Gallipoli Through the Soldier’s Lens
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/gallipoli-through-the-soldiers-lens
Gallipoli campaign
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign
Gallipoli (1981 film)
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_(1981_film)
Rhapsodies in Blue : Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes – The Public Domain Review
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/anna-atkins-cyanotypes
Superbe article, qui partant de cyanotypes d’algues revisite la question de l’illustration botanique, et les débats autour de la théorie de l’évolution autant que de l’étude des relations entre espèces passant avant la description isolée d’une espèce. Un travail de poète au XIXeme siècle... dont Goethe fut un des porteurs. Anticipation. Et en plus les illustrations sont magnifiques.
We can see a similar attitude displayed in Atkins’ cyanotypes. Rather than the artist choosing which parts of the plant to show or emphasize, her subject is put in a position to “draw” itself. Throughout her work, Atkins acts as an equal collaborator, arranging her specimens in desirable configurations but ultimately endowing each plant with the capacity to produce its own image. This authorial shift has important ramifications, not only for the study of Atkins’ work but for the understanding of the human relationship to the natural world at a time when the professionalization of science was still underway. While the Enlightenment vision of nature — and the illustrational conventions it produced — supported the idea that humans existed at the apex of a rigid hierarchy of being, Atkins’ cyanotypes, with all their individual imperfections, seem to hint at the existence of an underlying flux that could not be sufficiently captured by a fixed natural order.
In many ways these images are the product of a distinct historical moment — cyanotypes would not catch on as a viable replacement for botanical illustration — but modern science has legitimized a version of the worldview that Atkins’ images tacitly endorsed. Increasingly we are discovering that the maintenance of a livable biome relies upon vast webs of entanglement, yet still many of us cling to the nineteenth-century notion that we are somehow set apart from the natural world. We have developed tools that allow us to “see” everything from individual atoms to the origins of our solar system, but all of this knowledge has not stopped us from plunging headfirst into the earth’s sixth mass extinction. To understand Atkins’ cyanotypes as merely the relics of an outdated science or the fanciful experimentation of a budding artist is to disregard their most salient contribution. Her images demonstrate a way of knowing the world that is based in mutuality rather than domination. We discount such a lesson at our peril.
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Anna Atkins 1843
New York Public Library
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public Domain Review
The editors would like to thank Madeline Grimm, who oversaw the initial rounds of editing on this essay for Lapham’s Quarterly.
Paige Hirschey is an independent writer and critic specializing in the intersection of art, science, and technology. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto.
#Domaine_public #Cyanotypes #Algues #Théorie_evolution #Botanique
Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine – The Public Domain Review
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/handy-mnemonics
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time
In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.
We live in an age of visual information. Infographics flood the web, driven by accessible platforms that instantly translate information into a variety of graphic forms. News outlets routinely harvest large data sets like the census and election returns into maps and graphs that profile everything from consumer preferences to the political landscape. The current proliferation of visual information mirrors a similar moment in the early nineteenth century, when the advent of new printing techniques coincided with the rapid expansion of education. Schoolrooms from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi frontier made room for the children of farmers as well as merchants, girls as well as boys. Together, these shifts created a robust and highly competitive market for school materials, including illustrated textbooks, school atlases, and even the new genre of wall maps.
No individual exploited this publishing opportunity more than Emma Willard, one of the century’s most influential educators. From the 1820s through the Civil War, Willard’s history and geography textbooks exposed an entire generation of students to her deeply patriotic narratives, all of which were studded with innovative and creative pictures of information that sought to translate big data into manageable visual forms.
When Willard began publishing textbooks in the 1820s, she knew the competition was fierce, full of sharp-elbowed authors who routinely accused one another of plagiarizing ideas and text. To build her brand, she designed cutting-edge graphics that would differentiate her work and catch the attention of the young. Take, for instance, her “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire” of 1835.
By the nineteenth century, timelines had become relatively common, an innovation of the eighteenth century designed to feed growing public interest in ancient as well as modern history. First developed by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg in the 1750s, early timelines generally charted the lives of individuals on a chronological grid, reflecting the Enlightenment assumption that history could be measured against an absolute scale of time, moving inexorably onward from zero. In 1765, Joseph Priestley drew from calendars, chronologies, and geographies to plot the lives of two thousand men between 1200 BC and 1750 AD in his popular Chart of Biography.
After Priestley, timelines flourished, but they generally lacked any sense of the dimensionality of time, representing the past as a uniform march from left to right. By contrast, Emma Willard sought to invest chronology with a sense of perspective, presenting the biblical Creation as the apex of a triangle that then flowed forward in time and space toward the viewer. Commenting on her visual framework in 1835, Willard noted that individuals experience the past relative to their own lives, for “events apparently diminish when viewed through the vista of departed years.”1 In “Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire”, she found striking ways to represent this dimensionality of time. The birth of Christ, for example, is marked with a bright light, marking the end of the first third of human history. The discovery of America separated the second (middle) from the third (modern) stage. Each “civilization” is situated not according to its geography, as on a traditional map, but according to its connection and relation to other civilizations. Some of these societies are permeable, flowing into others, while others, such as China, are firmly demarcated to denote their isolation. By studying this map, students were encouraged to see human history as a rise and fall of civilizations — an “ancestry of nations”.
Moreover, as time flows forward the stream widens, demonstrating that history became more relevant as it unfolds and approaches the student’s own life. Historical time is not uniform but dimensional. On the one hand, this reflected her sense that time itself had accelerated through the advent of steam and rail. Traditional timelines, she found, were only partially capable of representing change in an era of rapid technological progress. Time was not absolute, but relative. On the other hand, Willard’s approach reflected her own deep nationalism, for it asked students to recognize the emergence of the United States as the culmination of human history and progress.
Willard aggressively marketed her “Perspective Sketch” to American educators, believing it to be a crucial break with other materials on the market. As she confidently expressed to a friend in 1844, “In history I have invented the map”.3 She also advocated for her “map of time” as a teaching device because she strongly believed the visual preceded the verbal — that information presented to students in graphic terms would facilitate memorization, attaching images to the mind through the eyes.
Willard’s devotion to visual mnemonics shaped much of her work. In the 1840s, she published another elaborate visual device, named the “Temple of Time”. Here, she attempted to integrate chronology with geography: the stream of time she had charted in the previous decade now occupied the floor of the temple, whose architecture she used to magnify perspective through a visual convention. Centuries — represented by pillars printed with the names of the era’s most prominent statesmen, poets, and warriors —diminished in size as they receded in time, turning the viewer’s attention toward recent history, as in the “Course of Empire”. But in the Temple of Time, the one-point perspective also invited students in to inhabit the past, laying out information in a kind of memory palace that would help them form a larger, coherent picture of world history. Readers, in other words, were invited into the palace, so they too could stand at moments in world history.
The Temple of Time is complicated, and more than a little contrived. Yet Willard reminds readers that traditional cartography relies on the same basic conceit:
In a map, great countries made up of plains, mountains, seas, and rivers, are represented by what is altogether unlike them; viz., lines, shades, and letters, on a flat piece of paper; but the divisions of the map enable the mind to comprehend, by proportional space and distance, what is the comparative size of each, and how countries are situated with respect to each other. So this picture made on paper, called a Temple of Time, though unlike duration, represents it by proportional space. It is as scientific and intelligible, to represent time by space, as it is to represent space by space.4
A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time.
Willard’s creative efforts to “map time” stemmed from personal experience. Born just after the Revolution, she was part of the first generation of American women to be educated outside the home, and she chafed at the way “female education” kept more than a few areas of knowledge off limits. One of the few subjects considered suitable for both boys and girls in that era was geography, yet Willard remembered with frustration the degree to which her textbooks lacked maps. It makes sense, then, that as a young teacher in the 1810s Willard became passionate about having her pupils draw maps — not copying them (a common practice in schools for young women at the time) but rather reproducing them in rough terms from memory to demonstrate a grasp of geographical relationships.
Willard’s own artistic creativity as a mapmaker was evident from the start. Her first textbook — a geography written with William Woodbridge and published in 1824 — includes a metaphorical map of the Amazon River and its tributaries which illustrates the evolution of the Roman Empire. (One can see in this early effort the prototype for her elaborate “Perspective Sketch” of the 1830s.)
Willard’s creativity as an educator was equally immense. In 1819 she published a plan to publicly fund the improvement of female education, which met with more than a little resistance. Two years later, she began to implement this vision by founding the Troy Female Seminary in New York—an institution that quickly became a preeminent school for future teachers and one of the most highly regarded schools for women in the country. At Troy, Willard assumed that females were capable of studying the same subjects as their male counterparts and incorporated “masculine studies”, such as science and history, into the curriculum. Her administration of Troy, and her intensive teaching in the decade prior to and after its foundation, convinced her of the multiple failures of contemporary pedagogy and textbooks.
In 1828, Willard issued the first edition of her History of the United States, or The Republic of America, a textbook so popular it would remain in print until the 1860s. One key element of the book’s success was the atlas that accompanied the text — a series of maps of the eastern US that Willard designed and executed with a former female student. In this series, each map marked particular moments or eras that either led toward or resulted from nationhood, including the landing on Plymouth Rock, the Treaty of Paris, or the late War of 1812 against Britain. Perhaps the most remarkable of these was the “introductory map”, which identified indigenous tribes through a series of geographic migrations, collapsing centuries of movement into a single image. In naming this the “introductory” map, however, Willard situated Native Americans in a prehistorical era antedating the ostensibly more significant events of European settlement. The single image she created was innovative and powerful, but it also rendered the violence of Native displacement as an inevitable prelude that gave way to the real drama of colonialism and the inevitable realization of national independence.
Willard’s commitment to creative cartography, combined with her nationalism, inspired her to create a simplified American Temple of Time in the late 1840s, which revealed a firm belief in Manifest Destiny: the providential progression from the European discovery of North America in the fifteenth century to a continental empire in the present. The concept of the American Temple was interactive, framing the chronological and geographical outlines of American history to aid memorization. Students were to identify the eight geographical entities that made up the continental United States: the original thirteen colonies, New France, the Northwest Territory, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and the area ceded by Mexico in the 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. Students were then instructed to locate each state and territory in time by shading its existence as it became part of the country (shading the colonies as they were settled, and the states as they joined the union). If the Temple were drawn large enough, there would also be enough space along the “floor” to identify important battles. The design is complex and unwieldy, but the goal is intriguing: an interactive exercise for students to integrate history and geography in order to understand how the past had—quite literally—taken place.
Willard’s final contribution to visual knowledge was perhaps the most straightforward, a “Tree of Time” that presented American history as a coherent, organic whole. There is, of course, a long tradition of presenting time as a tree (family trees being the most enduring), but Willard used the image not to represent ancestors as trunks and descendants as branches, but — rather oddly — to represent time arcing from left to right, like a timeline. She was so fond of the Tree of Time she used it to introduce all subsequent editions of her popular textbook History of the United States and even issued it on a much larger scale to be hung in classrooms.
Like the Temple, the Tree presented an encompassing history of the nation that reached back past 1789 to 1492. All of North America’s colonial history merely formed the backstory to the preordained rise of the United States. The tree also strengthened a sense of coherence, organizing the chaotic past into a series of branches that spelled out the national meaning of the past. Above all, the Tree of Time conveyed to students a sense that history moved in a meaningful direction. Imperialism, dispossession, and violence was translated, in Willard’s representation, into a peaceful and unified picture of American progress.
Ironically, it was the cataclysms of the Civil War that challenged Willard’s harmonious picture of history in the Tree of Time. In the 1844 edition of the Tree, President Harrison’s death marched the last branch of history. Twenty years later, Willard added a new branch marking the end of the US war against Mexico and the subsequent Compromise of 1850, seismic events which both raised and temporarily settled the sectional divisions over slavery. Even though the Civil War was well underway by the time she issued her last edition of tree, she marked the last branch as “1860”, with no mention of the bloody conflict that had engulfed the entire nation. Her accompanying narrative in Republic of America brought American history to the brink of war, but no further. Willard had come up against history itself.
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/emma-willard-maps-of-time
#Emma_Willard #cartographie_historique #cartographie #peuples_autochtones #infographie #femme_géographe #femme_cartographe
voir aussi :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/917835
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ajouté au fil de discussion sur les femmes géographes :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/662774
ping @visionscarto @reka
Loie Fuller and the Serpentine | Rhonda K. Garelick
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/loie-fuller-and-the-serpentine
With her “serpentine dance” — a show of swirling silk and rainbow lights — Loie Fuller became one of the most celebrated dancers of the fin de siècle. Rhonda K. Garelick explores Fuller’s unlikely stardom and how her beguiling art embodied the era’s newly blurred boundaries between human and machine. Source: The Public Domain Review
Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland – The Public Domain Review
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/fungi-folklore-and-fairyland
« Mangez-moi, Mangez-moi
C’est le chant du Psylo... »
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The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J. S.” was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. J. S. noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help, but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering in a confused state.
By chance a physician named Everard Brande was passing through this part of town, and he was summoned to treat J. S. and his family. The scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote it up at length and published it in The Medical and Physical Journal a few months later.1 The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the eight-year-old son named as “Edward S.”, whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was “attacked with fits of immoderate laughter” which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: “when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked”.
Dr Brande diagnosed the family’s condition as the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Today, we can be more specific: this was intoxication by liberty caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the “magic mushrooms” that grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses, and playing fields of Britain every autumn. The botanical illustrator James Sowerby, who was working on the third volume of his landmark Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1803), interrupted his schedule to visit J. S. and identify the species in question. Sowerby’s illustration includes a cluster of unmistakable liberty caps, together with a similar-looking species (now recognised as a roundhead of the Stropharia genus). In his accompanying note, Sowerby emphasises that it was the pointy-headed variety (“with the pileus acuminated”) that “nearly proved fatal to a poor family in Piccadilly, London, who were so indiscreet as to stew a quantity” for breakfast.
Alors là, la ressemblance entre le bonnet phrygien et les psylos dans les champs... je ne l’avais encore jamais lue. Et la médaille de Benjamin franklin ne laisse pourtant aucun doute.
During the nineteenth century, the liberty cap took on a different set of associations, derived not from its visionary properties but its distinctive appearance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have been the first to suggest its common name in a short piece published in 1812 in Omniana, a miscellany co-written with Robert Southey. Coleridge was struck by that “common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of Liberty that it seems offered by Nature herself as the appropriate emblem of Gallic republicanism”.3 The cap of Liberty, or Phrygian cap, a peaked felt bonnet associated with the similar-looking pileus worn by freed slaves in the Roman empire, had become an icon of political freedom through the revolutionary movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. William of Orange included it as a symbol on a coin struck to celebrate his Glorious Revolution in 1688; the anti-monarchist MP John Wilkes holds it, mounted on its pole, in William Hogarth’s devilish caricature of 1763. It appears on a medal designed by Benjamin Franklin to commemorate July 4, 1776, under the banner LIBERTAS AMERICANA, and it was adopted during the French Revolution by the sans-culottes as their signature bonnet rouge. It was these associations — rather than its psychoactive properties, of which he shows no knowledge — that led Coleridge to celebrate it as the “mushroom Cap of Liberty”, a name that percolated through the many reprints of Omniana into nineteenth-century British culture, folklore, and botany.
In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives — Alice in Wonderland, for example — aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
Despite its ubiquity, and occasional and tentative association with nature spirits, the mushroom that became the distinctive motif of fairyland was not the liberty cap but rather the spectacular red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). The fly agaric is psychoactive but unlike the liberty cap, which delivers psilocybin in reliable doses, it contains a mix of alkaloids — muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid — which generate an unpredictable and toxic cocktail of effects. These can include wooziness and disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the lips and extremities, nausea, muscle twitches, sleep, and a vague, often retrospective sense of liminal consciousness and waking dreams. At lower doses, none of these may manifest; at higher doses they may lead to coma and, on rare occasions, death.
Let us turn now to the most famous and frequently-debated conjunction of fungi, psychedelia, and fairy-lore: the array of mushrooms and hallucinatory potions, mind-bending and shapeshifting motifs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Do Alice’s adventures represent first-hand knowledge of hallucinogenic mushrooms?
The scenes in question could hardly be better known. Alice, down the rabbit hole, meets a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom, who tells her in a “languid, sleepy voice” that the mushroom is the key to navigating through her strange journey: “one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow shorter”. Alice takes a chunk from each side of the mushroom and begins a series of vertiginous transformations of size, shooting up into the clouds before learning to maintain her normal size by eating alternate bites. Throughout the rest of the book she continues to take the mushroom: entering the house of the Duchess, approaching the domain of the March Hare, and, climactically, before entering the hidden garden with the golden key.
Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Alice’s mind-expanding journeys owed anything to the actual drug experiences of their author. Although Carroll — in daily life the Reverend Charles Dodgson — was a moderate drinker and, to judge by his library, opposed to alcohol prohibition, he had a strong dislike of tobacco smoking and wrote sceptically in his letters about the pervasive presence in syrups and soothing tonics of powerful narcotics like opium — the “medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood”.8 Yet Alice’s adventures may have their roots in a psychedelic mushroom experience. The scholar Michael Carmichael has demonstrated that, a few days before he began writing the story, Carroll made his only ever visit to Oxford’s Bodleian library, where a copy of Mordecai Cooke’s recently-published drug survey The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860) had been deposited.9 The Bodleian copy of this book still has most of its pages uncut, with the exception of the contents page and the chapter on the fly agaric, entitled “The Exile of Siberia”. Carroll was particularly interested in Russia: it was the only country he ever visited outside Britain. And, as Carmichael puts it, Carroll “would have been immediately attracted to Cooke’s Seven Sisters of Sleep for two more obvious reasons: he had seven sisters and he was a lifelong insomniac”.
If so, he was neither a secret drug initiate nor a Victorian gentleman entirely innocent of the arcane knowledge of drugs. In this sense, Alice’s otherworld experiences seem to hover, like much of Victorian fairy literature and fantasy, in a borderland between naïve innocence of such drugs and knowing references to them. We read them today from a very different vantage point, one in which magic mushrooms are consumed far more widely than in the Victorian or indeed any previous era. In our thriving psychedelic culture, fly agaric is only to be encountered at the distant margins; by contrast, psilocybin mushrooms are a global phenomenon, grown and consumed in virtually every country on earth and even making inroads into clinical psychotherapy. Today the liberty cap is an emblem of a new political struggle: the right to “cognitive liberty”, the free and legal alteration of one’s own consciousness.
#Domaine_public #Champignons_hallucinogènes #Amanite_Tue-mouches #Psylocybine #Alice_au_pays_des_merveilles #Lewis_Caroll #Contes_de_fées
“A Very Speedy Way to Be Besotted”: How the English Found Cannabis | Benjamin Breen
▻https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/a-very-speedy-way-to-be-besotted-how-the-english-found-cannabis
In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London. Source: The Public Domain Review
