The Public Domain Review – Online journal dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web

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  • The Landlord’s Game: Lizzie Magie and Monopoly’s Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-landlords-game

    The board for Lizzie Magie’s 1906 version of The Landlord’s Game — Source (Courtesy of LandlordsGame.info).

    There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun.

    In early 1933, Richard Brace Darrow went to a dinner party where he was taught a new game. He had such a good time, and waxed so enthusiastic, his hosts typed up the game’s rules and sent Darrow a copy. Then Darrow proceeded to draw his own version, on a circular piece of oilcloth. (The version he’d played at the dinner party had also been homemade — mass-produced board games were not yet an ordinary commodity.)

    Darrow was a heater salesman who’d lost his job and times were lean. He decided to take his prototype and pitch the game to Parker Brothers. The rules were exactly the same as those his friends had shared, down to the misspelling of Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens. Parker Brothers didn’t bite right away, but then they did, and Darrow became a millionaire.

    Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement — a self-made man who saved himself from poverty through ingenuity and hard work. Darrow and Parker Brothers stuck to this story, even to the point of suppressing contradictory evidence. Parker Brothers bought up early homemade versions of Monopoly, presumably to have them destroyed, and somehow maneuvered their patent despite existing patents. Everyone in Darrow’s social circle knew the truth and some tried to say so. They were ignored.

    Perhaps Darrow quelled his conscience by imagining the game had no inventor. In fact, with a bit of effort, he could have tracked her down. She was still alive, and still making games. As was later detailed, Darrow learned the game at the Todds’ house, and the Todds learned it from a friend, Eugene Raiford. Eugene learned it from his brother, Jesse. Jesse learned it from Ruth Hoskins, who taught at a Quaker School in Atlantic City. Ruth learned it in Indianapolis, from someone named Dan Laymen, who had played it in his frat house in college. The frat brothers who taught everyone else to play were Louis and Ferdinand Thun. They learned it from their sister, Wilma, who learned it from her husband Charles Muhlenberg. Charles learned the game from Thomas Wilson, who learned it in his college economics class, with the radical Wharton/UPenn economics professor Scott Nearing. (Nearing played the game with his students until he was fired, in 1915, for criticizing industrial capitalism.) The trail ends here, for Nearing learned the game directly from its remarkable inventor, Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie, who filed a patent for it in 1903.

    Lizzie Magie’s original patent for The Landlord’s Game, filed in 1903 and granted in 1904 — Source.

    Lizzie Magie was a provocative, whip-smart nonconformist. Piqued about her dismal salary as a young working woman in the late nineteenth century, she caused a national furor by taking out an ad in a major magazine, describing herself as a “young woman American slave” for sale to the highest-bidding suitor. She filed many patents, not just on Monopoly (which she called The Landlord’s Game), but other games too, and also for a mechanical device that improved the ease of typing — all this at a time when the number of patents filed by women was miniscule, less than 1%. Born in 1866, Magie didn’t marry until she was forty-four, and had no children. She wrote poems, performed in dramatic theater, taught college-level courses in her home, corresponded with Upton Sinclair, and studied economic theory. Her father was close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Both father and daughter were devout followers of the teachings of economist Henry George, whose 1879 treatise Progress and Poverty made the case for a single tax, on land. Like her fellow Georgists, Magie believed that ownership of nature was not possible — the earth was not something that could be owned. Land could, however, be “rented”, thus comprising the single tax. Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to teach and proselytize the principles of Georgism.

    At first Magie self-published her game, producing a small number of copies she sold to friends. A few years later, she found a publisher in the Economic Game Company, who helped The Landlord’s Game find an audience in “pockets of intellectuals along the eastern seaboard”, writes Mary Pilon, and in Scotland, where Magie debuted a version she called Brer Fox and Rabbit.

    As the game’s popularity spread, bootlegs sprang up, including the version at the Todd’s dinner party. Monopoly changed in its telephone-like peregrinations. Most of the property names were altered, often in ways specific to the town in which the game was being played. Someone thought to group properties with colors, and the Quaker players, to make the game less raucous, eliminated both dice and the bidding that preceded a property purchase. Darrow hired a graphic artist to draw the now-iconic “Go” and various pictograms, and Magie herself kept fiddling, updating her patent with new properties and rules.

    Most of these changes were superficial, but one was not. Magie’s original concept included two sets of rules representing the difference between a Georgist and capitalist economy. By one set, players tried to produce equity through a single land tax, such that wealth was evenly distributed and winning the game a collective achievement. By the other, players tried to build monopolies and fleece their opponents. As is obvious, Darrow favored set two. What Magie intended as a forecast of disaster became Monopoly’s sole objective.

    In November 1935, George Parker visited Magie and finally offered to buy her patent. The offer wasn’t about restitution, but rather part of a corporate strategy to absorb games that threatened Monopoly’s monopoly: Easy Money, Finance, Inflation, and, of course, Magie’s Landlord’s Game. To sweeten the deal, Parker promised that his company would not only market The Landlord’s Game, but also develop two new games of Magie’s design. Magie agreed, and Parker Brothers did as promised, though without much oomph. The Landlord’s Game received little press, and Magie’s subsequent games, King’s Men and Bargain Day, fared poorly. Monopoly, on the other hand, went global.

    Illustrations from Charles Darrow’s patent for Monopoly, filed on August 31, 1935 — Source.

    Parker Brothers president Robert Barton later admitted, “Whether [Darrow] got it all from Magie Phillips, whether he got it from somewhere else, we didn’t know. And we cared very little.” Darrow glibly lied, Parker Brothers pretended ignorance, and the collusion worked perfectly for decades. After the umpteenth interview in which Darrow repeated Monopoly’s fake origin story, in 1964, one of his former dinner party friends wrote a letter to the show’s producer, WRCV-TV in Philadelphia. He described precisely where Darrow got the game, and noted the irritation of everyone involved. The letter writer concludes, “There is nothing to be gained by writing you this letter except, perhaps, to vent my feelings and point out . . . that everything in this world is not what it seems to be.”

    This entire story would have been lost had Parker Brothers not decided to pursue legal action against a Berkeley economist, Ralph Anspach, who began marketing a game he called Anti-Monopoly in 1973. Parker Brothers (by then owned by General Mills) sent Anspach a frightening cease and desist letter. Anspach thought the grounds ridiculous: no one would ever confuse his scrappy Anti-Monopoly (originally christened “Bust the Trust”) with the global sensation Monopoly — so rather than ceasing and desisting, he began digging up the history of the game, to see if there were grounds to contest Parker Brothers’ copyright claim. Indeed, there were. When Anspach realized Parker Brothers was defending a patent built on a house of cards, he took the company to court. The role of Lizzie Magie was a happy research surprise. As for the flip flop at the center of the story — a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profits a man — that part wasn’t much of a surprise at all.

    #Domaine_public #Monopoly

  • Aftershock of the New: Woodblock Prints of Post-Disaster Tokyo (1928–32) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/aftershock-of-the-new

    The shockwave struck at lunchtime. Witnesses would later state that tremors rocked Tokyo for ten full minutes, igniting fires across the city as lit stoves and cooking oil were thrown together in the chaos of the magnitude-7.9 earthquake. With water mains severed, the resultant blazes spread unchecked across the largely timber cityscape, consuming everything in their wake as the winds whipped them onwards. By the time the aftershocks petered out and the last flames were extinguished, the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, as it would come to be known, had claimed over 100,000 lives — including thousands of ethnic Koreans and others murdered amidst xenophobic rumors of sabotage — and the face of Japan’s capital had been altered forever.

    Yet in the aftermath of this tragedy, the tone of many bureaucrats and public planners in Tokyo was one of optimism, almost cheer, at the vast expanses of burnt-over nothingness that now provided them with space in which to lay out broad new roads and grand civic buildings in imported styles. This is the vision put forward in One Hundred Views of New Tokyo (Shin Tokyo Hyakkei), a collection of prints by eight artists published between 1928 and 1932. The artists who contributed to the series were part of the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement, which brought new techniques and aesthetic vocabularies to the Japanese woodblock.

    #Optimisme #Tokyo #Art_déco

  • John H. White’s Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973–74)
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-h-white-documerica

    While still in his twenties, White (b. 1945) was contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of DOCUMERICA, a project that sought to produce a visual record of the nation and its people with a particular — but not an exclusive — focus on ecology. The program made use of local photographers around the country and generally provided little in the way of guidelines or restrictions on subject matter; collectively, White and the rest of the DOCUMERICA cohort produced over 20,000 images, often using the openness of their assignment to create a body of work that shines not just with environmental urgency but with artistic vision too.

    #USA #culture #histoire #Chicago #seventies #blacls

  • “Mother Will Be Pleased”: How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/how-it-feels-to-be-run-over

    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”.

    #Domaine_public #Film #Accident

  • Theresa Babb’s Photographs of Friendship (ca. 1898) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/babb-photographs

    In The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, Marilyn Yalom describes the rise of the “new woman” in the late-nineteenth century, whose education, race, and class position created “a new model of friendship” that was “to last for much of the twentieth century”. She quotes a woman interviewed during this rise: “We live for our friends, and at bottom for no other reason.” Babb’s portraits do not fall neatly into this history, but certainly share the quoted sentiment. The groups of women she photographed are neither fully focused on the ennobling, moral uplift associated with “the serious New Woman” nor anticipatory of the “carefree flapper” that was to follow. Instead, we find joyful depictions of friendship among women, often on countryside outings, during a decade in US history remembered as “the gay nineties”. In the image above, Babb and three friends drink, heads thrown back, while lounging on a rocky shore. A fifth woman stares off toward the water, either comically posed in feigned disapproval or simply lost in thought. Several other images continue the theme, reflecting the pleasures of posing in groups. In a photograph captioned “Camping crowd at Ogier Point”, four women lean on each other, pulling faces for the camera; another image depicts friends and family of Babbs stacked on a ladder, with her sister, Grace Parker, on top.

    The activities are numerous: dancing, picnicking, dog walking, dinner parties, photography, bicycling, child care, hammocking, and naps on the beach are all represented. Spending time with these images, we start to feel as if we know Theresa Babb. And yet, in terms of biographical information, we know very little. Her husband was the treasurer of Knox Woolen Mill, Charles W. Babb, and her son, Charles Jr., succeeded in the family business, becoming President of the mill. On the envelopes that house the negatives of these photographs, Theresa Babb wrote detailed captions, small missives to some future onlooker.

    #Domaine_public #Femmes #Photographie

  • Clouds of Unknowing : Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas (1830)

    “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps”, says the seafaring raconteur #Charles_Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm). “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ’When I grow up I will go there.’” Of course, these “blank spaces” were anything but. The no-man’s-lands that colonial explorers like #Marlow found most inviting (the Congo River basin, #Tasmania, the #Andaman_Islands) were, in fact, richly populated, and faced devastating consequences in the name of imperial expansion.

    In the same troublesome vein as Marlow, Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas painted cartographic knowledge as a candle coruscating against the void of ignorance, represented in his unique vision by a broiling mass of black cloud. Each map represents the bounds of geographical learning at a particular point in history, from a specific civilizational perspective, beginning with Eden, circa “B.C. 2348”. In the next map titled “B.C. 1491. The Exodus of the Israelites”, Armenia, Assyria, Arabia, Aram, and Egypt form an island of light, pushing back the black clouds of unknowing. As history progresses — through various Roman dynasties, the reign of Charlemagne, and the Crusades — the foul weather retreats further. In the map titled “A.D. 1498. The Discovery of America”, the transatlantic exploits of the so-called Age of Discovery force Quin to employ a shift in scale — the luminescence of his globe now extends to include Africa and most of Asia, but North America hides behind cumulus clouds, with its “unnamed” eastern shores peeking out from beneath a storm of oblivion. In the Atlas’ last map, we find a world without darkness, not a trace of cloud. Instead, unexplored territories stretch out in the pale brown of vellum parchment, demarcating “barbarous and uncivilized countries”, as if the hinterlands of Africa and Canada are awaiting colonial inscription.

    Not much is known about Edward Quin, the Oxford graduate, London barrister, and amateur cartographer whose Atlas was published two years after his death at the age of thirty-four. We learn, thanks to Walter Goffart’s research into historical atlases, that Quin’s images were more popular than his words. The well-regarded cartographer William Hughes rescaled the maps for a new edition in 1846, discarding their artist’s accompanying text. The Atlas’ enduring technical advancement, which influenced subsequent cartographers, can be found in its ingenious use of negative space. Emma Willard’s Atlas to Accompany a System of Universal History, for instance, features cloudy borders that seem very much indebted to Quin.

    Looking back from a contemporary vantage, the Historical Atlas remains memorable for what is not shown. Quin’s cartography inadvertently visualizes the ideology of empire: a geographic chauvinism that had little respect for the knowledge of those beyond imperial borders. And aside from depicting the reach of Kublai Khan, his focus remains narrowly European and Judeo-Christian. While Quin strives for accuracy, he admits to programmatic omission. “The colours we have used being generally meant to point out and distinguish one state or empire from another. . . were obviously inapplicable to deserts peopled by tribes having no settled form of government, or political existence, or known territorial limits”. Instead of representing these groups, Quin, like his clouds, has erased them from view.

    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/edward-quin-historical-atlas
    #cartographie_historique #cartographie #connu #inconnu #géographie_du_vide #vide #histoire #Tasmanie #fleuve_Congo #colonisation #colonialisme #Edward_Quin #atlas

    ping @reka @visionscarto

    via @isskein

  • On the Road : The Woman and the Car (1909) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-woman-and-the-car

    In the early twentieth century, Dorothy Levitt, née Elizabeth Levi (1882-1922) was “the premier woman motorist and botorist [motorboat driver] of the world”. The first Englishwoman to drive in a public competition, she triumphed during races in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, defeated all challengers at the Championship of the Seas in Trouville, and set the women’s world record in the Brighton Speed Trials: a whopping 79.75 miles per hour — lightspeed, circa 1905.

    In Levitt’s “little handbook”, we find a similar hunger for the fraught freedom of the road that would eventually preoccupy the mid-century American imagination — exploited in novels like On the Road and Lolita, and in films such as Easy Rider — and which continues to provide a mesh of mechanist escapism in the British television program Top Gear:

    There may be pleasure in being whirled around the country by your friends and relatives, or in a car driven by your chauffeur; but the real, the intense pleasure, the actual realisation of the pastime comes only when you drive your own car.

    Above all else, The Woman and the Car endures as a pamphlet of petro-feminist empowerment:

    You may be afraid, as I am, of driving in a hansom through the crowded streets of town—you may be afraid of a mouse, or so nervous that you are startled at the slightest of sudden sounds—yet you can be a skilful motorist, and enjoy to the full delights of this greatest of out-door pastimes, if you possess patience —the capacity for taking pains.

    She ends her treatise with a reflection on recent historical progress. “Twenty or thirty years ago, two of the essentials to a motorist—some acquaintance with mechanics and the ability to understand local topography—were supposed to be beyond the capacity of a woman’s brain.” Levitt was not only instrumental in advancing equality behind the steering wheel, she also forever altered the automobile form. Decades before rearview mirrors became standard issue, she recommended that ladies carry a hand mirror, for holding up to the landscape receding in their dusty tracks.

    #Pétro-féminisme #Automobile #Féminisme #Domaine_public

  • The Cubies’ ABC (1913) – The Public Domain Review
    https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-cubies-abc-1913

    Trop fun cet abécédaire anti-cubiste.

    We tend to forget, now that the Cubists and Futurists have become as integral to the history of art as the painters of the Dutch Golden Age and the Italian Renaissance, how hostile most people — even most artists — felt toward the non-representational innovations of the artists on display at the Armory.

    For every open-minded viewer like William Carlos Williams, who later said he was “tremendously stirred” by what the show represented, there were dozens who felt more like the anonymous American quoted above — or like Mary Mills and Earl Harvey Lyall, who immortalized their disgust with “the Cubies”, stars of a novel alphabet book published sometime before the end of 1913.

    The mean-spirited, if sometimes hilarious, text of The Cubies’ ABC was composed by Mary (1879–1963), about whom nothing is known. The equally mean-spirited, if somewhat cutesy, illustrations were done by her architect husband, Earl (1877–1932).

    #Domaine_public #Cubisme