#debating what modernity is and when it starts is a favorite activity of historians

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

Since my last history related poll was fun, and the perception of time periods is fascinating....

(if you reblog and add tags, I'd also like to know where you usually study or read about)

Edit: for those who wanted more specific divisions of earlier periods: I wanted to add more but there are only so many slots allowed on a Tumblr poll.

#histblr #i skewed this towards the time periods where historians call themselves “modernists” intentionally #with that said #debating what modernity is and when it starts is a favorite activity of historians #there is no consensus

[seymour-butz-stuff]

Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made headlines with the ridiculous statement that the filibuster has "no racial history at all. None. There's no dispute among historians." That required immediate cleanup from his communications staff, who had to interpret for McConnell. The origins of the filibuster, they said, were what he was talking about. Which is ridiculous, on all counts.

The origins of the filibuster were ignominious, to be sure, but only because it was Aaron Burr who inadvertently created it. After having killed Alexander Hamilton in that duel, Burr was still vice president and for some reason senators were paying attention to him. Burr, as vice president, thought that the Senate rules were too messy and cluttered. He suggested that the previous question motion could be jettisoned because it wasn't really being used.

The motion is still used in the House. It's how a simple majority ends debate. But the handful of senators who had all known each other forever figured they could work stuff out without that rule, so away it went. For a century or so that was pretty much fine.

Until after the Civil War. Go figure.

This is where the McConnell flack's explanation really does McConnell no favors, because in reality the modern origins of the filibuster and how it's developed since Reconstruction is absolutely racist, and there is no way any objective person can paint that history as anything else.

"You start to see civil rights bills pass the House in the 1920s, and it was consistently used to block them," Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid and the author Kill Switch, a history of the filibuster, told Vox. "If there was any ambiguity in the antebellum era, it certainly shed that during the Jim Crow era—where it was widely taken for granted that the filibuster was directly tied to [blocking] civil rights." Kevin Kruse, a historian of race and American politics at Princeton University, agrees. "It's been a tool used overwhelmingly by racists."

Political scientists Sarah Binder and Steven Smith have also studied the filibuster, particularly how it's been used since 1917 when the Senate adopted a cloture rule—the ability to break a filibuster with 67 votes. Binder writes, "Of the 30 measures we identified between 1917 and 1994, exactly half addressed civil rights—including measures to authorize federal investigation and prosecution of lynching, to ban the imposition of poll taxes and to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race in housing sales and rentals." She adds, "Keep in mind, the 20th century filibuster scorched many civil rights measures beyond those that it killed outright."

The thing is, McConnell knows all this. He knows it very well, and until he declared that Democrats calling it a "Jim Crow relic" is "an effort to use the terrible history of racism to justify a partisan power grab in the present,"  he admitted the truth publicly. In writing. Saladin Ambar, an associate political science professor at Rutgers, quotes McConnell from just two years ago in McConnell’s book, The US Senate and the Commonwealth.

When he wrote that book in 2019, he recalled how as a 22-year-old intern in the Senate, he watched his boss, Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, help break a filibuster of the Civil Rights Act. "I saw that those who wrote to Senator Cooper were overwhelmingly opposed to the pending civil rights legislation. But Senator Cooper was undeterred," McConnell wrote. "He actively lobbied his colleagues to oppose the Southern Democratic filibuster being carried out against the civil rights legislation. I was exhilarated as I watched him take this courageous stance."

Exhilarated.

Now the attempt to maintain and expand those civil rights McConnell was so excited about has suddenly become a partisan power grab. As Georgia Republicans were preparing to enact a new and sweeping discriminatory voter suppression law, McConnell stood in front of the nation and declared, "States are not engaging in trying to suppress voters, whatsoever."

His historical revisionism is surpassed only by his histrionics over the likely end to the filibuster as his favorite tool. "These folks are not interested in compromise, they're interested in passing all of their bills to remake America," McConnell said in an interview last week. "It may not be the panacea that they anticipate it would be, it could turn the Senate into sort of a nuclear winter, where the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option is not a sustainable place." He'll go to any lengths, he's promising, to stop Democrats from ending the racist filibuster in order to stop racist voter suppression and restore democracy. All the while declaring that Republicans aren't acting on white supremacy.

McConnell knows better. As Ambar says, "McConnell knows this history well. He wrote about it. He witnessed it. He was there."

[blind-rats]

The ability of fans to shape and change the art they enjoy is nothing new. In 1893, the reaction to Arthur Conan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes was so intense that he eventually resurrected him ten years later. Historian Greg Jenner, the author of the forthcoming book Dead Famous (a study of the history of fame), has even tracked the characteristics of modern fandom back to the 1700s when rival supporters of English theatre actresses would compete for dominance like Team Aniston or Team Jolie.  

And to the 1920s, where fan groups would write thousands of letters to movie studios demanding their favorite actor be given better roles. “It was the same thing,” he says, “as Sonic the Hedgehog having weird teeth and people going, ‘No, that’s not the game I played as a kid, you need to fix it or I am not giving you any money.’” 

The last decade or so has witnessed huge changes in the awareness, perception, and tools of fandom. In terms of television and film, the enormous successes of Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have introduced geek culture – and its brand of participatory fandom – to the mainstream. At the same time, the internet – and more specifically social media – has amplified fans’ voices, while also breaking down the boundaries between them and the artists they love/hate.

Yet the extent to which the internet has changed the very nature of fandom is debatable. According to leading media scholar Henry Jenkins, whose 1992 book Textual Poachers is considered the founding text of fan studies, it has merely “increased the scope and scale of the fan community, allowed for ongoing interactions amongst fans, and made the entertainment industry more aware of the kind of fan responses which have been occurring all along”.

Case in point: in 1968, Star Trek fans – a group who essentially invented the framework of modern fandom – orchestrated a huge and successful letter-writing campaign to save the show from cancellation. Then, in subsequent years, they also popularised fan fiction as we now know it, publishing stories for each other in zines, and pioneering the homoerotic literary sub-genre of slash fiction (the term ‘slash’ literally derives from the punctuation between Kirk / Spock).

Now fans weaponize hashtags and online petitions to revive shows like The Expanse and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or to take showrunners to task with criticisms of their blind spots and choices. One notable example is the teen show The 100, which sparked ire in 2016 after killing off one of the show’s prominent gay characters; an act that was seen by many to perpetuate the ‘bury your gays’ trope that has been prevalent in TV and film. And as for fan fiction? There is, most famously, E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey series, which was inspired by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight and originally posted on a fan website. But, beyond that, there is also the platform Archive of Our Own, which in 2019 won a Hugo award for its archive of more than 4.7 million fan-written stories.

“Fans engaging actively with the materials of their culture has improved our world in countless ways,” says Jenkins. “Television, as it exists today, is largely a response to modes of engagement that fans have modeled over the past several decades – [a form] where more attention is paid to backstories and secondary characters, where there is a greater degree of serialization and the core mythology is sustained across multiple media platforms, and which builds in space for exploration and speculation. And now, which seeks to be more diverse and inclusive in whose stories get told… Many of today’s critical darlings are following practices that were modeled first in fan fiction.”

Perhaps one of the most profound changes of the last 10 years is the extent to which the entertainment industry has begun to exploit the passion of fanbases for their own commercial ends. “The industry needs fans more than ever before,” explains academic Suzanne Scott, author of Fake Geek Girls, a study of the gender politics of fandom. “They need fans to ensure big opening weekends at the box office, they need them as promotional labor to create more ‘authentic’ excitement around a media object, or to distinguish one text from the glut of content that we are constantly choosing between as consumers.” Just take the techniques employed by Netflix, who have become masters of facilitating ‘organic’ conversation around their output.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, they even rely on them as investors. A famous example being the 2014 big-screen revival of cult TV detective drama Veronica Mars, a sequel made possible only by the crowdfunding efforts of fans, and which subsequently led to a 2019 TV return on streaming service Hulu. 

With the latter series, this equal partnership dynamic started to become complicated, however, with fans recoiling in horror when creator Rob Thomas killed off love interest Logan. 

To quote journalist Constance Grady, writing for Vox: “Thomas, they said, had taken advantage of their desire to see Veronica and Logan together, using their investment as shippers to leverage not just their time and attention, but the literal dollars out of their pockets. In that case, didn’t he owe them something?”

Jenkins thinks it’s a fair question. “The sense of ownership reflects the way humans have always engaged with stories,” he says. “We use stories to make sense of who we are. We use stories to debate our values, fears, and aspirations. We display our attachment to stories in various ways and we define ourselves through which stories mean the most to us. There’s nothing odd about this. What is odd is the idea that corporations want to claim a monopoly over the storytelling process, resist input from their audience, and lockdown stories from further circulation and elaboration.”

CLICK THE LINK FOR THE FULL ARTICLE

#Veronica Mars #Fandom #Fanbase #Sonic The Hedgehog #Star Trek

[keystonewarrior]

Actually Older Than Dirt

Actually Older than Dirt

They called themself Vajra Tiglitolf these days. They had slipped into the United States in 1946 along with countless other Europeans, unheralded, unnoticed.  It was actually their second time in North America (third if you counted living underwater on the continental shelf), having resided with coastal communities stretching from modern day British Columbia south to Sinaloa, but that was when there was still a land bridge to Asia and long before the Spanish arrived on the continent.

They worked quietly at a deli in Princeton, NJ until 1961, then moved over to Philadelphia where they bagged groceries at an A&P and later attended classes as a liberal arts history major at Temple until 1968.  They always enjoyed the liberal arts classes more than the technical coursework, science and math just weren’t their thing.  Art courses were nice reminders of what they had seen and done over the millennia and they often thought it was a shame that nobody would ever see any of Leonardo’s really good stuff.  The original three-panel cartoonist, the church meticulously destroyed every last copy of those satirical hit-jobs while he was still under house arrest.  Music appreciation always took them back to the times and places where they first heard many of those stirring performances, sometimes overcome with emotion at the memory of being in the same room as the great composers.  Nakisha was little remembered among music historians and was a more accomplished harpist than anything else but as rock and roll grew in popularity in the US in the 50s they could almost hear her singing and playing, and then stopping to take her notes.  The hippies sounded a lot like Nakisha’s less serious work, the stuff she played for crowds in the market instead of the Persian palaces.  Literature classes were always fun but they often felt Chaucer would get more credit if they understood the man better and Shakespeare less credit if they’d really known him.  The most amusing classes were the history classes, especially when publishers, professors, and students got almost everything wrong and left out some of the critical tipping points and most hilarious details about so-called important people and places.  Egypt was terribly misunderstood and India all but forgotten.  But Vajra could not provide any evidence, and had spent intermittent and sporadic decades in each region and travelling between them for three thousand years, so mostly they simply asked questions about details they knew nobody could respond to and provoking debate.

The most memorable detail about those four years at Temple was the accounting class where a football player would crack jokes and hassle the TA, openly - if jokingly - copying answers from other students’ tests in class.  Vajra felt bad for the little TA but if she was ever going to make it as a mathematician she had better toughen up.  In the arts, you can often make up for a little talent with a lot of panache, but in math you have to prove it or you’re less than zero.  Zero was probably the thing historians never really got right about math - people died for zero.

There was tension in the American air as Vajra moved towns and changed careers again that summer.  Vajra had a nose now for avoiding war, but this didn’t quite feel that bad.  When the Democratic Convention in Chicago went down Vajra was working at a high school near Washington DC.  They were active in the environmental movement, civil rights movement, equal rights movement, but mostly ardently against the draft.

Vajra hated the draft most of all and when that came to an end they spent a few more years involved in various movements but saw the wind going out of the sails.  Without any skin in the game in the draft, most of the white, suburban US mosied out of protest movements and into adult family life.  The environmentalists couldn’t see the climate change writing on the wall, a few could but they didn’t have the data needed to really fight that battle even though Arrhenius had made everything very clear eighty years earlier.  Vajra was back in Europe in the late nineteenth century and had read Arrhenius’ work.  After Angstrom had argued against the climate change model, Vajra had gone to work with the Swedish physicist because (while they weren’t particularly talented at math and science) they had personally endured hundreds of environmental transformations and could see the path humanity was on.  Far too many in the environmental community thought they had essentially won the war and had the corporate polluters on the ropes.  Vajra knew how persistent - like mold inside the walls of a house - money and wealth could be, but nobody was willing to listen to a high school history teacher and low-level staffer working part-time and voluntarily across multiple national movements who actually liked disco.  When the Equal Rights Amendment fell short and Reagan and the NeoCons came to DC, Tiglitolf moved to Kissimmee, FL.  It was actually their second time in FL, but their previous abode had been underwater.

They had been to Disney twice before on summer working-vacations and decided it was a good enough place to work and hideout for maybe even several decades before having to move on again.  That was the trouble with dwelling within a body that could self-heal, it also maintained the same age and appearance if no changes were demanded of it.  There were subroutines in core memory Vajra could activate to simulate aging and to make changes to their physical form in different environmental and battlefield conditions.  A few were near-instantaneous (response to a chemical attack) while others took time and resources to manifest (changing from male to female).  The worst had been the years watching the dinosaurs die.  That particular rock had been a visible comet for weeks prior to impact and Vajra’s were the only intelligent eyes on the planet to see it coming.  A military draftee, a slave really, their body and mind had been laid open to the foundation - while they were aware and conscious - and rebuilt as the ultimate weapon.  They felt forced to fire up old diagnostics and activate telescopic sights and telemetry trackers.  Of course the computers immediately sought connection to higher headquarters, but Vajra kept shutting them down almost as soon as they booted up, but they were also distracted by the impending doom and the changes they were making to their body to survive the impact event.  Back then they looked more like a dinosaur.  Hey, above a certain size a reptile has no natural predators, except for big rocks from space.  The comet calved.  As it broke up it was clear one of the smaller pieces was going to hit the planet now, followed by a second larger impact a few weeks later as the comet’s orbit and the orbit of the Earth met again.  In the end there were essentially millions of impacts.  Rocks and ice hit the moon and the Earth and smaller rocks got pulled into other radical orbits and scattered around the solar system.  The millions of little ones might have been enough to kick the dinosaurs into the ditch along the evolutionary roadside, but it was the capital letter impact at the beginning of that death sentence followed by the exclamation point at the end that sealed the fate of almost every life on the planet.  Fourteen years later, resting in an ice-free estuary, quietly photosynthesizing and chewing on whatever corpse happened to float by, Vajra felt the tickle of communications programs being queried by a robot probe passing through the mesosphere overhead.  They had mercifully, if painfully, ripped out their IFF antenna a billion years earlier, so the communications and slave-chain programs could not be remotely activated, but Vajra nervously sat in that pond as glaciers crept closer for seventeen years before the probe finally exited the system.  They crept out of there and swam and crawled to the sea, then made their way around the planet closer to the second impact site.  The shallow seas in the area that would later become the Lake Wales Ridge on the Florida peninsula made for an excellent place to shake off this boring semi-plant existence and start eating food again.

Their first job in modern Florida was actually at Circus World.  They worked part-time there and at the Magic Kingdom waiting for Epcot to open.  They painted faces, told children the same silly jokes children had laughed at in Mesopotamia, and dropped agonizing puns on the parents.  Disney was going to be a beast, with thousands of anonymous employees, and every few months Tiglitolf could change jobs and nobody would ever say, “You haven’t aged a day” while they hid unnoticed and unheralded among the masses of workers.  Epcot ended up Vajra’s favorite park, even though between 1981 and today they had worked in almost every guest area.  Epcot ended up nice, but hardly a world’s fair, and Vajra had worked at three - Paris and Brussels in the late nineteenth century and Barcelona thirty years later.  World War One had been a disaster but they had weathered that shitstorm in Tunisia.  Nursing experience helping as a volunteer during the flu pandemic 1918-1920 led to work in Portugal through the 20s and when the Germans practiced mechanized warfare in Spain in the 30s Vajra quietly moved back to Egypt and reopened their old bakery and brewery almost on the same spot it had been over a century earlier.

Of course their name had not been Vajra Tiglitolf back then.  They’d had hundreds of names ever since that sort of thing had been important among people, but every name had been some variant of their name as a slave-soldier: Diamond Twelve.

#older than dirt #diamond twelve

[sciencespies]

Shakespearean Stabbings, How to Feed a Dictator and Other New Books to Read

https://sciencespies.com/nature/shakespearean-stabbings-how-to-feed-a-dictator-and-other-new-books-to-read/

Shakespearean Stabbings, How to Feed a Dictator and Other New Books to Read

An estimated 74 heroes, villains and sidekicks featured in William Shakespeare’s writings meet unsavory onstage ends. Thirty of these men and women succumb to stabbing, according to a 2015 analysis by the Telegraph, while five die by beheading, four by poison, and three by both stabbing and poison. At the more unconventional end of the spectrum, causes of death range from grief to insomnia, indigestion, smothering, shame and being baked into a pie.

Kathryn Harkup’s Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts adopts a scientific approach to the Bard’s many methods of killing off characters. As the chemist-by-training writes in the book’s prologue, Shakespeare may not have understood the science behind the process of dying, but as a someone who lived at a time when death—in the form of public executions, pestilence, accidents and widespread violence—was an accepted aspect of everyday life, he certainly knew “what it looked, sounded and smelled like.”

The latest installment in our “Books of the Week” series, which launched in late March to support authors whose works have been overshadowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, details the science behind Shakespeare, the golden age of aviation, women doctors of World War I, the meals enjoyed by five modern dictators and the history of the controversial Shroud of Turin.

Representing the fields of history, science, arts and culture, innovation, and travel, selections represent texts that piqued our curiosity with their new approaches to oft-discussed topics, elevation of overlooked stories and artful prose. We’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, but be sure to check with your local bookstore to see if it supports social distancing-appropriate delivery or pickup measures, too.

Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts by Kathryn Harkup

The author of A Is for Arsenic and Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein continues her macabre cultural musings with an immensely readable roundup of Shakespearean death. Looking beyond the literary implications of characters’ untimely passing, she explores the forces that shaped the Bard’s world and, subsequently, his writing.

Sixteenth-century London was a hotbed of disease, unsanitary living conditions, violence, political unrest and impoverishment. People of the period witnessed death firsthand, providing palliative care in sick friends’ and family members’ last moments, attending strangers’ public executions, or falling prey to misfortune themselves. Writes Harkup, “With limited effective medical treatments available, the grim reality of death, from even the most trivial of illnesses and infections, was well known, up close and in detail.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that all of Shakespeare’s plays reference disease in some capacity.

After establishing this sociopolitical context, Harkup delves into chapter-by-chapter analysis of specific characters’ causes of death, including infirmity, murder, war, plague, poison, emotion and bear attack. The author’s scholarly expertise (she completed two doctorate degrees in chemistry before shifting focus to science communication) is apparent in these chapters, which are peppered with rather clinical descriptions: In a section on King Lear, for instance, she mentions—and outlines in great detail—the “clear post-mortem differences between strangulation, suffocation and hanging.”

Death By Shakespeare is centrally concerned with how its eponymous subject’s environment influenced the fictional worlds he created. Combining historical events, scientific knowledge and theatrical carnage, the work is at its best when determining the accuracy of various killing methods: In other words, Harkup asks, how exactly did Juliet appear dead for 72 hours, and is death by snakebite as peaceful as Cleopatra claimed?

Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose

Today, most people’s knowledge of the zeppelin is limited to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. But as historian Alexander Rose writes in Empires of the Sky, the German airship—invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin at the turn of the 20th century—was once the world’s premiere form of air travel, easily outpacing its contemporary, the airplane.

The airship and airplane’s fight for dominance peaked in the 1920s and ’30s, when Zeppelin’s handpicked successor, Hugo Eckener, faced off with both the Wright Brothers and Pan American Airlines executive Juan Trippe. Per the book’s description, “At a time when America’s airplanes—rickety deathtraps held together by glue, screws, and luck—could barely make it from New York to Washington, Eckener’s airships serenely traversed oceans without a single crash, fatality, or injury.”

Though the zeppelin held the advantage in terms of safety, passenger satisfaction and reliability over long distances, the airplane enjoyed the benefit of sheer quantity, with the United States producing 3,010 civilian aircraft in 1936 alone. The Hindenburg, a state-of-the-art vessel poised to shift the debate in airships’ favor, ironically proved to be its downfall.

Detailing the aftermath of an October 9, 1936, meeting between American and German aviation executives, Rose writes, “Trippe … suspects the deal is done: America will soon be in the airship business and Zeppelin will duel with Pan American for mastery of the coming air empire.” Eckener, meanwhile, flew home on the Hindenburg in triumph, never guessing that his airship had “exactly seven months left to live.”

No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I by Wendy Moore

At the turn of the 20th century, the few female doctors active in Great Britain were largely limited to treating women and children. But when war broke out in 1914, surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson and anesthesiologist Flora Murray flouted this convention, establishing a military hospital of their own in Paris and paving the way for other women doctors to similarly start treating male patients.

Housed in a repurposed hotel and funded by donations from friends, family and fellow suffragists, the pair’s hospital soon drew the attention of the British War Office, which asked Anderson and Murray to run a military hospital in London. As author Wendy Moore points out, this venue “was, and would remain, the only military hospital under the auspices of the British Army to be staffed solely by women doctors and run entirely by women.”

Tens of thousands of patients arrived at the hospital over the next four-and-a-half years, according to Kirkus’ review of No Man’s Land. Staff performed more than 7,000 surgeries, treating previously unseen ailments including the aftereffects of chlorine gas attacks and injuries inflicted by artillery and high-explosive shells. Though initially met with distaste by men who dismissed a hospital run by “mere women,” Anderson and Murray’s steadfast commitment to care managed to convince even their critics of women’s value as physicians.

In 1918, the flu pandemic arrived in London, overwhelming the pair’s Endell Street Military Hospital just as the war reached its final stages. Writes Moore, “Now that they found themselves fighting an invisible enemy, to no apparent purpose, they had reached the breaking point.”

The pandemic eventually passed, and as life returned to a semblance of normality, women doctors were once again relegated to the sidelines. Still, Sarah Lyall points out in the New York Times’ review of the book, the “tide had started to turn” in these medical professionals’ favor—in no small part due to the perseverance of Anderson and Murray.

How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks by Witold Szablowski

The favorite meals of five 20th-century dictators are more mundane than one might think. As Rose Prince writes in the Spectator’s review of Polish journalist Witold Szablowski’s How to Feed a Dictator, Saddam Hussein’s cuisine of choice was lentil soup and grilled fish. Idi Amin opted for steak-and-kidney pie complemented by a dessert of chocolate pudding, while Fidel Castro enjoyed “a simple dish of chicken and mango.” And though popular lore suggests Pol Pot dined on the hearts of cobras, the Cambodian dictator’s chef revealed that he actually preferred chicken and fish.

According to Szablowski, How to Feed a Dictator strives to present “a panorama of big social and political problems seen through the kitchen door.” But tracking down the personal chefs who kept these despots—Hussein, Amin, Castro, Pot and former Albanian prime minister Enver Hoxha—well-fed proved to be an understandably difficult task. Not only did Szablowski have to find men and women who didn’t particularly want to be found, but he also had to earn their trust and convince them to discuss traumatic chapters in their lives. Speaking with Publishers Weekly’s Louisa Ermelino, Szablowski notes that Amin’s, Hoxha’s and Hussein’s chefs were simply culinary professionals; Castro’s and Pot’s, on the other hand, started off as partisans.

Ultimately, the author tells NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Sometimes they are very easy to like, but sometimes they are very easy to hate. Like, they are not easy characters, because it wasn’t an easy job.”

The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death by Gary Vikan

Gary Vikan has spent some 35 years tracking down evidence refuting the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity. In The Holy Shroud, Vikan—former director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum and a respected art historian—outlines his findings, arguing that the controversial burial cloth belonged not to Jesus, but to a medieval artist employed by French monarch John II at the height of the Black Death.

“I knew right away that the Holy Shroud was the fake, for the simple reason that it does not fit into the chronology of Christian relics or iconography, and because it appears for the first time in the historical record in 14th century France,” wrote Vikan in a blog post earlier this year. “ … [W]ith the help of a brilliant scientist, I am [now] able to answer the questions of when, why, by whom, and how the Shroud was made.”

Per the book’s description, John II gifted the “photograph-like body print” to his friend Geoffroi de Charny shortly before the latter’s death at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Originally meant as an “innocuous devotional image” for the knight’s newly-built church, the cloth was soon reinvented as one of Christianity’s most significant relics.

“Miracles were faked,” says Vikan, “and money was made.”

#Nature

#Nature

[multipleservicelisting]

Caligula’s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored

The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula — officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus — was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire’s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.

During the four years that Caligula occupied the Roman throne, his favorite hideaway was an imperial pleasure garden called Horti Lamiani, the Mar-a-Lago of its day. The vast residential compound spread out on the Esquiline Hill, one of the seven hills on which the city was originally built, in the area around the current Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

There, just on the edge of the city, villas, shrines and banquet halls were set in carefully constructed “natural” landscapes. An early version of a wildlife park, the Horti Lamiani featured orchards, fountains, terraces, a bath house adorned with precious colored marble from all over the Mediterranean, and exotic animals, some of which were used, as in the Colosseum, for private circus games.

When Caligula was assassinated in his palace on the Palatine Hill in 41 A.D., his body was carried to the Horti Lamiani, where he was cremated and hastily buried before being moved to the Mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius, north of the Capitoline Hill. According to Suetonius, the elite garden was haunted by Caligula’s ghost.

Historians have long believed that the remains of the lavish houses and parkland would never be recovered. But this spring, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism will open the Nymphaeum Museum of Piazza Vittorio, a subterranean gallery that will showcase a section of the imperial garden that was unearthed during an excavation from 2006 to 2015. The dig, carried out beneath the rubble of a condemned 19th-century apartment complex, yielded gems, coins, ceramics, jewelry, pottery, cameo glass, a theater mask, seeds of plants such as citron, apricot and acacia that had been imported from Asia, and bones of peacocks, deer, lions, bears and ostriches.

“The ruins tell extraordinary stories, starting with the animals,” said Mirella Serlorenzi, the culture ministry’s director of excavations. “It is not hard to imagine animals, some caged and some running wild, in this enchanted setting.” The science of antiquities department of the Sapienza University of Rome collaborated on the project.

The objects and structural remnants on display in the museum paint a vivid picture of wealth, power and opulence. Among the stunning examples of ancient Roman artistry are elaborate mosaics and frescoes, a marble staircase, capitals of colored marble and limestone, and an imperial guard’s bronze brooch inset with gold and mother-of-pearl. “All the most refined objects and art produced in the Imperial Age turned up,” Dr. Serlorenzi said.

The classicist Daisy Dunn said the finds were even more extravagant than scholars had anticipated. “The frescoes are incredibly ornate and of a very high decorative standard,” noted Dr. Dunn, whose book “In The Shadow of Vesuvius” is a dual biography of Pliny the Elder — a contemporary of Caligula’s — and his nephew Pliny the Younger. “Given the descriptions of Caligula’s licentious lifestyle and appetite for luxury, we might have expected the designs to be quite gauche.”

The Horti Lamiani were commissioned by Lucius Aelius Lamia, a wealthy senator and consul who bequeathed his property to the emperor, most likely during the reign of his friend Tiberius from A.D. 14 to 37. When Caligula succeeded him — it is rumored that Caligula and the Praetorian Guard prefect Macro hastened the death of Tiberius by smothering him with a pillow — he moved into the main house.

In an evocative eyewitness account, the philosopher Philo, who visited the estate in A.D. 40 on behalf of the Jews of Alexandria, and his fellow emissaries had to trail behind Caligula as he inspected the sumptuous residences “examining the men’s rooms and the women’s rooms … and giving orders to make them more costly.” The emperor, wrote Philo, “ordered the windows to be filled up with transparent stones resembling white crystal that do not hinder the light, but which keep out the wind and the heat of the sun.”

Evidence suggests that after Caligula’s violent death — he was hacked to bits by his bodyguards — the house and garden survived at least until the Severan dynasty, which ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. By the fourth century, the gardens had apparently fallen into desuetude, and statuary in the abandoned pavilions was broken into pieces to build the foundations of a series of spas. The statues were not discovered until 1874, three years after Rome was made the capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. With the Esquiline Hill in the midst of a building boom, the Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani nosed around freshly excavated construction sites and uncovered an immense gallery with an alabaster floor and fluted columns of giallo antico, considered the finest of the yellow marbles.

He later stumbled upon a rich deposit of classical sculptures that, at some point in the horti’s history, had been deliberately hidden to protect them. The treasures included the Lancellotti Discobolus, now housed at the National Museum of Rome; the Esquiline Venus and a bust of Commodus depicted as Hercules, now at the Capitoline Museums. In short time, the sculptures were carted off, the foundation of an apartment building was laid, and the ancient ruins were reburied.

The latest excavation of the horti unfolded under the detritus of the residences, which had been evacuated in the 1970s in the wake of a building collapse. Much like the 2012 exhumation of Richard III in Leicester, England, the unburying involved a modern parking site.

Sixteen years ago, the three-and-a-half-acre property was purchased by Enpam, a private foundation that manages pensions for Italian doctors and dentists. Exploratory core drilling for a new headquarters and a six-level underground garage brought forth a wealth of first-century relics, from the type of window glass described by Philo to lead pipes stamped with the name of Claudius, Caligula’s uncle and successor.

As construction crews erected the five-story office building, archaeologists in a trench 18 feet below street level gingerly screened and scraped away soil. In a study lab across town, paleobotanists and archaeozoologists analyzed fragments, and researchers painstakingly repaired a 10-foot-high wall fresco painted with pigment made from ground cinnabar. The entire $3.5 million conservation and restoration project was underwritten by Enpam.

Ground was broken for the Nymphaeum Museum in 2017. “The new space, in the basement of Enpam, brings to light one of the mythical places of the empire’s capital, one of the garden residences loved by the emperors,” said Daniela Porro, the museum director.

What all of this does for Caligula’s seemingly irredeemable reputation is an open question. He emerges from Suetonius’s “The Twelve Caesars,” written 80 years after the emperor was bumped off, as utterly depraved: having incestuous relationships with his sisters, sleeping with anyone he liked the look of, using criminals as food for his wild beasts when beef became too pricey and insisting that a loyal subject who had vowed to give his own life if the emperor survived an illness should carry through on his promise and die.

Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, posited that while Caligula might have been assassinated because he was a monster, it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated. In “SPQR,” her rich history of ancient Rome, she argues that “it is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, willful misinterpretation and outright invention — largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius.”

Whether Caligula got a raw deal from history is a subject of hot and unyielding debate. “There is clearly some bias in the sources,” Dr. Dunn allowed. “But even without that, it is difficult to envision him as a good emperor. I doubt these new discoveries will do much to rehabilitate his character. But they should open up new vistas onto his world, and reveal it to be every bit as paradisiacal as he desired it to be.”

from Multiple Service Listing https://ift.tt/3bDBxNi

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[minjukim013]

Think piece: Understanding “Netflix and Chill”

In 2009, one Twitter user uploaded a casual post on his account: “I’m about to log onto Netflix and chill for the rest of the night.” Little did he know that he would become the first person to say the phrase “Netflix and Chill” that would become an internet sensation in following years. In 2015, “Netflix and Chill” became a meme and a slang that swept the web, now used as a code for having a sexual affair rather than watching Netflix. This “Netflix and Chill” phenomenon is an interesting example that illustrates for both Berger’s and Hall’s analysis on the construction of meaning, representation, and the media. This essay will explore how technology affects the way we consume and appreciate images in 21st century, especially focusing on the formation of discourse around web-based images.

One of the central concepts in Berger’s “Way of Seeing” is the complex relationship between technology and Art, specifically about the impact of mechanical reproduction on traditional Art world. For example, he argues that the invention of camera enabled the isolation of momentary appearances and therefore destroyed the idea that images were timeless, virtually changing the way men saw the world (Berger 18). Camera’s ability to reproduce a painting destroys the uniqueness of its image, forcing its meaning to be fragmented and multiplied (18). However, this does not mean that mechanical reproduction of image irrevocably harms the authority of the image. On the contrary, Berger argues that there is a newly convened religiosity that “surrounds original works of art, which … has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible” (Berger 23). Furthermore, some Art Historians believe that the birth of impression was partly catalyzed by the invention of camera. They argue that the mechanic reality of photograph forced painters to explore new ways of depicting the world, encouraging them to express more emotion and humanness that machines cannot capture.

While some of these arguments are open to further debate, it is true that for hundreds of years, media technology has brought immense change in the way humans understand and interact with the world. Especially, as Berger notes, “[w]hat the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” (Berger 32). For Hall, evolution of images means evolution of languages. This is because he believes that “[a]ny sound, word, image or object which functions as a sign, and is organized with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is … a language” (Hall 5). Furthermore, Hall explains that language produces knowledge by defining and limiting our understanding of the world. Discourse disciplines us by creating rules of what is normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, desirable and undesirable, and so on. Based on this theory, as new media technology develops, new discourses form and redefine the way we see and position ourselves in the world.

“Ways of Seeing” was published in 1972. Since then, means of communication and representation has transformed drastically. The prevalence of world wide web, personal handheld devices, social network services, and many other platforms have revolutionized the way people access information. Images and information started to reach millions of people in a second in a way that traditional magazines, newspapers, films could not. Therefore, it is worth speculating the relationship between the development of media technology and the discourse around it.

It is highly relevant to revisit Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” when discussing the impact of media. In his book, he describes that “[m]edia, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.” In essence, McLuhan believes that the medium itself is as important as the content that the medium delivers. According to him, seeing a Mona Lisa in the Louvre, in a magazine, in a film, or on a website are completely different experiences. Recently, a magazine called Quartz released a shocking statistics that an average American spend 7.5 hours a day staring at some kind of screens – televisions, laptops, PC, phones, tablets, etc. How does this 21st century lifestyle – completely inundated with digital images – reflect the way we live our daily lives?

Before the age of Netflix (and the propagation of personal computers, without which Netflix could not succeed), movie watching was generally a public activity to some extent. You had to go to the movie theatre and sit next to dozens of people to watch a film. Even when videotapes and DVDs became popular, they usually required viewers to sit in a living room and watch the film on a television. Furthermore, they required viewers to purchase or borrow individual films, which forced them to interact with video shop vendors as well. On the contrary, Netflix is all about personalization and private viewing. The site analyzes your taste and suggests films you might like. It remembers the exact place you left off and shows you where to continue. You can watch your favorite shows and films right from your bed, without having to worry about going out to the theatre or family members passing by the living room. Considering how the most natural place to watch Netflix is on your own bed in a private room, it is not surprising how “Netflix and Chill” became a slang for “date night turning into a sexual affair.”

Simply put, “Netflix and Chill” reflects a new culture around consuming films. It is an idea that film watching is a personal and private activity, so readily available that you can choose any time and place to watch them. However, it is important to realize that Netflix is just an example that reflects a broader discourse around consuming images and information, not just films. It represents a growing power of individuals who consume and utilize visual information. Just like a Netflix user can browse through thousands of movies in their own room, average user of the internet can access trillions of images at one’s disposal. It is a completely different dynamic compared to when consumers had to rely on magazines, newspapers, televisions, or books for their only source of information. Now, people are developing novel ways to navigate through the plethora of information, communicate with each other, and express themselves online — whether it be a meme culture, social network services, or a “favorite” bookmark on Netflix. They are adapting to the new technology faster than ever, getting more and more used to the speed which information travels. Perhaps the new discourse in this age might be the very speed and fluidity of discourse, too fast and ever-changing to be defined by any one discourse.

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