~openculture | Bookmarks (55)

At the moment, you can’t see the largest, most detailed handmade model of Imperial Rome for yourself. That’s because the Museo della Civiltà Romana, the institution that houses it, has been closed for renovations since 2014. But you can get a guided tour of “Il Plastico,” as this grand Rome-in-miniature is known, through the new […]

Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above, humanity began cultivating it “in […]

Image via  Pompeii Archaeological Park Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at the evening’s end finding yourself in a room dedicated to late-night entertaining, painted entirely black except for a few scenes from antiquity. Perhaps this wouldn’t sound entirely implausible in, say, twenty-first century Silicon Valley. But such places also existed […]

If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books. It helps, but it’s not 100 percent necessary: even if you’ve never learned a single kanji character, you’ve probably marveled at one time or another at the aesthetics of Japan’s print culture. Maybe you’ve even done so here at […]

More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day-to-day existence. These had a way of being […]

Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An […]

When did you last send someone a photo? That question may sound odd, owing to the sheer commonness of the act in question; in the twenty-twenties, we take photographs and share them worldwide without giving it a second thought. But in the nineteen-thirties, almost everyone who sent a photo did so through the mail, if […]

What did ancient Egyptians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egyptian medicine and tools do we still use in modern times? Why did they practice mummification? Above, Laurel Bestock, a professor from Brown University, discusses everything you ever wanted to know about Ancient Egypt. Not a stranger to popular media productions—Bestock […]

If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or coffee shop in Addis Ababa, we can figure it out in a matter of seconds. This is, in historical terms, a recent development indeed: many of us remember when the most detailed cartographical information […]

Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures. These very words might start a […]

Pursued to any depth, the question of whether the United States of America counts as an empire becomes difficult to address with clarity. On one hand, the country has exerted a strong cultural influence on most of the world for the better part of a century, a phenomenon not unrelated to the military presence that […]

In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it […]

More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have […]

After about a century of indirect company rule, India became a full-fledged British colony in 1858. The consequences of this political development remain a matter of heated debate today, but one thing is certain: it made India into a natural destination for enterprising Britons. Take the aspiring clergyman turned Nottingham bank employee Samuel Bourne, who […]

This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an early version of a certain Mickey Mouse — into the public domain. Though it may look comparatively primitive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actually represents a great many advancements in the […]

The YouTube channel Lost in Time has taken footage from the legendary Lumière brothers, originally shot in 1896, then upscaled and colorized it, giving us a chance to see a distant world through a modern lens. Nearing the end of the 19th century, the film pioneers (and their employees) visited different parts of the world […]

Lawrence Fishburne brings a degree of gravity to his roles offered by few other living actors. That has secured his place in pop culture as Morpheus from The Matrix, for example. But he could even marshal it early in his career, as evidenced by his role as Apocalypse Now’s “Mr. Clean,” which he took on […]

During World War II, Tokyo sustained heavy damage, especially with the bombings conducted by the U.S. military in March 1945. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, US air raids destroyed 16 square miles in central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. Tokyo didn’t recover quickly. It took until the 1950s for reconstruction to really […]

For many, even most of us moderns, the central religious choice is a simple one: adhere to the belief system in which you grew up, or stop adhering to it. But if you survey the variety of religions in the world, the situation no longer seems quite so binary; if you then add the variety […]

The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of changing their names, however foreign they sounded. You can learn […]

In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be here. Faced with this fact, especially dedicated enthusiasts of Catalan architecture may already be planning their festivities. But we can be sure where the real pressure is felt: the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most […]

In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing in three different languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. Before long, English troops captured the stone and brought it to the British Museum in 1802—where it remains today. The animated video above, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, […]

Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in the Middle Ages, a young student in the twenty-twenties might well reply, before getting around to any other details, that it involved no smartphones. But even the flashiest new technologies have long evolutionary histories, and, in certain notable respects, […]

The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep […]