bernot

Both Faulkner and the physicists may be right: the passage of time is an illusion. And yet, for as long as we’ve been keeping score, it’s seemed that history really exists, in increasingly distant forms the further back we look. As Jonathan Crow wrote in a recent post on news service British Pathé’s release of 85,000 pieces of archival film on YouTube, seeing documentary evidence of just the last century “really makes the past feel like a foreign country—the weird hairstyles, the way a city street looked, the breathtakingly casual sexism and racism.” (Of course there’s more than enough reason to think future generations will say the same of us.) British Pathé’s archive seems exhaustive—until you see the latest digitized collection on YouTube from AP and British Movietone, which spans from 1895 to the present and brings us thousands more past tragedies, triumphs, and hairstyles

This release of “more than 1 million minutes” of news, writes Variety, includes archival footage of “major world events such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.” And so much more, such as the newsreel above, which depicts Berlin in 1945, eventually getting around to documenting the Potsdam Conference (at 3:55), where Churchill, Stalin, and Truman created the 17th parallel in Vietnam, dictated the terms of the German occupation, and planned the coming Japanese surrender. No one at the time could have accurately foreseen the historical reverberations of these actions.

Another strange, even uncanny piece of film shows us the English football team giving the Nazi salute in 1938 at the commencement of a game against Germany. “That’s shocking now,” says Alwyn Lindsay, the director of AP’s international archive, “but it wasn’t at the time.” Films like these have become of much more interest since The Sun published photographs of the royal family—including a young Queen Elizabeth II and her uncle Prince (later King, then Duke) Edward VIII—giving Nazi salutes in 1933. Though it was not particularly controversial, and the children of course had little idea what it signified, it did turn out that Edward (seen here) was a would-be Nazi collaborator and remained an unapologetic sympathizer.

This huge video trove doesn’t just document the grim history of the Second World War, of course. As you can see in the AP’s introductory montage at the top of the post, there is “a world of history at your fingertips”—from triumphant video like Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, above, to the below film of “Crazy 60s Hats in Glorious Colour.” And more or less every other major world event, disaster, discovery, or widespread trend you might name from the last 120 or so years.

The archive splits into two YouTube channels: AP offers both historical and up-to-the-minute political, sports, celebrity, science, and “weird and wacky” videos (with “new content every day”). The British Movietone channel is solely historical, with much of its content coming from the 1960s (like those hats, and this video of the Beatles receiving their MBE’s, and other “Beatlemania scenes.”)

Movietone’s one nod to the present takes the form of “The Archivist Presents,” in which a historian offers quirky context on some bit of archival footage, like that above of the Kinks getting their hair curled. The completely unironic lounge music and casually sexist narration will make you both smile and wince, as do Ray Davies and company when they see their new hair. Most of the films in this million minutes of news footage (and counting) tend to elicit either or both of these two emotional reactions—joy (or amusement) or mild to intense horror, and watching them makes the past they show us feel paradoxically more strange and more immediate at once.

Related Content:

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube

New Archive Makes Available 800,000 Pages Documenting the History of Film, Television & Radio

700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. 

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/1000000-minutes-of-newsreel-footage-by-ap-british-movietone-released-on-youtube.html is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

%%POST_LINK%% is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

joga:

Alice Rosati

blackpaint20:

A horned witch, 18th century
French School
Private Collection

What do you do if you are a woman and you want to play competitive football? You get stuck wearing a bikini in a league that doesn't pay you or provide health insurance -- because it's the best competitive football you can play. This is a great bit of long-form journalism over at Grantland by Jordan Ritter Conn. I ended up watching a bit of a "Legends" Football League game when flipping channels a couple weeks ago and the quality of play was no different from your usual Arena Football game.

read more

historical-nonfiction:

Most of the information about Rome and Roman society comes from the 1.5% who had wealth, power, and literacy. The rest, the vast majority of citizens, we know next to nothing about. But we have their skeletons.  Most were buried anonymously outside the city, without epitaphs and often without grave goods to tell us who they were or what they did. Their skeletons are as anonymous in death as in life. There are between 10,000 and 20,000 plebeian skeletons languishing in Italian warehouses, without funding  or interest in investigating them.

Now, Kristina Killgrove, an archaeologist from Vanderbilt University, wants to tell their story by sequencing their DNA, and she is raising donations to do it. Since 2007, Killgrove has been studying 200 skeletons recovered from lower-class graves excavated outside Rome’s city walls. She looks at the chemical isotopes from their water, food and environment into their bones and teeth. Using modern science, she can reconstruct to a degree what they ate, where they came from, and much more. For instance, strontium and oxygen isotope levels revealed that a third of them had immigrated to Rome after their childhood, and thereafter lived similar lives to Roman-born people. To learn more about her research, and maybe donate to her project, check out Kristina’s blog, or her website Roman DNA Project

Today’s Gender of the Day is: I don’t know ,because im not wearing any shoes

noctumsolis:

nazerine:

a-little-melancholy:

chaz-gelf:

sixmilliondeadinternets:

Gandhi has been historically the most aggressive character in Civilization due to an original bug in the first game that caused him to go all-out once he reaches democracy. They just kept the thing going ever since.

To further explain this bug, because I was chatting with mothmonarch about Civilization and other strategy games last night and I never got around to explaining this fully, but I love this story:

Gandhi’s AI in the original game had its aggression set to the absolute minimum (0 on a scale of 0 to 10, I believe, I may have this wrong but the basic idea I’m about to explain is accurate, as far as I can tell). Adopting democracy lowers an AI civ’s aggression by 2 points, so when someone who is fully peaceful loses two points of aggression, they should still be nice and polite, right?

Except this is an old DOS game, and so computer math is in place. What actually happened was that Gandhi’s aggression level ticked backwards two steps, from 0 to 255. On a scale of 0 to 10, Gandhi is now 255 points of pure nuclear rage.

And that’s the story as I recall it, but again I may have gotten some details wrong, so feel free to correct me! After that, as the original poster said, the devs loved the bug so much that they just kept it in as a running joke!

“On a scale of 0 to 10, Gandhi is now 255 points of pure nuclear rage.”

I about pissed myself laughing at this.

please handle your overflow people you could be causing a nuclear war

Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?

( I’m sure it’s been done 0x0000 - 1 times )

It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?

The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of  US society.

This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.

Make a dad happy with Lunarbaboon Volume 1: http://lunarbaboon.bigcartel.com/product/lunarbaboon-volume-1

The suspense is terrible…

(Buy a print of this comic)

llleighsmith:

let’s bring this back

thelingerieaddict:

I don’t know music, so I don’t understand what I’m looking at (though I do like it), but I just showed this to my husband, and his jaw hit the floor.

bynnie:

ladymacbetterthanyou:

cr-est:

He yelled at me until we adopted him

the wand chooses the wizard

That’s a cat

catasters:

“I’m doing my part…”