blunt force trauma. In this minute-long film, a stationary camera, placed on the edge of a dirt road, records the approach of a horse-drawn cart, which passes safely out of the frame. Through the dust kicked up by hooves and wheels comes a motor car, driven by Hepworth, veering wildly toward us. As this automobile collides with the camera, the screen cuts to black and hand-written text flashes almost imperceptibly before our eyes: “?!!!? ! Oh! Mother will be pleased”. One of the earliest uses of intertitles, Hepworth’s film belongs to a genre of fin-de-siècle accident pictures, which includes his own Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), Walter R. Booth’s An Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903), and the Lumière brothers’ infamous L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), the screening of which has been apocryphally associated with audience members fleeing the theater to avoid being crushed by the train coming toward them. This is heavy subject matter, leavened only in Looney Tunesish universes where victims recover with comic elasticity. As such, it is tempting to read these “crashes” as weighted with allegorical gravity: the shocking arrival of cinema as a new media form. “When we watch this film”, writes Richard Howells in reference to How It Feels to Be Run Over, “we are at the same time watching the cinema discover its potential to communicate in new ways.” And yet, the invocation of the personal in this film, both through its affective title (how it feels) and by the attempt to represent something like interiority with the closing intertitles, trains our gaze not on history, but on something closer to narrative: the way endings can ripple backward through plots — whether cinematic or biographical — to lend them consistency. Witnessing a narrowly avoided transport accident in the same decade as Hepworth’s film, James Joyce asked his brother: “Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become.” Watching How It Feels to Be Run Over is to spend a minute in suspension as we await the title’s significance. We learn less about how it feels to be crushed by heavy machinery, more about the conventions of cinematic sensation itself. Like the catharsis promised by tragedy, we can explore the perverse thrill of a virtual car crash from the safe remove of our sofa. We barely have time to feel anything, only a flurry of question and exclamation marks before consciousness cuts to black. Of greater accessibility here is the way that “death” provides a sense of formal closure, lending significance, as Joyce describes, to “inciting incidents”. Mother told us to stay out of the road. If she is pleased, it is because she knew how this story would end. Strangely, in a suppression that Sigmund Freud might enjoy, the version of How It Feels to Be Run Over above omits the frames containing “Mother”. An alternative version is available on YouTube.

public-domain-review

Oct 6, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:39.133481

synaesthesia-diagrams-1883

Synaesthesia’s Colour Debut (1883) Text by Kevin Dann Oct 25, 2022 Victorian polymath Francis Galton is known as the inventor of many things: the world’s first weather and isochronal climate maps; the statistical concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean; the ultrasonic whistle; and — with a more harmful afterlife — many aspects of the field he named “eugenics”, as well as its supposed application to criminology. An indefatigable student of physical appearance, who is remembered (and often reviled) for a fanatical dedication to hegemonic British imperial norms of behavior and appearance, Galton also turned his curiosity to the inner world and its perceptions. Pioneering research into the visual-spatial complex known as “number form” — in which individuals experience numbers as possessing distinct spatial properties — Galton published the very first color plate of synaesthetic visualizations in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. In April 1879, Galton received a letter from his friend George Parker Bidder, a London barrister whose father had been a famous prodigy of calculation. The letter included diagrams of his visualizations for numbers, the months of the year, and historical time figured as the succession of English kings, prompting Galton to work up a “kitchen table questionnaire” that he distributed to hundreds of scientific and literary associates in England, America, Russia, France, Germany, and Italy. Though his earlier publications on number forms report the colors as described by respondents, only in 1883 did Galton enlist “no less than thirteen different lithographic stones” to faithfully depict them. Never using the term “synaesthesia”, which assumed widespread currency only after 1893, Galton assembled Plate 4 from a small roster — including novelist Rose Kingsley (Figure 64) and botanist George Henslow (Figures 70–73) — of his synaesthetic correspondent “seers”. The middle row depicts the word, letter, and number associations of Dr. James Key, sent to Galton from Cape Colony in South Africa. Along with supplying the colors he saw in his visual field when thinking of “Francis Galton”, “London”, and the word “visualization”, Dr. Key provided samples of wallpaper together with the words that the colors suggested to him. When Galton showed these to another synaesthete, she was scandalized to see how different they were from her own mental colors. Estimating that number forms were more common among women (one in fifteen) than men (one in thirty), Galton also concluded that: 1) the persistence of color associations with sounds was as prominent as that of number forms with numbers; 2) vowel sounds evoked colors more often than consonants; 3) seers had very precise color terminology; 4) no two people agreed on the color associations; and 5) these forms of mental imagery were “very hereditary”, and likely quite universal. Founded upon the most diverse idiosyncratic associations in childhood, Galton discovered that these concrete, stereotyped, and unchanging visual patterns only persisted among those individuals who continued to employ the associations in the inner life of their minds.

public-domain-review

Oct 25, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:39.624798

story-of-sun-moon-stars

Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898) Text by Kevin Dann Jun 21, 2022 On a frosty East Midlands morning, when Agnes Giberne was but seven or eight years old, she asked her father why it wasn’t warmer. She already knew, after all, that the Sun was some three million miles nearer in winter than during the summer months. Sitting across from a roaring fire in the hearth, her father pointed to a fly on his knee and replied with his own question: “See — if that fly were one inch nearer to the fire, would it feel any hotter?” Distance — immeasurable, humbling, stupefying distance — is the leitmotif of Agnes Giberne’s 1879 Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners. This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom. Remaining in print for nearly a century, it remains a compelling narrative that transports us to the most remote astral bodies, but also quickens every reader’s lost seven-year-old sensibility that the universe was made to be brought within one’s humble yet unbounded reach. The method of her father’s koan-like response — simple, striking analogy — would become Giberne’s own foolproof method to ask immense questions about the Earth’s history, atmosphere, oceans, vegetation, and, especially, the starry heavens above. The answer to her book’s opening question (“What is this earth, of ours?”) promises that no matter how immense and incomprehensible it may appear, Earth is “Something very great — and yet something very little. Something very great, compared with the things upon the earth; something very little, compared with the things outside the earth.” Employing always the inclusive “we” in her wide-ranging narrative, Giberne’s poetic voice swings gently between wide-eyed wonder and hard-nosed empiricism. She compasses the Earth as one sibling in the solar system “family”, embraces each planet as a beautiful and mysterious bosom friend, and rocks the reader not to sleep but to wakefulness in the Cosmos. When Sun, Moon and Stars appeared in 1879, Agnes Giberne had published thirty-five works of Victorian evangelical fiction. In the original and subsequent editions until 1898, when it was repackaged as The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, each chapter came prefaced by Bible passages, with God’s hand everywhere invoked. This was hardly a contradiction. For years, Giberne had carried on a lively correspondence about how to reconcile Biblical miracles and modern natural science’s materialist gospel with University of Oxford observatory director Charles Pritchard, who wrote an admiring preface for Giberne’s pioneering venture: a layperson’s guide to astronomical science. Despite its title’s inviting offer of a “story”, the 1898 edition featured-above — while retaining nearly the entirety of Giberne’s 1879 narrative, with “Copious Additions” of wonderful silhouette woodcuts — is recognizably more modern and more “scientific”. Revisions include new sections on the technology of stellar photography, a capsule history of (male) astronomers, and the deletion of all the Biblical passages and half of the enthusiastic outbursts acknowledging God’s benevolent intelligence. One feels in the arc of these changes the process of celestial disenchantment that was accelerating as the nineteenth century closed. In 1898 the world’s attention turned to speculation about life on Mars and the Moon, fueling both literary fantasy and astronomical exploration. Agnes Giberne’s goal — to foster soulful intimacy with the solar system and the stars beyond through perceptual practice and pedagogy — gave way instead to a largely alienating, technologically-driven, and competitive professional astronomy, increasingly inaccessible to interested amateurs. Reading her wonderful book now, in any edition, one returns to a lost world: the forgotten cosmos of childlike curiosity.

public-domain-review

Jun 21, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:40.279994

hamann-turner

The Turns of the Turnverein: Heinrich Hamann’s Gymnastic Photographs (ca. 1902) Text by Kevin Dann Sep 27, 2022 Despite their best efforts to keep still and straight-faced, the young, uniformed bodies in Heinrich Hamann’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein) remain in motion. Girls shaping a human pyramid alternate looks of attentiveness and amusement. Boys performing handstands on parallel bars are flanked by onlookers who smile, fidget, or grimace. A series of images involving inventive uses of the pommel horse — to reenact Don Quixote, to strike tableaux vivants of Romulus and Remus, and, when paired with a bicycle, to play “Texas Yack” (Jack) — allow physical education to decay into silliness. Only the adult gymnasts in these photographs approach the gravity of purpose desired by their coach. One can see in Hamann’s photographs both the playful spontaneity of the Turnvereins’ original exercises and the rigid postures and movements that would soon help meld individuals into the fascist masses of the Nuremberg rallies and 1936 Berlin Olympics. The Turner movement and its calisthenic equipment sprang from a man known as “the Turnvater”: Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn (1778–1852), a German gymnastics educator and fervent nationalist who took the rough-and-tumble turnen (romping about) of unruly schoolboys and molded it into a populist force. Beginning with simple hikes alongside his students in the Berlin countryside, Jahn developed jumping, throwing, and catching games, as well as now-familiar gymnastics exercises — often performed during patriotic commemorations — to train the undisciplined youth. “Just as the gymnasts bounced over their bars with the firm strength of their bodies”, writes Hans Kohn, “so they expected to bounce into the future Volksstaat with the firm strength of their conviction and will”. More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Jahn’s refinement of Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths’ earlier exercises was meant to train a new form of body politic. Threatened both by Napoleon’s occupation of German states during the First French Empire and by French aristocratic culture, Jahn’s pedagogy (formalized in his 1816 Die deutsche Turnkunst) was a “paradoxical combination of Bohemianism and Puritanism”, with its emphasis on the Du form and informal dress. A significant presence in the 1813 to 1815 wars of liberation, the Turnverein movement spread widely until it was banned by a Prussian cabinet order in 1820, when gyms were closed and Jahn went to prison for two years as a political subversive. A number of Turnverein disciples played a role in the 1848 revolutions, although their desire to establish a gymnastic army (Turnerschar) was never realized. Despite many Turners fleeing Germany after the failure of these uprisings and founding clubs in the United States and throughout Europe, German Turnverein — which maintained their connection to Jahn’s völkisch philosophy — had nearly 1.5 million members by World War I. While American Turners would work toward abolitionism during the Civil War, with each turn in Germany away from liberal principles that fed the revolutions of 1848, Jahn’s gymnastics movement became further adapted to serve martial impulses and fascist myths. “Initially imbued with the spirit of liberal nationalism, Turnen by the eve of World War I had become a conservative social movement, allied with right-wing nationalism and chauvinism”, writes Barbara J. Keys, leading some critics to cast Jahn’s ethnonationalism as a precursor to Nazism. Though it welcomed the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933, even the acutely nationalistic Turnerschaft was dissolved in 1936, when all German sport was taken under state control. ※※Indexed under…Exerciseas precursor to Nazism The St. Pauli club photographs, shot before Germany’s and the world’s twentieth-century catastrophes, capture the contradiction inherent in the organized discipline of the body. On one hand, these images of wall-bar exercises and vertiginous pole vaults honor the innocent pleasures of group sport. On the other, documentation of Frankfurt’s Turnfest — a festival uniting various Turnverein — feels retroactively infected by the spectacles of Volksgemeinschaft that were to follow.

public-domain-review

Sep 27, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:40.750039

dexter-pickle

Trimalchio in Newburyport: Timothy Dexter’s A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1848) Text by Hunter Dukes Sep 13, 2022 “Never since the Flood has there lived a man so little appreciated as Timothy Dexter”, wrote a later biographer of this eccentric, eighteenth-century businessman. Born near Boston in 1747, Dexter began life as a leather dresser, earning his living by crafting garments with techniques disseminated from the Levant. He took a financial position in the success of American independence, wagering his wife Elizabeth Frothingham’s dowry by going long on depreciated Continental currency after the Revolutionary War (a strategy copied from John Hancock). With the debt-addressing measures introduced through Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan, Dexter’s notes were redeemed at par, making him a wealthy man almost overnight. This was but the beginning of an odd assortment of undertakings, successes, and controversies. Most notable: a strange 1797 text with literary ambitions, written in Dexter’s personal eye dialect and entirely devoid of punctuation. Boasting that his work would be remembered once Shakespeare and Milton were forgotten (and not until then), he responded to critics of his style by furnishing all subsequent editions of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones with a supplemental page of full stops, commas, and exclamation points: “Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops”, explains the author. “I put A nuf here and thay may peper and solt as they please”. Dexter’s life itself reads like literary fable — a Trimalchio reborn in New England, whose wealth afforded him everything but what he really desired: respect. Self-educated, he served as the elected Informer of Newburyport, Massachusetts, tasked with enforcing laws regarding the slaughter of deer. Each week, he synchronized his vast clock collection, and the device that ran truest (or “behaved best”, in his words) was baptized with a grandiose title. He kept a court of confidantes, including a personal poet laureate whose name, Jonathan Plummer, perhaps reflects the man’s talent with verse — “Lord Dexter, like king Solomon, / Hath gold and silver by the ton” — and the upper-class Lucy Lancaster, daughter of a formerly enslaved African king, who provided both council and mitigation: “If Dexter loaded a gun to shoot some one, Luce was sent for”. ※※Indexed under…Timepieces rewarded for running true Other anecdotes are even less credible. Tricked into shipping coal to Newcastle and opening a warming-pan business in the West Indies, it is said that Dexter turned a profit against all odds — his fossil fuel arrived during a miners’ strike; the bed warmers proved vital to molasses refinement. A man of supposedly open mind and stentorian voice, Dexter had violent tendencies that intensified through his flirtation with the “insanity of inebriation”, delivering soused oratories at dinner parties that commenters found “truly Ciceronian”. He staged his own mock funeral, complete with a mahogany coffin and sun-lit tomb for the self-styled “first Lord in Amerika”, and interrupted the service by viciously caning his wife in the kitchen, as punishment for her dry eyes. (His son, also inebriated, escaped a beating when his inability to hold himself upright was mistaken for grief.) Dexter later commissioned a statuary for the family garden, placing his likeness among busts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, which bore the inscription: “the greatest philosopher in the known world”. A published obituary, following his swift decline in 1806, remembered Dexter as “truly ridiculous”, possessing “intellectual endowments not being of the most exalted stamp”. Despite numerous other exploits, Dexter’s voice survives through his literary endeavor, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, a muddled rant targeting politicians, religious officials, and his own wife, which contains a theological excursus on man’s place in the animal kingdom: If you can bare the trouth I will tell the trouth man is the best Annemal and the worst all men are more or Less the Divel but there is sit of ods sum halfe sum three quarters the other part of beast of Difrent kind of beasts sum one thing and sum a Nother sum Like a Dog sum Lik horses sum bare s Cat sum Lion sum lik ouls sum a monkey sum wild Cat sum Lam sum A Dove sum a hogg sum a oxe sum a snake. . . Self-published and distributed for free, A Pickle was sought-after by eager readers and would-be ridiculers, stretching into eight print runs. Even so, it quickly became a rare book — Dexter’s biographer Samuel Knapp (1784–1838) was unable to find a copy during his life — until it underwent several subsequent reprintings in the nineteenth century. Perhaps more interesting than the text itself are the supplemental pages of punctuation, which vary between extant editions. A version appended to an 1858 volume of Knapp’s biography features tildes, double daggers, and dashes of various lengths. Arranged with an unexplained symmetry, the page appears almost like concrete poetry, as if anticipating later avant-garde works such as Christian Morgenstern’s typographical “Fisches Nachtgesang”. Antics aside, Dexter has had a lasting, if sometimes uncoveted, place in American letters. “I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter”, a writer who “makes his own rules of rhythm, so far as there is any rhythm in his sentences”, thought Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is something almost modernist about A Pickle’s neologisms, the printed voice of a Revolution-era eccentric, and how they are haltingly joined through his listing cadence. One begins to wonder if Lucy Ellmann’s full-stop-eschewing Ducks, Newburyport (2019), whose title and plot involve Dexter’s hometown, bears a debt to this strange book.

public-domain-review

Sep 13, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:41.226757

garland-blood-collages

The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60) Text by Sasha Archibald Sep 20, 2022 The novelist Evelyn Waugh was an inveterate collector. His interest was Victorian arcana — bric-a-brac unfashionable in his time, even gauche, and cheaply acquired. He had a soft spot for histrionic decorative objects, and furniture much larger than function demanded. By his own account, Waugh’s taste referenced the musty, redolent home of his three maiden aunts, a house that hadn’t been altered since 1870, which had entranced Waugh as a young child. Brownish oil paintings; mounted butterflies; glass cabinets of fossils; a taxidermized monkey on the bathroom shelf. “It all belonged to another age, which I instinctively, even then, recognized as superior to my own.” In middle-age, Waugh turned his collector’s eye toward books, telling Life magazine in 1946 that he was now “collect[ing] old books in an inexpensive, desultory way”. Indeed, he amassed some 3500 volumes, all of which were transferred after his death to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Despite the size of Waugh’s library, the archive had no trouble designating its “single most curious object”. That distinction belonged without question to the Victorian Blood Book. The Blood Book is handmade, folio-sized, with a handsome marbled endpaper and forty-three pages of exquisitely crafted decoupage. John Bingley Garland, the manuscript’s creator, used collage techniques, excising illustrations from other books to assemble elegant, balanced compositions. Most of the source material is Romantic engravings by William Blake and his ilk, but there are also brilliantly colored flowers and fruits. Snakes are a favorite motif, butterflies another. A small bird is centered on every page. The space between the images is filled with tiny hand-written script that reads like a staccato sermon. “One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!” etc. The book’s reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed. To be clear, Garland’s blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ’s own. And yet the final work suggests that the properties of actual blood tugged the artist’s shirtsleeves, pulling him away from the symbol and towards its source. It’s as if God gave Garland permission to fetishize hemorrhage. The Blood Book isn’t the only evidence of this fixation. Garland also made several single-page collages, now dispersed in various museums. In these, the imagery is more densely layered and the compositions more clamorous than those in the Blood Book, but the trademark drips remain. It’s not clear that Garland ever saw collages like the ones he decided to make. While Victorian scrapbooking could sometimes veer toward collage, the Blood Book is in a different category entirely, deploying techniques usually dated to Cubism in the early twentieth century. There is no evidence that Garland even considered himself an artist. Born in Poole, England, in 1791, he was a politician and merchant who joined the family fishmongering business. The fish came from Trinity, Newfoundland, such that Garland moved back and forth between Poole and Trinity, distinguishing himself in both places. He was Newfoundland’s first speaker of the house and a two-term mayor of Poole; with his brother, he spearheaded the building of a church in Trinity. He seems to have retired early, leaving public life around age forty-five, though he lived another four decades. The occasion of the Blood Book was the 1854 marriage of his daughter Amy, who treasured it as the pious craft of a loving father. Her heirs rejected the Blood Book nickname, preferring “Amy’s Gift”. (Garland’s own title—Durenstein!, a cryptic reference to the castle in which King Richard the Lionheart was ransomed during the Third Crusade — didn’t stick.) It’s not surprising the Garland heirloom ended up in Waugh’s library. The Blood Book’s singularity would have spoken to any collector of mid-Victorian whatnots, and Waugh was moreover a devout Catholic. But it was perhaps the specific pitch of Garland’s creation that made the purchase inevitable, the breathless exuberance of so many exclamation points, and so much exclamatory blood. For a man famously cynical and perpetually bored, the Blood Book was the perfect novelty. Below you can browse all forty-one collages from Garland's Blood Book, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

public-domain-review

Sep 20, 2022

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:41.525307

unai-no-tomo

Unai no tomo: Catalogues of Japanese Toys (1891–1923) Text by Kevin Dann Jun 15, 2022 When Brooklyn Museum Curator of Ethnology Stewart Culin visited Japan for the first time in the fall of 1909, he escaped from the harangues of curio dealers by asking them to bring him a traditional children’s toy called burri-burri. Culin knew this rare and obscure object only from a specimen in Tokyo’s Imperial Museum and another owned by the collector Seifu Shimizu. Culin’s request to the dealers quickly confirmed the toy’s rarity, as neither he nor any of his numerous assistants were ever offered one. In the end, Culin asked Shimizu to make him a copy to bring back to Brooklyn. Only on a subsequent trip to Japan in 1912 did Culin secure an original, from an old shop on Kyoto’s famed Shijo Street. It bore the dim painted traces of pines and storks beneath its patinaed surface, complete with a plaited cord of knotted and tasseled red silk, and was accompanied by a pair of small wooden disks. The only lore that the shop owner could provide Culin was that the burri-burri had been used in an ancient game. The designs seemed to resemble the emblem associated with the Boys Festival, and also with traditional New Year’s toys — battledores and shuttlecocks. During Culin’s visits to Japan, Seifu Shimizu — director of a major Tokyo trading company, artist, calligrapher, and leading Meiji Era collector of omocha (toys) — was in the midst of publishing the ten-volume Unai no tomo, comprised of charming woodblock prints of traditional objects of play. The founder of Odomokai (十八番クラブ), a Connoisseur's Club to advance the appreciation of tomo (“playfellows” or “companions”), Shimizu treasured Japanese toys. He created the Takeuma-kai (Hobbyhorse Club) for their study in 1880, and curated the first known exhibition in 1906. After Shimizu’s death in 1913, his friend Nishizawa Tekiho completed the final volumes of the Unai no tomo series. Browsing through these catalogs we meet: jack-in-the-box chickens; whales on wheels and magnetic mice; a clay sumo wrestler grappling an orange carp; and popguns, hobbyhorses, and noisemakers galore. Only the barest of labels accompany each of Seifu Shimizu’s prints and were it not for Culin’s connoisseurship, these ubiquitous folk objects may have remained in obscurity for the English-speaking world. Student, friend, and colleague of the pioneering anthropologists of play Frank Hamilton Cushing and Frank Gouldsmith Speck, Culin was the world’s paramount encyclopedist, philosopher, and collector of children’s games and toys, having published Korean Games in 1895 and the eight-hundred page Games of the North American Indians in 1907. Widening his discoveries about burri-burri, he noticed that the Unai no tomo were almost without exception derived from amulets and talismans rooted in Shinto and traditional Japanese folklore. As miyage — souvenirs — they were commonly given as presents to children by travelers returning from both sacred and secular pilgrimages. “They are frequently, in fact”, Culin concluded, “degenerate forms of charms and magical things, and the line between the two classes of objects cannot be sharply defined”. By the time that Culin penned these words, he felt a deep, bittersweet attachment to both the Unai no tomo volumes and the toys that he brought home to deposit in the Brooklyn Museum, for modernity was sweeping from the American as well as the Japanese child’s landscape all manner of games and toys. Regaling a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter in 1925 with descriptions of a half-dozen varieties of tag, “hares and hounds”, “ring relieve”, “red lion”, “head and footer”, “Spanish fly”, “kick the wicket”, “one o’cat”, and “fungo”, Culin grew wistful, observing that “the street games of Brooklyn grow fewer and fewer. The great amount of traffic has driven the children from the streets that used to be their playgrounds. The old-time street games like the burri-burri are becoming a thing of the past.” Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can browse volumes 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 of Unai no tomo and see highlights in our gallery below.

public-domain-review

Jun 15, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:42.052612

cornish-waves

The Kumatologist: Vaughan Cornish’s Wave Studies (1910–14) Text by Kevin Dann Sep 22, 2022 Walking along the Devon coast at low tide in the autumn of 1895, geographer Vaughan Cornish (1862–1948) watched two sets of waves interact on the shore. As one set rippled across the flat strand, the other rounded a shoal and broke onto the beach. After colliding, each set then continued on its separate path, which brought to his mind how waves of light can pass through each other unaffected. Cornish’s casual association, between the behavior of light and water, speaks to how immersed he and his contemporaries were in a world of invisible waves. British and continental science in the 1890s was wrangling with gravitational waves, magnetic waves, sound waves, and mysterious new emanations — cathode rays, x-rays, and uranium radiation. And yet, the common ocean wave possessed its own secrets, having undergone only the barest scientific scrutiny in the two centuries since Newton’s Opticks. Setting to work on a course of reading, Cornish quickly discovered that waves of the air, water, and earth were virtually a “Land of the Unknown”. In his 1910 Waves of the Sea and Other Water Waves, the English geographer made his first sustained attempt to plumb their mysteries, finding that “[o]f all manifestations of the inorganic world [the wave] is most like a living being”. By 1914, when he published Waves of Sand and Snow and the Eddies Which Make Them, Cornish’s twenty-two scientific papers and previous book made him Earth’s pioneer “kumatologist” — the term he coined for the scientific study of waves. Though kumatology failed to find a professional rhetorical foothold, Cornish’s research gave physical scientists a set of powerful indications by which they could make their own studies of geomorphological and atmospheric phenomena. American geographer Carl O. Sauer considered Cornish one of but four predecessors who could serve as a master for twentieth-century geographers. After that moment on the Devon shore, Cornish’s entire life became organized around the wave. Liberated from the need to work by his wife Ellen’s inheritance, the couple traveled around the world studying Earth’s variegated waveforms. Experiencing a catastrophic earthquake together in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, they saw a familiar pattern: uniformitarian agency operating across crests and troughs. The pair subsequently traveled to the Panama Canal to understand waves in the volcanic bedrock, and in 1913, after Ellen’s death from cancer, Cornish penned a tribute to her scientific companionship: The Travels of Ellen Cornish. Being the Memoir of a Pilgrim of Science. Travels opens with a lengthy description of waves in the Bay of Biscay, passes on to note wave patterns in the pools of Buddhist temples in Kobe, and then goes into exhaustive detail about standing waves in the various cataracts of Niagara Falls. Along with learning about barchan dunes in the Arabian Desert, snow mushrooms in British Columbia’s alpine forests, and cahots (undulations produced by sledges) in Quebec farm fields, Cornish’s curiosity leads him to make discoveries about the waves created by a London omnibus and by leaves blown against stone steps in Kensington Gardens. Part III of Waves of Sand and Snow finds parallel forms in deltas, quicksand, and mackerel skies. An award-winning scientific photographer, Cornish included plates that expertly capture the subtleties of shadow and light playing across oscillations in various bodies. Yet his books also record a moment before cinematography became a scientific tool. In any medium, waves are not things but events, their dynamic processes best portrayed as moving rather than static pictures. Though Cornish was the first person to make a film of the Severn River’s spectacular tidal bore, and celebrated motion pictures’ observational advantages for the study of waves, he never took up film as a scientific practice. In later life, Cornish authored a series of books that established a nascent science of scenery in Britain, and he was an outspoken champion of landscape preservation, returning to kumatology with his 1934 Ocean Waves and Kindred Geophysical Phenomena. Both the prose and photographs of the 1910s wave studies give ample evidence of Cornish’s refined aesthetic sense, yet in his later works one learns that the steady empiricist of sand, snow, and sea was often swept away by an altogether otherworldly species of invisible waves. Contemplating ripples on the Lake District’s Ullswater, “magic began to work upon my mind; the will was shackled; the mystic sense set free.” Like Henry David Thoreau contemplating the metamorphic, pulsing life of sand flowing down from a bank near Walden Pond, Cornish’s wave-induced ecstasies hint at larger transcendental rhythms still waiting to be explored.

public-domain-review

Sep 22, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:42.498697

what-spiritualism-really-is

The Discarnates: Thomas Carlyle in the Spirit-World (1920) Text by Anna Della Subin Jun 1, 2022 In 1869, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle horrified legions of spiritualists with a letter, printed in the American Scotsman, that described the new religious movement as a “Liturgy of Dead Sea Apes”. Carlyle enlisted a favorite insult: a fable held that when a wayward tribe, who lived by the Dead Sea, refused to listen to the wisdom of Moses, they were transformed into apes, “gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense”, as Carlyle narrated in Past and Present (1843). “They sit, with… such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things”. For Carlyle, the notion that people could converse with the dead, encountering vaporlike spirits as they sat in the darkness, was the latest instance of ape-consciousness, the “truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man”. One will never know what happens after death, Carlyle contended. “Give up all that”, he advised in his letter. In response, a spiritualist in Bristol took it upon himself to write to the esteemed Sage of Chelsea, to politely ask whether he had ever investigated the phenomenon of Spiritualism himself. He received a curt, one-sentence reply, in blue colored pencil: By volitn., or except passively and by accidt., I never did; nor have the least intentn. of ever doing. By 1919, Carlyle had changed his mind. His body had lain in its grave for nearly four decades when his spirit appeared to a certain Dr. Wm. J. Bryan, with the urgent need to author another text. Over the course of a year, the philosopher transmitted the chapters of What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan, at a moment when a teeming ocean of dead, killed in the Great War or by flu, were beckoning new generations of spiritualists worldwide. “The change which comes to all who pass the portal of death, is simply…. a walking across the threshold of two rooms”, Carlyle, “a so-called dead man”, excitedly announced. It was the duty of the living, he reported, to receive the truths of Spiritualism in midnight communiqués “by wireless”. Dr. Bryan, who worked a day job as a physician, found his pen gliding across the page at night through automatic writing, the same process, he noted, as that which inscribed the ten commandments on tablets of stone. In What Spiritualism Really Is, Carlyle posthumously describes the nature of death, wherein the magnetic chord that connects the soul, or astral-body, to the physical body, is severed. Leaving behind their cadavers, all souls arrive at the same place, “Over There” — for there is no such region as hell, even for those who might deserve it. The gauzy newcomers take time to build strength again, and to adjust to the brighter colors of heaven, before they begin to speak. “Change certainly has taken place; but annihilation—never!” The dead, Carlyle relates, are the “discarnates”, those who have shed their bodies but retain their unique selves: “always it is found that personality persists”. During his “earth career”, Carlyle had worried over how to write history that still had arterial blood. Haunted by his own unfinished biography of Oliver Cromwell, he wrote to Emerson in 1840, “A subject dead is not worth presenting.” For Carlyle, “the past was not a dead thing awaiting the resurrecting pen of the historian, but something ‘alive’”, the scholar David McAllister notes; “Carlyle’s fear was that in the act of writing he would kill it.” Although he ridiculed the rituals of the séance room, as a historian, Carlyle was already engaged in the practice of letting the deceased speak for themselves. Later, Carlyle’s spirit would appear again in a classroom in Michigan in 1936, when a professor invited a Detroit medium, Mrs. Lillian Lee, to conjure the dead for his session of History 112, “Europe in the 17th Century”. Other souls swarm around Dr. Bryan in the book: Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Bryan’s own father, the biblical prophet David, an unnamed nun, “casting all sectarian thought aside”. Thomas Jefferson speaks of justice and mercy; President McKinley applauds Bryan for his efforts. The Neoplatonist martyr Hypatia arrives to say, “The doctrine is sound!!” The abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher tells of how the dead wouldn’t care to live again, even if they could. Carlyle relays: “The question which is so often asked by mortals of spirits is: ‘Are you happy?’ And the answer comes, invariably, ‘Yes’”. Yet at the heart of Carlyle’s transmitted text is a riddle. If personalities persist in the afterlife, how can it be that the spirits seem to agree on absolutely everything? The mysteries of death endure.

public-domain-review

Jun 1, 2022

Anna Della Subin

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:42.987661

despinque-anglicus-illuminations

Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1480) Text by Jo Livingstone Oct 4, 2022 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, also known as Barthélémy l'Anglais and Bartholomew the Englishman, was a medieval scholar, monk, and politician. Born near the beginning of the thirteenth century in England (hence his name), he made a career abroad in continental Europe’s institutions of higher learning. Bartholomaeus started out studying and teaching in Paris as a member of an intellectual order devoted to the tradition of Aristotlelian reasoning called Scholasticism. Later, he went into politics, holding serious positions in Bohemia and Saxonia — regions around present-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic — during the turbulent period when Mongols were invading Europe and Europeans were once again besieging Jerusalem. In 1240, Bartholomaeus wrote a book about everything. Titled De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), it was conceived as an encyclopedia of general knowledge. Across nineteen books, he traces the Great Chain of Being, a theory of all things that begins with God and runs through celestial beings, the soul, bodies (both human and heavenly), the elements, rocks and stones of the earth, animals, and the senses. De Proprietatibus Rerum is special for the rigor with which Bartholomaeus cites his sources. These include household names in the West like Plato and Aristotle, doctors and mathematicians from the Golden Age of Islam, such as Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persia, and those who translated scientific works to and from Arabic and Latin, like Constantine the African. The Great Chain of Being was the dominant theory of all creation during the High Middle Ages, and the idea that God’s will permeates its every aspect in an intentional and patterned way was important to Bartholomaeus and his fellow medieval encyclopedists. You can see this patterning most clearly in the lush illustrations that accompany certain manuscripts of Bartholomaeus’ text. Among the loveliest of these is a French translation by Jean Corbechon, illuminated by the masterful Evrard d'Espinque. Made in the later fifteenth century, its heavy leather covers protect 392 leaves of parchment. Evrard d'Espinque’s illuminations depict the world in a semi-abstracted way — and his simplified designs, as demonstrated by the map above, can be confusing to our contemporary eyes, since the decorative elements on the earth’s circumference (birds and water and ships) are embellishments to an otherwise precise and roughly correct rendering. If you look closely at this image, you will see four rivers flowing down from a glowing spot towards a faint “T”. The orb at their source is Eden, which contemporary scholarship thought was somewhere beyond India (medieval maps oriented the world with East at the top). The four rivers are the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates, which the same sources said flowed out of Eden and into the world. The three radial segments of the “T” represent bodies of water (the Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean). As boundary lines, these three aqueous bodies divide the landmasses of this circular world. The bottom quadrants are Europe and Africa, with the top semicircle being Asia. The “O” and “T” shapes themselves had a symbolic meaning in this era, standing for orbis terrarum — “the lands of the earth”. Later in the same chapter, we can see the T-O shape repeated in another illuminated diagram, this time of the seven classical planets, distributed in space according to the regions of the zodiac, which are placed in the outer area of the circle. At this map’s center sits the earth. This does not mean that medieval scholars thought that the earth was at the center of our solar system. Instead, the illumination shows the planets as they appear in the night sky, which is the primary datum of western astrology. In Book XI, De Aere (“On the air and weather”), the same little diagram of the world appears again, also against an abstracted blue background that evokes a summer sky, this time illustrating a section of the text about the four cardinal winds: septentrio, auster, favonius, and subsolanus. A zoomed-in and more elaborate T-O map is found in Book XIII, De aqua (“On water and fishes”). Here, the abstracted sea areas of the first map we saw have become specific waterways. A similar symbolic map appears in Book XI, De regionibus et provinciis (“On regions and places”). Instead of ships, now d’Espinque shows land masses in and around the waterways — islands, mountains, and cities appear in miniature form as rocks, hills, and houses. These are not labeled or specified geographically, and instead decorate the earth in quick, elegant brushstrokes. Patterning was inherent to the visual aspect of this kind of scholarship, particularly in the use of these circular diagrams that Naomi Reed Kline calls “rotae” to organize information. On one hand, a two dimensional circle instinctively relates to an orb in three dimensional space, helping medieval geographers to represent real space on the page in intuitive ways. But there’s also a formalism to the circles, which illuminators used to illustrate everything from the zodiac to the clock to the earth to the cycle of Fortune. A bit like Cartesian coordinates for depicting graphs, or the spreadsheets which organize so much of our modern world’s most crucial data, Kline describes these maps as “circular wheels that made understandable, in simplified graphic manner, concepts that explained the way the world worked”. Bartholomeus and other encyclopedists like him, as well as their illuminators, such as the extraordinary Evrard d’Espinque, collaborated to refine and elaborate this understanding of the world’s mechanics. It looks utterly unlike our visual representations of geography, with map keys and GPS coordinates, but these forms lie inside and underneath everything science has visualized since. Our world is still an orb, and we still draw planetary motion using circles and ellipses. Science runs along a Great Chain too.

public-domain-review

Oct 4, 2022

Jo Livingston

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:43.460944

kedzie-shadows

Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 3, 2022 Asked why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), a now infamous critique of “the rest cure”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman recounted her own treatment for neurasthenia. Forbidden by her doctor from intellectual labor and confined to the domestic sphere, she was brought “so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” Seventeen years earlier, in the preface to Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book that gathers real swaths of arsenic wallpaper sourced from stores across Michigan, physician Robert Clark Kedzie made his own evaluation of treatments for nervous exhaustion, offering a peculiar chemical theory for the descent into madness during bed rest. From Kedzie’s perspective, Gilman’s narrator — who believed that her boudoir wallpaper bore a “vicious influence” — was right: something sinister had been lurking in plain sight. How many women have thus “gone into a decline,” I will not venture to guess. Perhaps a consideration of the “delicate state of her lungs” leads her to confine herself to her room, and the fear of “taking cold,” to avoid all ventilation; and thus she breathes constantly an air loaded with the breath of death. . . . and finally succumbs to consumption, — a consumption of arsenic in every breath she inhales! Kedzie was writing during a frenzy for wallpaper in Europe and the United States, fueled by eighteenth-century innovations in block printing, steam-powered presses, and new color compounds (in Britain, for example, the supply of wallpaper increased 2615% between 1834 and 1874). Opulent greens, yellows, and violets could now be cheaply rendered on a mass scale thanks to Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s invention of copper arsenite paint, whose colors soon bled into bookbinding, drapes, gowns, and other pigmented garments. Commenting on the Parisian fad for arsenic green dresses, such as this exquisite tea gown worn by Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay — an inspiration for Proust’s Duchess de Guermantes — Punch magazine called their shade “the hue of death, the tint of the grave”. Known and used as a poison since Ancient Greece, arsenic was something of a pharmakon in the nineteenth century, believed to be both medicine and poison, depending on the dose. As Lucinda Hawksley tracks in her expansive and beautifully-wrought Bitten by Witch Fever, the same Victorian newspapers that venerated Austrian arsenic eaters for their rosy complexions also carried shocking accounts of Gesche Gottfried, Hélène Jégado, and Maria Swanenburg: nineteenth-century serial killers suspected of claiming hundreds of victims with the substance colloquially known as “inheritance powder”. In the realm of aesthetics, a similar contradiction arose in the art and life of William Morris, socialist activist and famed wallpaper designer, whose business was built on wealth from Devin Great Consols, a copper mine turned world’s largest arsenic refinery. Criticized for blinkering himself to the health conditions of miners, Morris also remained skeptical of research that suggested his signature patterns could cause disease, going on the record with a quotation that supplied Hawksley with her study’s title: “As to the arsenic scare a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.” In response, Dante Gabriel Rossetti poked venomous fun at Morris in his unpublished satirical skit The Death of Topsy. The play sees George Wardle, Morris’ real life business manager, and his wife Madeleine Smith — a Glaswegian socialite famously tried for poisoning her lover with arsenic — slip the substance into the boss’ coffee. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, modern wallpaper experienced a backlash, both from aesthetes and medical professionals. In an 1882 lecture on the British renaissance in decorative arts, prepared for his tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde declared recent wallpaper “so bad that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime.” And indeed, his deathbed quip in 1900 — “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go” — inadvertently captured the emerging scientific consensus about arsenical wallpaper: its presence, like crime, was a threat to life. Few had thought arsenic could be volatilized until Bartolomeo Gosio discovered that fungi growing in damp paper paste were prone to synthesize noxious fumes that bore notes of garlic. In books and pamphlets such as Our Domestic Poisons (1879), Our Homes, And How to Make Them Healthy (1883), “On Chronic Arsenic Poisoning, Especially from Wall-Paper” (1889) , and a strange, anonymous novel of the era, The Green of the Period; or, The Unsuspected Foe in the Englishman’s Home (1869), the element’s full-fledged dangers were unveiled to the public. Some went so far as to revise the past, suggesting, for example, that Napoleon was ultimately defeated, not on the battlefield, but by his green wallpaper on St. Helena. (Drawing on recent chemical testing of Napoleon’s wallpaper in The Arsenic Century, James C. Whorton believes that the emperor did suffer from arsenic poisoning, but doubts wallpaper was the primary source.) Dr. R. M. Kedzie, who served on the Michigan Board of Health in the 1870s, explains his unique strategy for raising awareness in the preface to Shadows from the Walls of Death. Originally printed in a run of one hundred copies, only a half-dozen of which remain due to recipients fearfully destroying their copies, the book is contaminated by the very substance under indictment. That is, to eradicate the poison, Kedzie chose to archive its vehicle. “[T]o call attention to this source of danger, and to assist persons in detecting these dangerous colors in wall paper, the State Board of Health Directed me to prepare specimen books of such dangerous wall papers. . . . The wall papers in this book all contain arsenic.” Below you can browse selections from Kedzie’s pernicious book through the safety of your digital display — a magic made possible, in part, by arsenic embedded in the electronics that have come to wallpaper modern life.

public-domain-review

Nov 3, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:44.014094

cummins-indian-congress

Playing Indian: Cummings’ Indian Congress at Coney Island (1903) Text by Kevin Dann Nov 2, 2022 This recording of Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’ Wild West Show held in Brooklyn’s Steeplechase Park is one grand audio sleight-of-hand. The orchestra at Columbia Records’ Manhattan studio created the sounds of whooping “Sioux warriors”, beating tom toms, and stampeding horses. Cummins’ “five hundred Indians representing forty-two tribes, living in teepees, wigwams, and adobe houses” were all out at Coney Island, under the watchful eye of showman Cummins and his Lakota wrangler Henry Standing Bear, a veteran of Carlisle Indian School. Vaudevillian Len Spencer supplies the carny barker introductions, and orchestra musicians round out each section with mock applause or war cries. The closing chapters of the perennial wars against native peoples in North America coincided with a mania for all things Indian, including audio recordings. While Arthur Foote, Edward Macdowell, Antonín Dvořák, Arthur Farwell, and other classical composers wrote symphonic music celebrating the vanishing Indian, Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths churned out ersatz “Indian” ballads, intermezzos, novelty numbers, and even fox-trots. The Library of Congress’ National Jukebox collection includes more than fifty Indian-themed discs recorded between 1902 and 1924 — the year of the last Apache raid, widely considered to mark the end of the American Indian Wars. The Coney Island “Congress” — a title consciously chosen to distance Cummins’ production from Wild West Shows, which Indian reformers saw as undermining their efforts at “civilizing the savages” — was itself a conglomeration of counterfeits. A former prospector and cowboy turned Chicago theatrical manager, F. T. Cummins masqueraded as “Chief La–Ko–Ta”; Annie Oakley’s rival Princess Wenona, “Sioux Indian Maiden & Champion Rifle Shot of the World”, was really Lillian Francis Smith, the daughter of a Massachusetts Quaker couple, who had joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the age of fifteen in 1886. The show Indians — reservation dwellers mostly recruited from the Pine Ridge Agency — were given mock warrior names and biographies: Ghost Face, Painted Horse, Standing Soldier, Red Shirt, Bad Wound. The highbrow pageant of pottery makers, blanket weavers, and lace workers was but a thin veneer over the frontier violence that the Steeplechase audience thrilled to see and hear. A review of Cummins’ Congress later that same summer at Madison Square Garden highlighted a reenactment of the capture and lynching of a horse thief, and a white captive’s running of an Indian gauntlet before being burned at the stake. The recording’s most recognizable feature — the “war dance” vocal monody — is a non-native musical convention, which helped produce the kind of problematic stereotypes that Michael Pisani charts in his magisterial study, Imagining Native America in Music. The “dance” harks back through John Philip Sousa’s 1890 reimaginings of Cherokee and Chippewa songs to as early as 1641, when French performers in the Royal court ballet dressed as American Indians and danced to the moresca. Some iteration of this mostly monotone melody and percussion typically appeared in the musical accompaniment to early cinema’s silent Westerns. It continued into the talking picture era up through the Hollywood Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, notably used during the dance of Mose Harper in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), becoming a musical signifier of Native America as imagined by characters contributing toward its demise.

public-domain-review

Nov 2, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:44.486406

shores-of-the-polar-sea

Shores of the Polar Sea (1878) Text by Paloma Ruiz Jun 16, 2022 When the British Arctic Expedition set sail from Portsmouth on May 29, 1875, the explorers hoped to reach the highest latitude, and perhaps even approach the ever-elusive North Pole. It was believed that, should they successfully pass through Smith Sound, between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, they would encounter an Open Polar Sea free from troublesome ice. With this primary goal, three steamships set out across the stormy Atlantic only to immediately become separated by a violent cyclone, reconvening at Disko Bay on the western coast of Greenland some weeks later. Perhaps they could have interpreted this early inconvenience as a sign of the winter to come, or a warning that the Arctic waters are rarely kind. Regardless, the captains pressed on. In Shores of the Polar Sea, Edward L. Moss, an artist and esteemed Royal Navy Surgeon, records this journey from his first-hand seat in the belly of HMS Alert. A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs, the book provides a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice. Moss prefaces his work with a modest appeal: “Whatever may be the artistic value of the Sketches — and they lay claim to none — they are at least perfectly faithful efforts to represent the face of Nature in a part of the world that very few can ever see for themselves.” As their expedition begins, every detail seems to emphasize the boyish excitement of Moss’ comrades. When the summer brings endless midnight sun, some sailors find themselves passing days at a time without sleep. Even the exhaustion and isolation of ocean travel does not send the mesmerized sailors to bed, captivated, as they are, by the natural landscapes. Ice floes, stretching for miles in every direction, shine kaleidoscopically: “pink and metallic, green, pale yellow, and violet… like fields of mother-of-pearl”. And alongside the awe felt toward an inhospitable Arctic, a reader is met with the adrenaline of discovery, and a desire for ownership over what was formerly unknown. “When we stopped to secure a sketch, the lifeless stillness… was most impressive”, writes Moss: “No human eye had ever looked upon it before. And now there was neither bird or beast, or even flower or blade of grass, to dispute possession”. In this way, the sketches and chromolithographs became akin to laying claim over the land, an artistic gesture that reproduced natural beauty in order to seize it for oneself and nation. The British Arctic Expedition was not unique in its brutality. Perhaps invigorated by the perceived violence of their environment, the men fought back. In hopes of expanding England’s contribution to natural history, they captured, bottled, and preserved everything from brittle feather stars to small black spiders. And what they didn’t capture for study, they killed en masse to consume. Carrying Winchester repeating rifles — “murderous weapons for this sort of work” — the men hunt everything that moves. Arctic hares, reindeer, walruses, and seals, which they grimly nickname “floe-rats”. In a particularly successful outing, Moss describes the midnight pursuit and overpowering of seven burly musk oxen. One man, thinking himself rather clever, tried to make a wounded ox “carry his own beef”, and guided it onto the deck of the ship while the animal could still walk. Moss notes that, although these oxen had likely never seen a human before, they understood instinctively to be afraid. As the winter encroached, so did a seemingly permanent darkness. Fearful of the perennial ice floes, which could easily crush whatever ship crossed their path, the Alert landed at Floeberg Beach, where it would rest until the following summer allowed for safe escape. And while the daily life of a sailor may appear unsympathetic, Moss’ prose is deeply personal, poetic, and even romantic. Not only are his accounts of the expedition unflinchingly thorough, they also linger playfully on every odd moment, awkward bit of dialogue, or alienating aspect of harsh Arctic life. Through dreamlike sketches and descriptions, Moss depicts the process of building igloos to house special scientific instruments. Here, the men could sit for hours collecting data, protected from the wind and provided with an influx of dull heat from the earth. Because of the near constant snowfall, their igloos became quickly submerged, and “long before winter had passed, [the] town had disappeared as completely as Nineveh or Pompeii. Only an uncertain mound here and there projected over the bleak slope of drifted snow”. Inside their buried, makeshift town, the space reverberated with the sound of footfall overhead: the heavy steps of men, and the faster patter of paws. Often, it smelled strongly of burnt candles, and the moonlight filtering through the ice would create a greenish-blue effect, “like a diver sees deep underwater”. Throughout this frosted travelogue, we can imagine how frantically Moss might have worked to make his landscape images come to life. Crawling up from the eternal dampness of his quarters, he would hasten across the ice to gain perspective on the ship or the igloos or the men, and maneuver his pencil through “two pairs of worsted mittens”. Once the sketch was laid, he would scurry inside to add color by candlelight, emerge again to check for accuracy, and repeat the process several more times.

public-domain-review

Jun 16, 2022

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:44.933424

fungi-of-shropshire

Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902) Text by Elaine Ayers Oct 11, 2022 As temperatures drop and leaves fall, blanketing forest paths and city sidewalks in layers of red and orange, nature’s decomposers spring from the ground. Transforming organic matter into fertile soil, fungi and their vast underground networks work silently beneath our feet. October is peak mushroom season for many, as foragers trained in the art of finding tasty, meaty puffballs and hen-of-the-woods also begin their labor. Our fascination with fungi, one of the oldest organism groups on earth, has remained a human constant. From umami-rich meals to poisonous and psychedelic specimens, mushrooms have represented something queer, sexy, and dark for centuries. Behind recent calls for fungal futures — involving everything from “biohacked” bodies to anti-capitalist visions — lie carefully illustrated descriptions of the mushroom world by naturalists like M. F. Lewis. Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes with filigreed title pages, her Fungi of Shropshire features hundreds of species, collected across forty-two years of work in England and Wales, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and ink. Despite the enormity of Lewis’ project, little is known about her life — we have yet to discover her first name. What we do know is that she was deeply and intensely committed to studying mushrooms. The title of these three volumes, Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighborhoods is a bit of a misnomer: her illustrations, which range from the recognizably red-and-white spotted fly agaric to smaller, drabber species, were produced over many hundreds of miles, painting a stunning portrait of Britain’s rich fungal diversity in regions seldom explored by mycologists. Most pages feature several species collaged together, sprouting from vegetable hosts or moldy organic matter. Lewis’ pages avoid the classificatory divisions of typical herbaria (or, in this case, fungaria), grouping mushrooms mostly by aesthetic arrangement rather than taxonomic relations. Like many other women naturalists in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lewis appears to have collected and illustrated specimens for her own edification, combining her “polite” training in the arts with meticulous scientific observation against the backdrop of a growing embrace of natural history’s wonders. As some women filled their parlors with seaweeds and skeletonized flowers, Lewis turned her eyes to something decidedly darker. Scraping through rotting leaves and the animal feces from which mushrooms sprung, Lewis saw the beauty in these odd, seemingly unclassifiable specimens (we didn’t separate fungi into their own kingdom until the 1960s), emphasizing their sumptuous colors and casually ignoring their potentially poisonous qualities. Anticipating what would become a full-blown mycological fever later in the nineteenth century — most clearly demonstrated by beloved children’s book author and mycologist Beatrix Potter — Lewis knew that mushrooms were for more than consumption. They held scientific and aesthetic value amidst showier flowers and elegant ferns, even as they worked within a system of decay in which death preceded reproduction. It’s unclear whether today’s obsession with fungi — tracked in recent books by Litt Woon Long, Merlin Sheldrake, and Anna Tsing — is another fleeting trend or a longer embrace of our primordial ancestors, bred by an increased understanding of these deceptively massive, spore-producing organisms’ importance for a networked world in peril. What is clear, though, is that the beauty and diversity of the fungal world has captivated amateur naturalists and artists for centuries. From the smallest mushroom caps to sprawling, fleshy, phallic specimens, women like Lewis chose to study fungi over other plants, animals, and everything in between, pointing to the artfulness in decomposition, the liveliness of rot. Below you can browse highlights from the only known copy of Lewis’ work, courtesy of Cornell University Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

public-domain-review

Oct 11, 2022

Elaine Ayers

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:45.407727

pyle-mermaid

Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910) Text by Kevin Dann Sep 8, 2022 There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel, especially when that work has had such a powerful hold on the modern world’s imagination. Writing about Howard Pyle’s (1853–1911) The Mermaid in The Outlook less than a year after the artist’s death in Italy, a “Spectator” described the unfinished and unsigned painting “brought back from Florence”: heaving sea of iridescent blue and green, a cold moon, and slippery rocks, from which a mermaid siren, glittering, mysterious, alluring, winding her white arms about the young fisher-lad, was dragging him down, down, into the depths below of white lacing foam. But the painting did not travel with Pyle to Florence: it never left the artist’s atelier in Wilmington, Delaware. (His student Ethel Pennewill Brown, who had rented the studio during Pyle’s European sojourn, captured the painting’s unfinished state in 1912.) Pyle had begun The Mermaid in 1908, using a model from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as his inspiration for the mermaid. The young man’s aquiline nose, delicate lips, and fine feminine eyebrow are features that can be seen in dozens of Pyle heroes — prominent among them Sir Galahad, Robin Hood, and the buccaneer Captain Henry Morgan (Douglas Fairbanks’ inspiration for The Black Pirate, and later Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow). Considered the “father of American illustration”, Howard Pyle’s capacious imagination compassed both American and European historical subjects. Born but a few blocks from the wharves and quays of the Wilmington riverfront, summering most of his life at Rehoboth Beach near the surf-battered Cape Henlopen, Pyle’s oeuvre leaned ever seaward, and so mermaids had long lived alongside his pirates, sailors, and sea captains. A decade before The Mermaid, Pyle had caught Man and Maid in a similarly Moon-kissed embrace in The Merman, whose hybrid, piscine nature is half obscured, registered only by the fingers of his right hand, which appear faintly scaled and webbed. Among Pyle’s illustrations for Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1894), we find an image of a half-dozen mermaids swimming alongside a mythic goddess-carrying ship and another of a mermaid playing the lyre. And Pyle’s lively 1902 collection “North Folk Legends of the Sea”, for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, included an eerie frontispiece of bare-breasted mermaids, and a portrait of St. Brendan wearing a brocaded cape adorned with undines. When Pyle set off for Italy with his family in November 1910, he had just finished a trio of immense murals on Dutch colonial era subjects for the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, and was keen to garner more commissions. Having crisscrossed the Atlantic for decades in his imagination, this was his first actual trans-Atlantic voyage. Ill almost from the moment he arrived in Rome, Pyle persevered in his study of Florence's mural masterpieces, but died a year later of a lingering kidney infection before completing a full work. Orphaned on his Delaware easel, The Mermaid was finished by Pyle’s student Frank Schoonover, who added a pair of flying fish (almost exactly reproduced from Pyle’s headpiece for “North Folk Legends of the Sea”) and a scuttling crab. Along with The Mermaid and over a thousand other works by Howard Pyle, the Delaware Art Museum owns nine of his pencil sketches for the painting. Every single sketch — most as furiously dynamic as the sea foam enveloping the two Moon Lovers — is of the cross-species embrace, a long longing that has haunted the human imagination for millennia, and haunts us still. A century ago, the Outlook’s Spectator mistook that embrace as the Mermaid’s murderous design on a young fisherman. A reading more consonant with the painter’s soul might note the deep atmosphere of reciprocity shimmering between the lovers. Amid the relentless movement of the restless sea, they find fulfillment in fusion. Yet the fisherman’s pileus or Phrygian cap, the soft, conical hat of emancipated Roman slaves, is also the classic red liberty cap that became an icon of the French and American revolutions, suggesting that this mercurial subject’s freedom is not solely otherwordly. Pyle’s mermaid — palpably more human than fish, for her alabaster skin runs down below the water line, and there is only the barest hint of a forked, scaled tail — is made alongside man, neither for or against him. If only for a moment, their loving embrace stills all stormy waters, and heals all wounds.

public-domain-review

Sep 8, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:45.887675

flammarion-engraving

Wheels Within Wheels: The “Flammarion Engraving” (ca. 1888) Text by Hunter Dukes Nov 9, 2022 A man crawls to the ends of earth. He has journeyed for days under the light of a splendorous sun, passed his nights beneath a firmament shot through with stars. There is no reason to look back toward his origin: everything that came before appears at toytown scale against the enormity of his present purpose. Crouching down to explore a seam, the suture where sky and ground meet, the traveler pushes his head through the celestial vault and out into the heavens beyond. Curtains of flames replace the alchemical sun of his old world. In this lacerated empyrean, the planetary bodies move like clockwork — a cosmic machinery whirring along in adherence to laws yet to be discovered, whether natural or divine. Seemingly first published in astronomer and science fictionist Camille Flammarion’s (1842–1925) L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888), this image has puzzled enthusiasts of the scientific mystic’s works, both for its obscure provenance and cryptic symbolism. With its pastiche of Renaissance visual style and medieval caption — “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch” — the illustration was once thought to have originated centuries before Flammarion published his text. The artist remains uncertain, but early interpreters believed he or she was a contemporary of the paradigm shift that the work seems to depict: when ancient cosmogony gave way to the Scientific Revolution. Heinz Strauss and Heinrich Röttinger dated the engraving to the mid-sixteenth century, while Erwin Panofsky, writing in 1963, found its style indicative of the seventeenth. On the other hand, Ernst H. Gombrich, speaking on behalf of the Warburg Institute, was convinced that the engraving had to be a more-recent homage to the Renaissance. The artist employed a stippling technique, for example, not used before the late eighteenth century. A skilled draftsman, it is feasible that Flammarion created the image himself, although it differs slightly in style from his other artworks. More mysterious than its provenance is the work’s potential meaning. As Stefano Gattei enumerates, in a book chapter that promises to “close the debate” on Flammarion’s engraving, the stooping man has been variously described as “a missionary, a skeptic, a wandering Jew, a researcher, a traveler, a learned man contemplating divine wonders, a pilgrim, or an Earth-bound frustrated astronomer.” Part of the difficulty here comes from the image’s symbolic polyphony: aspects of the Ptolemaic universe mingle with a prominent ofan — the wheeled structure that resembles a gyroscope, which Ezekiel and David glimpsed in their vision of God’s throne — layering astrological and esoteric iconography. For many, this singular image, of a man passing beyond the world’s limits, feels indebted to a problem of bounded finitude that arises in commentaries on Aristotelean cosmogony and theological genesis. If the universe is finite, how can its limits (or creator) lay within it? Below you can read the text that originally accompanies this engraving in Flammarion’s L’atmosphère as well as passages from other works by Flammarion, gathered by Stefano Gattei, that seem to anticipate it. Camille Flammarion, L’atmosphère (1888): Whether the sky be clear or cloudy, it always seems to us to have the shape of an elliptic arch; far from having the form of a circular arch, it always seems flattened and depressed above our heads, and gradually to become farther removed toward the horizon. Our ancestors imagined that this blue vault was really what the eye would lead them to believe it to be; but, as Voltaire remarks, this is about as reasonable as if a silk-worm took his web for the limits of the universe. The Greek astronomers represented it as formed of a solid crystal substance; and so recently as Copernicus, a large number of astronomers thought it was as solid as plate-glass. The Latin poets placed the divinities of Olympus and the stately mythological court upon this vault, above the planets and the fixed stars. Previous to the knowledge that the earth was moving in space, and that space is everywhere, theologians had installed the Trinity in the empyrean, the glorified body of Jesus, that of the Virgin Mary, the angelic hierarchy, the saints, and all the heavenly host.... A naïve missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together, and where, by stooping his shoulders, he passed under the roof of the heavens. Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (1880): The Earth looks like an immense plain, rugged by a thousand kinds of facets and reliefs, green hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less high, meandering rivers in the plains, lakes with cool shores, vast seas, infinitely varied countryside. This land seems to us fixed for eternity, sitting on century-old foundations, crowned by a sky at times pure and at times cloudy, extended so as to form the unshakable foundation of the universe. The Sun, the Moon and the stars seem to turn around her. From all these appearances, man has easily believed himself to be the centre and the purpose of creation, a vain presumption that he held for a very long time, as there was no one to contradict him. Camille Flammarion, Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865): This fact reminds us of the story Levayer relates in his Letters. It seems that an anchorite, probably a nephew of the Fathers of the Eastern deserts, boasted of having been to the farthest edge of the world, and of having been forced there to bend his shoulders, due to the meeting of heaven and Earth at that very end.

public-domain-review

Nov 9, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:46.212490

visualising-bubbles

Visualising Bubbles (1500–1906) Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 19, 2022 We have entered the dog days of July in the Northern Hemisphere, with a heat wave bringing Europe to a rolling boil, and thoughts of sea, shade, or cooler climes to many people’s minds. Writing of a shadowed garden, Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (in Stephen Kessler’s translation) captures the lethargy of this weather and the pleasures of relief: how the summer atmosphere can feel “light, afloat; the world turning slowly, like a soap bubble, delicate, iridescent, unreal”. While soap froth has existed since at least the time of Mesopotamia, the fragility, iridescence, and impermanence that Cernuda describes started to bubble into the West’s visual imagination during the sixteenth century. Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the artist’s eye. Despite a monkey who seemed to be huffing bubbles in the 1480s, and the reed-blowing youth of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560), the earliest explicit soap bubble in painting is often credited to a panel on the back of Cornelis Ketel’s Portrait of Adam Wachendorff (1574). The front shows the secretary Wachendorff performing scribal duties, holding a letter freshly sealed above his inkwell and pen. Yet the painting’s frame reminds him that his writing, like all else, will fade too soon. “Sermo Dei Æternus Caetera Omnia Caduca”, reads the text: the word of the lord is forever and all else transient. Unlike the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s famous seduction, Ketel does not choose “time’s winged chariot” to chafe at Wachendorff’s back. Instead, he paints a bubble boy. Yet like the scribe himself, we are blinkered to this symbol of impermanence: the Rijksmuseum has not shared photographs of the verso, which shows a curly haired putto blowing suds. He is wreathed by Greek that reads: man is a bubble. Ketel’s Portrait is an early example of using soap bubbles to represent vanitas — the transience of life and surety of death — while his putto plays the role of an allegorical figure associated with the emblem tradition of homo bulla. We find similar scenes in Netherlandish engravings and paintings, dating through the eighteenth century, by Raphael Sadeler (I), Jacques de Gheyn (II), Hendrick Goltzius, and Johannes de Groot (II). Across these images, lounging children blow bubbles while resting on skulls, as extinguished candle stubs and smoking urns create a cloudscape overhead. There is a kind of primordial equation here between life and enclosure. Like soap and water, the spirit cannot be separated from its etymological link to expiration. “Who first had the thought that the world is nothing but the soap bubble of an all-encompassing breath?”, asks the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Bubbles, while, during his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope imagines individuals as “bubbles on the sea of matter borne, / They rise, they break, and to that sea return”. Karel Dujardin’s 1663 Boy Blowing Smoke Bubbles seems to speak to the delicate membrane between our lives as distinct beings and what Freud — building on his correspondence with Romain Rolland — described as an oceanic pull: “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded”. In the painting, a sashed youth blows bubbles while balancing on a clamshell amid dark and choppy waters. In place of a pearl, a giant surfactant orb rests beneath his left foot, the last piece of a necklace originating from the deeps. Spending time with this painting, we get the sense that it is “bubbles all the way down”, as it were — that the borders between soul, body, and world could, in an instant, pop. From the mid-eighteenth century, artists turned their back on vanitas toward a focus on technique, melancholy, physics, and politics. Greater attention to the material details of bubbles may have come from longer-lasting soap, marketed explicitly for blowing by merchants such as Andrew Pears in Soho. A painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin dampens allegory to highlight the luster of its bubble’s edgeless body: a curved plane that throws sparkling light. Chardin’s painting, claims the soap-bubble scholar Sabine Mödersheim, marks a shift in cultural narratives of childhood, when bubbles became “much more about personal melancholy, mourning one’s own childhood being gone rather than the general idea of vanitas and fleeting time.” If the bubble’s brief lifespan prompted considerations of vanitas and melancholy, its shape offered a vantage onto the laws of color, light, and space. Pelagio Palagi’s 1827 Newton’s Discovery of the Refraction of Light envisions the scientist finding revelation in the stuff of child’s play. As Isaac Disraeli recorded with pith in Curiosities of Literature: “Newton is indebted for many of his great discoveries… he observes boys blowing soap bubbles, and the properties of light display themselves!” In addition to the body-as-bubble, there seems to be a parallel between this soapy form and the stuff of thought — the bubble catching Newton’s eye in Palagi’s work is at once a demonstration of optical interference and a painterly technique for visualizing units of undiscovered knowledge, retrievable from the external world. An astounding 1883 mezzotint by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe demonstrates the principles of interference up close, displaying a kaleidoscopic window mirrored in the soap bubble, which, in turn, becomes a window onto understanding the physical properties of light. The nineteenth century is notable for its use of soap bubble pipes in a micro-genre of caricature, where the same joke gets made about varying political concerns. An 1803 hand-colored etching shows George III puffing bubbles, filled with a tiny Napoleon and the words “flat bottom boats”, “invasion”, and “little ships”. In short, the king is not concerned. Boney blows back in an anonymous 1813 print, where he sits surrounded by bubbles labeled with capitals and countries of conquest — the most recent being Rome, which his son, king of the city from birth, reaches toward. In the midst of making “Europe”, Napoleon’s basin spills to the floor, but he is not yet aware of its fall: a premonition of what the future holds. The trope merges with our modern sense of “economic bubble” in an illustration for Puck by Udo J. Keppler titled “Wall Street Bubbles:—Always the Same”, showing J. P. Morgan as a bull in both senses, blowing “inflated values” toward a desirous crowd: a commentary on the Panic of 1901. And then, of course, there are countless images primarily about the simple magic of soap bubbles — and they are indeed wondrous. A gang of enraptured boys tussle and bubble in an engraving from Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella’s 1657 series about The Games and Pleasures of Childhood; a joyous mother produces perfectly rounded specimens for her son beneath a plum tree in a mid-eighteenth century woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu; and various turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographs capture children completely absorbed in their task. As they fix upon the tiny fleeting world they have exhaled inside of soap film, we do something different: glance over a scene preserved by the capsule that is film stock. And this gets us to the hollow core of soap bubbles in visual art, no matter the medium. In depicting their fragility, representation robs bubbles of something essential to their form — the ability not to be.

public-domain-review

Jul 19, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:46.757328

daniel-murray-preliminary-list

Black Bibliography: Daniel Murray’s Preliminary List (1900) Text by Hunter Dukes Oct 18, 2022 Reflecting on more than a century of attempts to archive African American literature, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill — directors of the Black Bibliography Project — recently argued that “Black bibliography reminds us that organizing knowledge is a vital and deeply political act”. For Daniel A. P. Murray (1853­­–1925), only the second Black American to work at the Library of Congress, the recovery and preservation of a literary tradition could help grant dignity previously withheld. “As literature is the highest form of culture and the real test of the standing of a people in the ranks of Civilization”, he wrote in a 1900 article for Colored American Magazine, the multitude of works unearthed from previously neglected writers “must undoubtedly raise the Negro to a plane previously denied him.” Having dedicated his life to books, serving as an assistant librarian for forty-one years, Murray’s proclamation took aim both at gatekeepers of belles-lettres and the violent rhetoric of racial inferiority in 1890s America. During “Bibliographia-Africania”, a 1904 essay penned for The Voice of the Negro, he quotes Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique — “All the world, except savage nations, is governed by books” — before asking a question of his readers: “Have [Black American writers] produced anything in the literary line worthy of recognition and preservation? That is the test. If they have, let us see it, so we may justly assign to them their proper place in the ranks of civilization.” In 1900, Murray had a chance to invigilate this test on a global stage, preparing a Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors in anticipation of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Paris Exposition — an event that would be attended by more than forty-eight million visitors. As Elizabeth McHenry tracked in last year’s To Make Negro Literature, Murray built on the “Works by Negro Authors” compiled for the Bureau of Education’s Report of 1893–1894, adding an additional 117 titles before printing the list as a circular in an effort to elicit reader contributions. In its preface, Murray writes that his goal is “to secure every book and pamphlet in existence, by a Negro Author”, to be used in the “Exhibit of Negro Authorship” and later archived in the Library of Congress. His Preliminary List includes Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s Violets (1895), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), the classical scholarship of William Sanders Scarborough, and novels by William Wells Brown, as well as authors such as Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth who would be later excluded from the canons of Black bibliographers such as Benjamin Brawley. In compiling his list, Murray found himself frequently cut off from the past by the dearth of historical record, sometimes resorting to the study of title-page portraits as a method for confirming an author’s race. Teaming up with Thomas J. Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois for the Paris curation, Murray displayed books and pamphlets from the Preliminary List alongside a vast collection of photographs and stunning infographics designed by Du Bois and his students at the University of Atlanta. Intended to make visible the history of “the American Negro”, his “present condition”, “education”, and “literature”, the exhibition was a great success — despite the reticence of many American newspapers to review it domestically. While Murray’s circular was not the first document of Black bibliography — it was preceded, for example, by abolitionist Henri Grégoire’s 1808 De la Littérature des Nègres — the list had a considerable afterlife. The Library of Congress’ first bibliography of African American literature, Murray’s Preliminary List eventually grew to contain more than two thousand titles, laying the groundwork for a project of Alexandrian scope: Murray’s Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race Throughout the World, which promised twenty-five thousand biographical sketches, six thousand titles, and five thousand musical scores. Despite never completing this project, Murray’s efforts and ambitions inspired a sizable bibliography of later bibliographical projects, such as Du Bois’ Select Bibliography of the Negro American (1901), Monroe Work’s 1912–1938 Negro Year Books, Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918), the New York Public Library’s The Negro: A Reading List (1925), and Dorothy Porter’s North American Negro Poets (1945). In Murray’s “incompleteness”, present-day critics find an invitation to continued conversation. As Shirley Moody-Turner writes: “To bequeath a capacious field of study, one that could be dismantled, reassembled, and debated: such was the imagined future of the ‘preliminary lists’ and ‘incomplete’ biographies that marked African American knowledge production at the turn of the century.”

public-domain-review

Oct 18, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:47.242963

etteilla-thot

Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789) Text by Kevin Dann Oct 20, 2022 Great revolutions were stirring in Paris during January 1789: Abbé Sieyès published his incendiary pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? (What is the Third Estate?), and from the study of “M. Etteilla, Professeur d’Algebre” at 48 Rue de l’Oseille, a letter was sent applying for a patent to print a French edition of Livre de Thot, which promised to reveal the theory and practice of ancient Egyptian magic through Tarot. By July, when the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille fortress, scores of Parisians were already turning to Etteilla’s cards to divine the fate of France. Engraved by Pierre-François Basan, the luxury edition of Etteilla’s tarot deck contained seventy-eight brush-colored cards and included a specially designed carrying case. Even in its cheaper, uncolored iteration, this deck was radically different from the many Tarot de Marseilles permutations that had appeared over the previous centuries. Etteilla — pseudonym of French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791) — founded an organization specifically dedicated to the study of the esoteric Tarot, La Société des Interprètes de Thot, which promulgated the systematic integration of Tarot and astrology, thus refashioning the tarot deck as a tool for spiritual and mundane divination. Etteilla was the first to give divinatory meanings to cards and spreads. And some historians consider him the first person to earn a living as a professional tarot reader. To merge the two ancient sciences, Etteilla assigned zodiacal constellations first to the seven stages of Creation (culminating in Card 7, “Rest” — its illustration looking like a scene built up out of Baron Cuvier’s paleontological finds in the Paris basin) then to Cards 8 (a woman encircled by eleven rings) through 12 (La Prudence, a sandaled, caduceus-bearing goddess paused before a serpent). Though many of Etteilla’s cards are clearly recognizable as reproducing the Trumps from the Tarot of Marseilles, the order of the cards (which proclaims to mirror a symbolic syntax discovered on the walls of the Temple of Memphis), individual details, and the astrological associations are altogether novel. Though he does not explain his method for assigning correspondences, it appears that Etteilla drew upon the mystical, Hermetic text Pymander for his picture of the Cosmos and its creation. Etteilla’s radical publications — cf. Etteilla, ou la seule manière de tirer les cartes 1773; Cours théorique et pratique du livre de Thot (1790); L'oracle pour et contre mil sept cent quatre-vingt-onze (1790) — elevated the Tarot as Abbé Sieyès’ political-scientific impulses elevated the Third Estate, enabling the citizenry to understand their fate and fortune, even as these descended into the Terror and beyond. The later “Grand Etteilla” series, printed well into the nineteenth century, and the present-day proliferation of tarot decks, following ephemeral fads and fashions, all trace their origins to this beautiful and beguiling creation from the enigmatic Egyptophile at 48 Rue de L’Oseille.

public-domain-review

Oct 20, 2022

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:47.577315

inkblot-books

Fearful Symmetry: Inkblot Books (1857–1915) Text by Hunter Dukes May 26, 2022 “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapor sometime like a bear or lion”, says Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in a moment of lamentation. He is describing pareidolia: the tendency to hallucinate faces or patterns in meaningless shapes. This seemingly widespread ability has long been a wellspring for visual artists. The Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti went so far as to suggest that imitative art began when the ancients made minor changes to veined marble or knotted wood, bringing out a figure that was already partially present to their eyes. A parallel process underlies divinatory rituals: searching for images formed in tea leaves, spilt milk, or the distortions of a crystal ball. From the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, a microgenre of books appeared at the convergence of these two traditions. Marrying accidental artistry — the kind, for example, employed by Victor Hugo in his suggestive use of stains — to divinatory claims, inkblot books were part bestiary, part parlor-game séance, cataloging those creatures that seemed to crawl out of the inkwell with the slightest encouragement. But what exactly do we spot in a blot of ink? For Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), who produced a series of kleksographien (or “blotograms”) decades before the Rorschach test laid claim to this form, the answer was not “the projections of our own minds”. Rather, the faces that appeared on this doctor-poet’s page were “daguerreotypes of the invisible world”. Kerner discovered the technique by chance. Writing with eyes clouded by cataracts, he tended to dribble excess ink onto his paper. When folded, the mirrored blots gained the symmetry of humanoid faces. Kleksographien (1857) features dozens of otherworldly creatures, hellfiends, and messengers of death (todesboten), begun as indelible smears and sometimes further infused with life through Kerner’s embellishments. Due to “the blackness of ink”, Kerner believed that “the power of a noxious demon / Often hides in the inkwell”. To browse through this volume is to become uncomfortably attuned to the mind’s malleability. We meet goat-headed deities wreathed by trumpet vines, a bearded man whose waist has grown pustule skulls, and a full-page spread of mothy recursions. Poems accompany the klecksography, often styled as announcements from distant realms. These offer origin stories for the spirits, who spawn in moonlight from the ruins of castle dungeons and other gothic landscapes. While Kleksographien echoes lifelong interests for Kerner — who wrote the first biography of mesmerism’s namesake and once used hypnotism to exorcize the spirit of a bloodlusting monk — other nineteenth and early-twentieth century inkblot books struck a more juvenile tone. Indeed, as Damion Searls tracks in The Inkblots, playing “klecks” or “blotto” was once a common activity for children: Carl Jung recounts filling “a whole exercise book with ink blots” and “giving them fantastic interpretations”. Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine’s Gobolinks (1896) captures the youthful, imaginative quality of the inkblot and features characters such as “A Flit-Flit Flitter”, “The Kangar-Rooster-Roo”, and other “goblin[s] of the ink-bottle”. Commenting humorously on the tendency of their animal blots to feature a plethora of tails, the authors note that they “have added nothing to the price of the book on account of undue liberality in the matter of caudal appendages”. In an even more amateur vein, John Prosper Carmel’s Blottentots (1907) infuses Kerner’s accursed characters (it features menacing “Gobble-Me-Ups” and “Bucking Nightmares”) with Stuart and Paine’s formal silliness. A blot that looks like two terriers with tails as long as leads is named after the poetic form that accompanies the image: doggerel. Yet all is not innocent play. Some of the books’ “comically monstrous figures” are evoked to suggest “the cute domestication of sinister forces”, writes Susan Zieger, and are named in ways that echo “nineteenth-century racist discourses of ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Golliwogs’”. While these blotted books have artistic precursors, such as Alexander Cozens’ mechanism for summoning imaginary landscapes, their chronological clustering prompts us to ask if there is something historical at play. Are their ghostly associations part of the wider cross-pollination between new media technologies and occult perception in the nineteenth century? (Kerner, after all, glossed his klecksography as akin to “the pictures in a photographic camera”.) This seems to be the case, at least, in another blot experiment, Cecil Henland’s The Ghosts of My Friends (1915) — an autograph book that begins with an epigraph from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The best in this kind are but shadows”. However, whereas the album amicorum tradition sought preservation — as if, through writing, friendship might withstand even death — the signatures in Henland’s book are to be folded over while wet, creating a nearly illegible effect, blurring alphabetic letters into ghostly characters. Viewing these shapes in light of the title, it is as if ink too gains a documentary capacity, harboring the names, but also the visible spirits, of friends past. On the other hand, these figures peeking out of ink have always been there. For the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, pareidolia is not a fringe phenomenon: it is at the core of religious experience. “Anthropomorphism by definition is mistaken, but it also is reasonable and inevitable. Choosing among interpretations of the world, we remain condemned to meaning, and the greatest meaning has a human face.” Condemned, in their own way, to meaning, inkblot books play upon the tension between word and image. Unlike Hermann Rorschach’s infamous assessment, meant to plumb an individual’s personality, these works hint toward a universal vocabulary of shadows. “The strangest images and figures are formed entirely from themselves”, wrote Kerner in an 1854 letter, they “resemble those from the bygone eras of the dawn of mankind”.

public-domain-review

May 26, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:48.097700

it-started-with-muybridge

It Started with Muybridge (1964) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 28, 2022 Produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1964, It Started with Muybridge begins with a voiceover proclaiming the center’s mission: “research and development for tomorrow’s weapons”. The future’s bombs, this training film claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge. His famous sequential studies of animal movement innovated photography as a tool for motion analysis — the field that excites these ordnance laboratorians most. On screen we watch timelapse experiments with floral blooms and crystal growth set to whimsical flute music before the film smoothly cuts to instruments of human annihilation. The visual transition is itself an object lesson in the power of sequential images. “The elaborate equipment of today, adapted to a variety of special purposes, finds many uses outside of scientific research”, intones the narrator, as a driver makes contact with a golf ball in slow motion, and a composited woman skips in lingerie to demonstrate “how well a certain article of clothing will stay with the wearer”. Lulled, as we are, by imagery of leisure and a familiar scopophilic gaze, when aerial bombers arrive on screen, they appear almost beautiful: their parachute mines descending like synchronized divers to sow the sea. The documentary proceeds to recount the Naval Ordnance Laboratory’s contributions to scientific photography, containing “dimensions that Muybridge could not have foreseen”, and explain the use of various instruments that calibrate, synchronize, and sequence cameras for recording the flight of ballistic missiles. While this film makes a military forefather of Muybridge, his photography and inventions were crosscut with warfare in other ways during his lifetime. Étienne-Jules Marey — whose La Machine animale (1873) inspired the hippophilic industrialist Leland Stanford to commission Muybridge’s famous equine photographs — repurposed the Gatling gun into a chronophotographic rifle on the heels of Muybridge’s research. And as a pioneering war photographer, Muybridge manipulated the candid form toward affecting fictions. His stereographs of the Modoc War (1872–1873), for example, were financed by the United States Army — one particularly famous image, captioned A Modoc Brave on the War Path, shows a crouched and shirtless marksman, with sights aimed on a target beyond the frame. In truth, writes Jarrod Hore, “the few photographs claiming to depict Modoc warriors were shams — the subjects were friendly scouts framed as rebels”. This wartime propaganda was, in effect, a weapon itself, creating complex visual “pathos formulas”, in John Trafton’s words, and garnering public support for expansionism and forced resettlement. Turned into engravings for Harper’s Weekly, Muybridge’s stereographs inadvertently documented U.S. imperialism’s role in wider trajectories of history. “Muybridge was photographing the journey to modernization”, recounts Rebecca Solnit in River of Shadows. “His Modoc pictures are not great expressive works of art; what is important in them is his act of witness and how it connects this history to the other histories he was tied to: the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images”. It Started with Muybridge ends on an image so banal it winks sinisterly. After a ten-minute exposition of military pulse generators, timing units, spark gaps, shadowgraphs, and the “phenomena” of explosive detonations, we conclude with horses. Muybridge’s observation that all four galloping hooves are off the ground at the same time “has been a boon to artists, horse trainers, and veterinarians, and photography has been solving tough problems ever since”. When we remember that this documentary was released on the eve of Operation Rolling Thunder — the U.S. Navy and Air Force’s three-year campaign of aerial bombardment against North Vietnam — these “tough problems” may come into greater focus.

public-domain-review

Jun 28, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:48.389556

villers-portrait

Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1801) Text by Hunter Dukes May 26, 2022 Our attention is initially drawn to the light, which clings to the contours of a woman thought to be Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, fuzzing the borders of flesh, fichu, and the muslin of her neoclassical dress. In the midst of creation, the artist meets our gaze: are we the model or a mere distraction? Yet her dark irises seem to blend into the matte wall. Instead of holding eye contact, our concentration strays to a frame within the frame — the scene encased by a broken windowpane. In the foreground, the artist’s fingers fold her material over a drawing portfolio, adding a sense of depth to a two-dimensional surface, while the cracked glass opens this studio to the evening air. For art historian Amelia Rauser, du Val d’Ognes becomes “animated by her own sensibility, a living statue pulsing with vitalist energy”. And indeed, juxtaposed with the couple at the painting’s vanishing point — heads canted in amorous engagement — it seems as if the artist’s solo absorption illuminates this artwork, her unseen canvas a spotlight bringing the world into focus. First attributed to Jacques-Louis David and then Constance Marie Charpentier, this portrait is now believed to be the work of Marie-Denise Villers (1774–1821), who may have exhibited the painting at the Parisian Salon of 1801. As Estella Lauter shows, the shifting ascription inadvertently exposes the gendered reception of art: what was once described as a merciless portrait by David of “an intelligent, homely woman” quickly became imbued with fault and “feminine” technique. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Charles Sterling’s 1951 commentary on the painting illustrates how conjectured gender can overcolor the beholder’s eye: the idea that this “may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea”, he writes. “Its poetry, literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms, and its cleverly concealed weaknesses. . . all seem to reveal the feminine spirit”. Yet, through its trompe l’œil effect — whereby the cracked glazing illustrates how glass alters the sky — it is as if the artist (Villers or otherwise) anticipated the somewhat facile nature of scholarly interpretation. We can look as long as we like, but we will never see the drawing that occupies du Val d’Ognes’ attention. Like broken windowpanes, all interpretations of artworks remain fractured views onto the world. We know less than we would like about Charlotte du Val d'Ognes and Marie-Denise Villers — the latter can only be firmly credited as the artist of one other painting: A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802). Thanks to Anne Higonnet’s masterful sleuthing, we can posit that this portrait is set in the Louvre, where Jean-Baptiste Regnault and Sophie Meyer created an atelier for women artists, which Villers may have attended. Charlotte du Val d'Ognes also aspired to a career in the arts, and, according to Bridget Quinn, gave up painting after marriage for the demands of family life. Perhaps the couple in the portrait’s distance, then, represent looming social expectations in a revolutionary era, when debates about equal rights for women gripped 1790s France. “The device of the window scenes allows us to see public and private selves simultaneously”, writes Higonnet, “the woman who trains professionally, and the woman attached to male partner and home”. And the broken glass might gesture toward a shifting social order, a time when it could finally become possible to be at once a “professional woman” and “traditionally feminine”.

public-domain-review

May 26, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:48.695069

phantom-flowers

Phantom Bouquets: Two Books on the Art of Skeleton Leaves (1864) Text by Elaine Ayers Sep 6, 2022 These two short treatises, both published in 1864, detail the art of producing “phantom flowers”: snow-white bouquets of leaves and seeds reduced to their very veins. Part of a legacy of attempts to preserve fragile plants long beyond their lifespans — from Anna Atkins’ iconic cyanotypes to the tradition of drying herbarium specimens — scientists and artists have worked for centuries to capture floral ephemerality. Stemming from much older East Asian techniques for “skeletonizing” plants, first fully described in Europe by Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch, the “phantom” process of putrefaction, flesh removal, and chemical bleaching rivaled early modern anatomical practices in its complexity. Skeletonization crossed the Atlantic in the 1860s, quickly taking hold of a primarily American female public intent on combining the arts and sciences into displays of taste driven by a growing fervor for natural history. Making phantom flowers took an enormous amount of intricate skill — an art which, to some, “seemed designed for female hands exclusively”. After collection, leaves would be covered in hot water and stored in sunlight for roughly a month, until the rotted tissue could be carefully removed with fingers or a soft artist’s brush. These skeletonized leaves were then bleached using a sensitive chemical solution of chloride or lime, dried, and mounted either upright under a glass cloche or flat in a frame. Rarely exhibited on their own, the finest phantom flowers were grouped together into nearly translucent bouquets, where any imperfections could be artfully hidden away. The finished objects resembled “perfectly bleached artificial lace-work or exquisite carvings in ivory”, and were described as revelatory, even religious. Observing the full process from decay to ever-lasting beauty was to “lift the soul from groveling things up to the regions of poetry and of love”, thought Edward Parrish, author of The Phantom Bouquet (1864). Calling skeleton leaves an “emblem of Resurrection”, the anonymous author of Phantom Flowers (1864) exemplifies the broader religious undercurrents driving nature for so many nineteenth-century readers. Creating these arrangements was to watch leaves transform, Christlike, from “corruption” to their “final and perfect beauty”. Designed primarily by and for women, phantom flowers fit into a growing trend of arranging natural specimens for display in the upper- or middle-class home, as Victorian parlors filled with taxidermied insects, delicate seaweed albums, and even miniature aquaria. Unlike scientific societies or public lecture halls, private parlors offered one of the few spaces where women could gather to discuss the newest discoveries in natural history. Reflective of their owner’s taste, education, worldliness, and observational skills, the parlor was an ideal environment for rare phantom flora to hold centerstage. The commercial value of these mounted bouquets is carefully buried in the depths of the treatises. Despite introducing the art as a process that would contribute directly to a woman’s botanical expertise, laying bare “the admirable laws which govern” the natural world, the author of Phantom Flowers admits that “to American minds especially”, the primary question readers might ask is: “Will it pay?” Here, then, is the conundrum underlying the production of artful specimens so characteristic of Victorian parlor displays. While these authors underscored the scientific, aesthetic, and even religious nature of working with plants in such intimate, embodied ways, these objects were never far removed from the commercial and colonial realms of Victorian Britain and America. Perhaps paradoxically, the trend died out quickly. Phantom flowers have, for the most part, become rare ghosts of the nineteenth century. Attempting to preserve ephemeral floral beauty for eternity, these objects now largely exist as skeletons of the past, an experiment in preservation that did not last. You can browse a selection of skeleton leaves shown in the two volumes below, and similar specimens arranged as picture frames in another post of ours on a set from the Library of Congress. For a detailed look at the process itself, see this British Pathé film from 1932.

public-domain-review

Sep 6, 2022

Elaine Ayers

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:49.220903

campi-phlegraei

Peter Fabris’ Illustrations for William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776–79) Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 6, 2022 A British diplomat serving as Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, William Hamilton (1730–1803) spent a large part of his life in Naples — observing volcanic activity, collecting antiquities, and shepherding adventurous travelers, including kings and queens, to the summit of magma-rich mountains. Present for the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius during the mid-to-late eighteenth century, Hamilton wrote Campi Phlegraei in two parts, with a tertiary supplement, based on his Observations on Mount Vesuvius (1772) for the Royal Society. Composed as a bilingual French and English edition, the work is a notable watershed in volcanology, trading biblically-inflected narratives of catastrophe and creation for precise observational description. To illustrate these volumes in a manner true to his approach, Hamilton recruited the English-born Neapolitan artist Peter Fabris, otherwise known for his paintings of the city’s “pulsating street life — with sellers of melons, cooked apples, corn, truffles and fried pastries”, writes Robert Holland. Hamilton charged Fabris to paint with “the utmost fidelity”, making sure “each stratum is presented in its proper colours”, and fifty-nine of the resultant gouaches were engraved and hand-colored to accompany Campi Phlegraei (literally, the flaming or fiery fields, named after the area west of Naples). In curator and writer James Hamilton’s assessment, Fabris “revolutionized the art of the volcano, and changed our ways of seeing them”. The illustrations progress from macro- to microscopic worlds as we traverse the volumes. Detailed renderings of tufa, scoriae, and pumice follow from nocturnal landscapes lit by brimstone and fire, winter scenes with smoke pluming through snow. Although engaged with late-Romantic reimaginings of the pastoral, picturesque, and sublime, Fabris seems almost able to dissolve aesthetic history in his landscapes by foregrounding an enduring wonder for the unstable geological processes beneath our feet — capturing the awe of those moments when bedrock becomes anything but. In two complementary images, recording the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779 during day and night, the volcano sprays tephra and lava like a monstrous Roman candle, while figures appear to dance and prostrate in joy or agony across an illuminated bay. Of course, this had all happened before. In 79 CE, a seventeen-year-old Pliny the Younger looked up from his writings, gazing across the Bay of Naples, and noticed what seemed to be an odd cloud formation, like “an umbrella pine” atop Vesuvius’ peaks. At times “it looked light colored”, he noticed during the course of his observation, and “sometimes it looked mottled and dirty with the earth and ash it had carried up”. He informed his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who, emboldened by scholarly fascination and an impending sense of catastrophe, summoned a fleet of quadriremes. As “tall broad flames blazed from several places on Vesuvius”, the Elder uttered fortune favors the brave and then set sail into a coruscating dark, calming his shipmates by assuring them that the inferno was merely a bonfire set by peasants without the means of extinguishment. This history and the story of what happened next stems from a sole surviving eyewitness account: the nephew narrating his uncle’s demise. In two letters written to Tacitus twenty-five years after the event, Pliny the Younger describes with lasting terror Pompeii’s burial beneath pyroclastic flows. “Then we saw the sea sucked back, apparently by an earthquake, and many sea creatures were left stranded on the dry sand. From the other direction over the land, a dreadful black cloud was torn by gushing flames and great tongues of fire like much-magnified lightning. . . . We were amazed by what we saw, because everything had changed and was buried deep in ash like snow.” Visiting Vesuvius in the late 1700s was to encounter a past made newly palpable. The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had begun to be exhumed from their ashen limbo. And after a period of relative peace since 1767, Vesuvius awoke once again, bubbling with various degrees of activity between 1770–1779 and 1783–1794. As young British gentlemen capped their education through tours across Europe’s classical landmarks, perhaps with a copy of Edmund Burke in tow, they often sought sublimity on the slopes of the volcano and were sometimes guided by Hamilton. “In many ways more authentic than other stops along the Grand Tour” — writes Noam Andrews in an article about Hamilton’s “love affair with Vesuvius” — “this site was alive: visitors could revel in the volcano's sublimity, cautiously witnessing occasional spurts of pre-catastrophe”. You can browse a selection of Fabris’ illustrations, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, below, and a rare, complete set of the Campi Phlegraei volumes, held by the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

public-domain-review

Jul 6, 2022

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:49.720958

the-dream-of-mrs-l-l-nicholson-from-oakland-california-1924

The Dream of Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland, California (1924) Jan 29, 2012 In 1924 California's Tribune-American newspaper ran a competition for its readers to write in with their most unusual dreams and the winning entry was made into a short film. This is Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland's dream of losing her baby, rowing across San Francisco Bay, picking up some fish, and eventually discovering her lost child in a most unusual place and in trouble with the law. Internet Archive user "kingwaylon" has added a nice homemade soundtrack to this version here.

public-domain-review

Jan 29, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:50.620198

uriah-jewett-and-the-sea-serpent-of-lake-memphemagog-1917

Uriah Jewett and the Sea Serpent of Lake Memphemagog (1917) Dec 1, 2011 A very curious little book concerning a poet named Uriah Jewett, a sea serpent, the disappearance of a cheat named Hoyt, and the possible illegitimate child of Prince Arthur born in the forests of Canada.

public-domain-review

Dec 1, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:51.210996

the-daddy-long-legs-of-brighton

The Daddy Long Legs of Brighton Dec 8, 2011 The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway was a unique coastline railway in Brighton, England that ran through the shallow waters of the English Channel between 1896 and 1901. Magnus Volk, its owner, designer and engineer, had already been successful with the more conventional Volk's Electric Railway, which had then not been extended east of Paston Place. Facing unfavourable geography, Volk decided to construct a line through the surf from a pier at Paston Place to one at Rottingdean. The tracks were laid on concrete sleepers mortised into the bedrock, and the single car used on the railway, a huge pier-like building which stood on four 23 ft (7.0 m)-long legs, was propelled by electric motor. It was officially named Pioneer, but many called it Daddy Long-Legs. Construction took two years from 1894 to 1896. The railway officially opened 28 November 1896, but was nearly destroyed by a storm the night of 4 December. Volk immediately set to rebuilding the railway including the Pioneer, which had been knocked on its side, and it reopened in July 1897. In 1900 the council decided to build a beach protection barrier, which unfortunately required Volk to divert his line around the barrier. Without funds to do so, Volk closed the railway. A model of the railway car is on display (along with a poster for the railway) in the foyer of the Brighton Toy and Model Museum. (Text from Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Dec 8, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:51.710144

the-lost-world-1925

The Lost World (1925) Jan 22, 2012 Silent film adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. Directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien (an invaluable warm up for his work on the original King Kong directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack). In 1922, Conan Doyle showed O'Brien's test reel to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, which included Harry Houdini. The astounded audience watched footage of a Triceratops family, an attack by an Allosaurus and some Stegosaurus footage. Doyle refused to discuss the film's origins. On the next day, the New York Times ran a front page article about it, saying "(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces". It is a film of many firsts: first film to be shown to airline passengers, in April 1925 on a London-Paris flight by the company Imperial Airways; first feature length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general; first dinosaur-oriented film hit, and it led to other dinosaur movies, from King Kong to the Jurassic Park trilogy.

public-domain-review

Jan 22, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:52.197841

yuletide-entertainments-1910

Yuletide Entertainments (1910) Dec 22, 2011 Christmas recitations, monologues, drills, tableaux, motion songs, exercises, dialogues and plays, suitable for all ages. From the introduction: "It becomes more and more a part of Christmas gayety to present the legends, or the spirit of it, to the eye as well as the mind. For this purpose the following pages have been prepared in play and pantomime, songs and marches, drills and recitations. While the needs of adults have not been forgotten, those of the children have been most largely remembered, since Christmas is pre-eminently the children's festival. A word to those who take charge of such affairs may not be amiss. Precision of movement is the keynote of success for everything of this kind. This does not mean stiffness, but it does mean exactitude and certainty. Uncertain gestures in speaking; scattered attack and close in singing ; hesitation in acting ; and, more than all, careless motions and marching in the drills (corners not formed squarely, motions only half in unison, etc.) — all these are fatal to that success which makes such entertainments entertaining. Here, as everywhere else, "What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well."

public-domain-review

Dec 22, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:52.619050

edison-reading-mary-had-a-little-lamb-1927

Edison reading Mary Had a Little Lamb (1927) Feb 9, 2012 In this 1927 recording made by Thomas A. Edison at the Golden Jubilee of the Phonograph ceremony, he recalls the first words he spoke into the phonograph, a recital of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" nursery rhyme. In his writings, Edison recounts further the 1878 recording: I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm ... Kruesi (the machinist), when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. This original recording was thought lost until scientists at the the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress had a go at recreating it using "optical imaging".

public-domain-review

Feb 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:53.059182

amundsen-s-south-pole-expedition

Amundsen’s South Pole expedition Dec 14, 2011 This wonderful set of photographs come from the pages of The South pole; an account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition in the "Fram," 1910-1912, Roald Amundsen's account of his expedition which became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911, just five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen and his team returned safely to their base, and later learned that Scott and his four companions had died on their return journey. Amundsen's initial plans had focused on the Arctic and the conquest of the North Pole by means of an extended drift in an icebound ship. He obtained the use of Fridtjof Nansen's polar exploration ship Fram, and undertook extensive fundraising activities. Preparations for this expedition were disrupted when, in 1909, the rival American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert E. Peary each claimed to have reached the North Pole. Amundsen then changed his plan and began to prepare for a conquest of the South Pole; uncertain of the extent to which the public and his backers would support him, he kept this revised objective secret. When he set out in June 1910, even most of his crew believed they were embarking on an Arctic drift. Amundsen made his Antarctic base, "Framheim", in the Bay of Whales on the Great Ice Barrier. After months of preparation, depot-laying and a false start which ended in near-disaster, he and his party set out for the pole in October 1911. Although the expedition's success was widely applauded, the story of Scott's heroic failure overshadowed its achievement. For his decision to keep his true plans secret until the last moment, Amundsen was criticised for what some considered deception on his part. Recent polar historians have more fully recognised the skill and courage of Amundsen's party; the permanent scientific base at the pole bears his name, together with that of Scott. (Text based on Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Dec 14, 2011

collection

2024-05-01T21:39:53.614834