‘It’s like the crowning of the world. It’s insane. Very disco. You’d love it.’
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"They painted the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their lights. Their reasons, their judgements, because in the darkness there be dragons. But it isn’t true. In the dark there are discoveries, there are possibilities, there is freedom in the dark, once someone has illuminated it." --Captain Flint, Black Sails, 2014-2017
Hey, if anyone’s curious, this IS making a serious impact — this handbook was taught as standard practice for my EMT license course, as well as several other programs. A lot of new providers are being taught this as a matter of course.
Slides were used to teach history of art and architecture since around 1880s until they were replaced by digital modes such as PowerPoint. Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, over the decades, FAL has acquired over 600,000 slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty for teaching.
In the past couple years, the Fine Arts Library’s Digital Images and Slides Collection has been engaged in a large-scale move of our 35 mm slides to off-site storage at the Harvard Depository.
This collection of over 600,000 slides documents the history of world art and architecture up to the early 2000s. Access for retrieval of items needed by future researchers is being provided through creating HOLLIS records. We have digitized most of the slides, but the archiving of this significant teaching format, nearly in its original arrangement, will serve as a valuable record both of the past art historical interests of faculty and students, and as a tangible reminder of bygone classroom teaching practices.
These are some samples from our slide collections. We’ll be showing some of these slides at our Open House on September 18th.
hi!! prefacing this by saying i mostly read articles/watch documentaries on the subject BUT here’s a quick rundown (barring atpm):
kissinger’s shadow: the long reach of america’s most controversial statesman by greg grandin — super expansive, gives you a really good scope of kissinger’s career. my go-to recommendation tbh
kissinger: the idealist by niall ferguson — this is part one of probably a two-part series? but he hasn’t released the second book yet. this book covers the first part of kissinger’s life, so his childhood, his schooling, his military service… i’m chipping away at it and i really like it so far, it’s very in-depth but it is fairly massive
the fall of a president by woodward & bernstein but containing collected authors — a series of essays/thinkpieces/etc compiled by woodward and bernstein that kind of gives differing perspectives on nixon/watergate
king richard - nixon and watergate: an american tragedy by michael dobbs — super interesting retelling! frames nixon as this almost shakespearean figure, and follows the weeks leading up to watergate
^ these are the ones i’ve read/am reading! here’s a few i haven’t read yet but look promising:
kissinger - a biography by walter isaacson
the blood telegram: nixon, kissinger, and a forgotten genocide by gary j. bass
the trial of henry kissinger by christopher hitchens
the good die young: the verdict on henry kissinger by rojas, sunkara, walter
henry kissinger and american power: a political biography by thomas a. schwartz
note that some of these were written by people who did to some extent laud kissinger—the isaacson biography stands out in my memory, but i might be misremembering—but i think that that’s also important to read in supplement!
This is a beautiful graphic but it doesn’t explain the pros and cons of each fire type.
The Swedish torch is good for an efficient and contained fire, it’s controlled and good for cooking over and produces less light and heat than other fires. It can be difficult to keep going once you burn through the original log
The teepee is your traditional campfire. Good for heat and light not great for cooking, burns through fuel fairly quickly
The star fire is one of the slowest burning and not well protected but provides an even heat good for slow cooking and is excellent if you have limited fuel and need the protection a fire can provide
The lean to is a compact and efficient fire that evolves into a dense and hot bed of coals. The structure creates a good source of air flow which can help damp wood burn. A slightly better cooking fire that isn’t as bright. It also provides protection from wind on one side
The platform fire is incredibly hot and will create a very thick bed of coals but it doesn’t have a lot of air flow and is a little harder to get started.
The log cabin is big and bright and has lots of air flow which again is good for damp logs. You can also use this structure to start a smaller fire in the middle while drying out bigger logs. This fire will crumble into a messier bed of coals that don’t produce particularly even heat for cooking.
The modified leanto is excellent if you need it to perform multiple functions. The side with more fuel will burn bright and hot and the side with less fuel will burn less hot but more evenly and controlled, this gives you different cooking options.
Got the rest of my zine backlog up on itch.io for people to read, these are mostly free cause they’ve been posted here or I intend to post them. That being said you’re free to tip me on any of em anyway, I’m gonna be putting all my paid and free zines into a bigger bundle soon to help pay for meds so it’d be much appreciated. 🫀🫀
For $15 you can get every zine I’ve posted up on itch.io so far, 24 in total.I made my free zines temporarily $1 so they could be included in the bundle but they will also be set back to free afterwards. Anyway for the spiel, disabled trans drag thing. I’ve been especially bedridden for the past few months from fibro and cptsd, my savings are especially taking a beating as I’ve been hopping between meds and appointments trying to find treatment that works for me. If you like my work and want to help me out, and also own 24 pdfs, this bundle will be running for a month. Stay safe, ty
Thinking about how wild it is that enshittification starts as a way for the rich to squeeze the populace for more money but ends up infecting everything so even luxury products decline in quality. They’ve got more money than fucking God now and for what? Literally they can’t even buy fun nice stuff for themselves because they killed craft.
Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.
guess it’s time to post agha shahid ali’s poem about dhaka muslin
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Fun fact! Revival of Dhaka Muslin has been ongoing for quite some time. The headline of the above article is very very misleading, we know exactly how Dhaka Muslin was made. The process was very well documented. We know how it was made, but colonialism ruined the fabric’s production area and devalued the skills needed to make it such that they no longer existed. But the process itself was not lost.
That being said, efforts to bring it back are underway, and they have been making amazing progress, and succeed in creating Dhaka Muslin yet again.
This is a pretty good updated article, it has a lot of the same info as the BCC one (which also discusses some of the revival efforts) but with more of a focus on that process, an update to the story, and it details some of the other ongoing projects working on the revival!
Here’s the first weaver to manage to produce a finished piece in nearly 200 years, Al Amin.
His first piece was 300 threads, according to the article they have now been able to get into the 700s for thread counts, which is absolutely incredible.
Several projects are actually underway now each with different weavers and slightly different methods, producing fabric intended to meet or best the original!
And if you’re curious, “okay but can it pass through a ring” yes! Yes they can!
All three of these photos are of pieces made in the modern century, photos by Wasiul Bahar!
It’s a very time consuming process, and a very expensive fabric to purchase, but love and passion for it have been steadily bringing it back!
just precisely how bad was 1500s jerusalem at making maps, you ask? well,
this…is a fidget spinner
Reblog if you believe in fidget spinner earth.
Ok so a couple of really important things for understanding what’s going on with this map. First, it’s not from 1500s Jerusalem. This is the Bünting Clover Leaf Map from 1581 Hanover, Germany. This turns out to be super important for understanding the map. Why? Because it was made by a Christian.
This is a stylized map. It’s derived from a very popular kind of map called a “T and O map”, which first are found in Iberia around ~600 CE and then became very popular in Europe. Here’s an early one (12th century edition of a 7th century book describing them):
A larger, later, and more detailed one (1300):
And a modern map with the outlines of the T-and-O superimposed:
So what is a T and O map? They were a way to conceptualize the world. Pre-1492, conventional wisdom was that there were three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Asia was the largest and went at the top, with Europe to the bottom left and Africa to the bottom right. The shaft of the T was the Mediterranean, the left side of the crossbar was the Don River, and the right was the Nile River. And at the center? Jerusalem.
Here’s the thing: For most of human history, most people haven’t needed maps to get around. They were either travelling between locations they or someone in their party knew, or they were moving slowly enough (i.e. on foot or by cart) to be able to stop and ask directions. So maps weren’t navigation–they were either for education (Ptolemy’s 2nd cent CE description of the world, which was turned into many, many maps in the Middle Ages) or, far more common, for religious symbolism. Between ~500 and ~1700, the purpose of most maps was to show Christians their place in the world. T and O maps put Jerusalem at the center because it was where Jesus was crucified, and they put Asia at the top because that was where it was believed the Garden of Eden was located.
8th century T and O map from Italy. Adam and Eve are visible in the center top:
The really interesting thing about T and O maps, imo, is that they’re deliberately not accurate. People were certainly capable of making recognizable maps of the world, but they were choosing to go with this more stylized version.
1482 world map based on Ptolemy’s writings:
T and O maps, then, are deliberate. They include only what the map maker thought was important, and that is almost always a religious function.
Our modern maps, meanwhile, evolved out of a combination between the Ptolemaic maps and portolan charts. Portolan charts are navigational maps. They frequently only featured the coastline and ports, but overlaying the map is a set of rhumb lines, or paths with constant bearing with respect to true north.
One of the earliest surviving portolan charts, from 1325 Italy:
Portolan charts, by modern standards, are vastly more accurate than T and O maps, and are visibly a better representation of the Earth than a Ptolemaic map. But from the concerns of a medieval cartographer, they’re very bland and boring. There’s no representation here of important cities, religious locations, or classical allusions. It’s just a map of coastlines.
Back to the Clover Leaf map. In 1492, Columbus changed (among other things) map making. The assumption until 1498 (when it became apparent that this was not Asia and it was not a minor collection of outlying islands) was that the world had three continents–at least three accessible to human explorers. After 1500, mapmakers engaged in a race–sometimes a war–to represent the new discoveries first and most accurately. The result was a series of increasingly recognizable world maps.
There are a ton, and thanks to that and (mostly) accurate records about who went where when, you can start to date post-1492 maps based on what areas of the world they do or do not show. But the most relevant one for this post is this one:
This is a 1582 world map, which depicts a reasonably accurate Europe, Africa (including Madagascar, discovered by Europeans in 1500), and most of Asia. Japan is still difficult, as is southeast Asia; Australia is missing entirely. Over in the Americas, while most of South America is decent, North America has some struggles in the northern and western regions. Baja California is an island and everywhere north of that is missing entirely. In the south, there’s hints that the cartographer was thinking about Terra Australis Incognita–a long theorized ‘counterweight’ to the Northern Hemisphere continents. In the 1500s, various voyages attributed Tierra del Fuego, Indonesia, and Australia to the continent. Its relationship to Antarctica seems to be completely coincidental.
This is a pretty typical late 1500s map.
It’s drawn by the same cartographer as the Clover Leaf map.
Heinrich Bünting wrote a book, called Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Itinerary of Sacred Scripture), in which both maps are featured, along with many, many others. The book uses current knowledge along with the Bible to talk extensively about the Holy Land–which explains why Bünting put such an allegorical map in his book to begin with.
The Bünting Clover Leaf map isn’t an accurate representation of the world–but it does show a 16th century audience how the world was constructed in medieval theology.
This is all utterly fantastic work on T-maps. I can add one tiny tidbit: not only could Bünting draw a reasonably accurate world map if he felt like it, but also, the reason his fidget spinner map isn’t quite the standard medieval T-map shape is because he was being clever. The caption across the top, translated:
“The whole world in a cloverleaf, which is the crest of the city of Hanover, my beloved fatherland.”
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