Her encampment is 'an old patio umbrella draped in a white plastic sheet secured with binder clips. It is flanked by two large boards with messages in capital letters: BAN ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS OR HAVE A NICE DOOMSDAY and LIVE BY THE BOMB, DIE BY THE BOMB. This rudimentary shelter has been positioned outside the White House for more than three decades. It is a monument itself now, widely considered the longest-running act of political protest in the United States, and this woman, Concepcion Picciotto — Connie, as she’s known to many —
is its longest-running caretaker.' [more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 6, 2013 -
7 comments
The blog
US Slave collects long-form articles on every aspect of the history of slavery, primarily focussing on African slaves in the USA and their descendents. Among the content there is
this biography of Ota Benga, the Congolese Pygmy man who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, and several posts about
Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus.
[more inside]
posted by daisyk
on Mar 15, 2013 -
16 comments
"An April 17, 1981, a CIA cable[pdf] described an army massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was believed to support leftist guerrillas.
A CIA source reported that “the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.” The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.”
In May 1981, despite these ongoing atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters to tell the Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to lift the human rights embargoes on military equipment that former President Jimmy Carter and Congress had imposed."
The Guatemala Documentation Project, part of the
National Security Archive, collects information about
the decades long civil war in Guatemala, including State Department documents that point to Washington's complicity in
massacres,
assassinations and
human rights violations.
posted by empath
on Mar 5, 2013 -
21 comments
Via
io9: "The first nine Superman cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios from 1941 to 1942 are a wonder of animated retrofuturism, giving us a peek into a world that not only had a flying superstrong protector, but also filled viewers' heads with dreams of autonomous robots, comet-controlling telescopes, and machines that could shake the Earth. These films are in the public domain and have been available on the Internet Archive," but now Warner Bros. is releasing them (remastered) on YouTube. The first short,
"Superman" (also known as "The Mad Scientist,") was nominated for an Academy Award. Also see:
The Super Guide to the Fleischer Superman Cartoons. Find links to all nine episodes and more inside.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 25, 2012 -
28 comments
The permanent collection of the (US) National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago contains more than 2,500 pieces of art by 250 artists, all of which can be seen at
NVAM Collection Online. The site includes biographical material on the artists who created the work.
Featured Artwork.
A small selection.
(Via. Images at links in this post may be nsfw, and/or disturbing to some viewers.)
posted by zarq
on Nov 12, 2012 -
1 comment
In the Shadow of Wounded Knee. Along the southwestern border of South Dakota is one of the most poverty-stricken places in the United States—the Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota people. After 150 years of broken promises, they are still nurturing their tribal customs, language and beliefs.
Via [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 25, 2012 -
32 comments
Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.'
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 11, 2012 -
5 comments
In February, PBS and AOL launched
Makers, a video archive containing personal stories and anecdotes told in the first person by women, many of whom have sparked groundbreaking changes in American culture.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 4, 2012 -
3 comments
"America may well be in a fateful decline. But given that the country has survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, 9/11, and the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, is our current crisis proportionate to the doomsday hysteria—or have we lost perspective?"
Frank Rich, columnist for
New York Magazine, explores the recurring phenomenon of declinist panic and our national tendency to burnish the past in
"Mayberry R.I.P."
posted by shiu mai baby
on Aug 22, 2012 -
89 comments
The latest record from Neil Young & Crazy Horse,
Americana (released June 5, 2012), is a surprising collection of grungy covers of classic American folk songs, many of which are better known for their contemporary use as children's songs or camp songs. Of the record, Neil Young said:
Every one of these songs has verses that have been ignored. And those are the key verses, those are the things that make these songs live. They’re a little heavy for kindergarteners to be singing. The originals are much darker, there’s more protest in them...[cite]
Nevertheless, many of NY&CH's renditions skip some of the juicier bits from the history of these songs' performance. Read on for a listing of tracks with some of their darkest verses.
[more inside]
posted by yourcelf
on Jul 14, 2012 -
30 comments
He considered himself an artist, but his work, while
popular and
incendiary, showed little
talent or
originality. Later in life he took up working with
precious metals, and that would be the craft he’s remembered for, but earlier in his career he
printed his own
engravings, or his
version of
the work of others. Earlier this year at Brown University’s
John Hay Library, something very rare was discovered. One of
Paul Revere’s prints depicting the Baptism of Christ was found tucked in an old textbook. While not a particularly valuable work or great art, this rare print does tell us a bit about the man as an artist, and about
his faith.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on May 7, 2012 -
6 comments
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans:
Almost immediately after the law came into practice, Northerners and abolitionists set up relief organisations, which battled to establish schools and provide other forms of support – but their resources were limited. They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county.
posted by nickyskye
on Mar 4, 2012 -
11 comments
'Few Americans today can name more than one or two
current boxers, but boxing once stood at the center of American life. It has become a ghost sport, long discredited but still hovering in the nation’s consciousness, refusing to go away and be silent entirely. But there was a time when things were very different. Boxing's history
winds a thread through the broader history of the nation.'
posted by zarq
on Sep 14, 2011 -
95 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
19th-century newspaper ads for patented stomach cures and digestive aids [...] foregrounded mince pie as the K2 of digestive summits. But for every published warning on the dangers of mince, the newspapers published a poem, essay, or editorial praising it as a great symbol of American cultural heritage or a nostalgic reminder of mother love and better times bygone—or even, as the State of Columbia, South Carolina, asserted in 1901, a beneficial Darwinian instrument that had "thinned out the weak ones" among the pioneering generations.
So wrote Cliff Doerksen in his wonderful, James Beard award-winning article
Mince Pie: The Real American Pie. Doerksen not only gives the history of this once most American of foods, he also makes two mince pies from 19th Century recipes to see if they are indeed all that. This is but one of many great articles Doerksen wrote for The Chicago Reader in recent years (links to a selection below the cut). Sadly, Cliff Doerksen
passed at the age of 47 just before Christmas.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 29, 2010 -
73 comments
Robert F. Gallagher served in the United States Army's 815th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion (Third Army) in the European Theater during WWII. He has posted his memoir online:
"Scratch One Messerschmitt," told from numerous photos he took during the war and the detailed notes he made shortly afterwards.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 23, 2010 -
7 comments
IMAGINE THAT THIS MINUTE, ON THIS STATION, YOU RECEIVED WORD THAT WE HAD MADE CONTACT WITH A CIVILIZATION ON ANOTHER PLANET. THE CLOSEST THING IN HUMAN HISTORY TO SUCH AN EVENT TOOK PLACE IN 1493 WHEN NEWS REACHED EUROPE THAT COLUMBUS HAD ENCOUNTERED A NEW WORLD.
posted by Brent Parker
on Oct 10, 2010 -
74 comments
The Personal Photographs of Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, Television Pioneer. The screen images are time exposure photographs of the picture on the kinescope in the monitoring rack in the main control room. Some were taken with stationary frames of moving picture film projected upon the iconoscope by a standard moving picture machine. Others are actually the pictures transmitted with the iconoscope camera in the studio and outdoors.
posted by tellurian
on May 3, 2010 -
9 comments
The Obama Coalition "
These general findings suggest the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States. With effective organization and mobilization, such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future."
posted by Glibpaxman
on Apr 4, 2010 -
37 comments
