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Monday, October 2nd, 2017
- Buddhism and Modern Psychology - Robert Wright/Princeton University on Coursera - October 2 (6 weeks)
- Effective Altruism - Brian Singer/Princeton University on Coursera - October 2 (9 weeks)
- Causes of Climate Change - University of Bergen on FutureLearn - October 2 (3 weeks)
- Roman Architecture - Yale University on Coursera - October 2
- Seeing Through Photographs - The Museum of Modern Art on Coursera - October 2 (6 weeks)
- Greek and Roman Mythology - University of Pennsylvania on Coursera - October 2 (10 weeks)
- Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom - The Museum of Modern Art on Coursera - October 2 (4 weeks)
- Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance - Monash University on FutureLearn - October 2 (6 weeks)
- Classical Sociological Theory - University of Amsterdam on Coursera - October 2 (8 weeks)
- Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life - The University of Chicago on Coursera - October 2
- The Spain of Don Quixote - Universidad Autónoma de Madrid on edX - October 3
- Introduction to Health and Wellness - Arizona State University on edX - October 9 (8 weeks)
- Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe - Arizona State University on edX - October 9 (53 weeks)
- Introduction to Solar Systems Astronomy - Arizona State University on edX - October 9 (53 weeks)
| Time | Event |
| 7:23a | 1,000+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in October: Enroll Today
In many parts of the world, the school year is now officially in session. For kids. And for you. In October, 1,000+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be getting underway, giving you the chance to take free courses from top flight universities. With the help of Class Central, we've pulled together a complete list of October MOOCS. And below we've highlighted several courses that piqued our interest, including Buddhism and Modern Psychology (see video above) taught by bestselling author Robert Wright (Why Buddhism Is True), and Effective Altruism presented by eminent philosopher Peter Singer. Here's one tip to keep in mind: If you want to take a course for free, select the "Full Course, No Certificate" or "Audit" option when you enroll. If you would like an official certificate documenting that you have successfully completed the course, you will need to pay a fee. You can browse through the complete list of October MOOCs here. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. 1,000+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in October: Enroll Today 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.  |
| 10:40a | Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression
An odd phenomenon has been at work in the past few years. Print book sales slope upward while eBook sales creep down. The trend manifests the opposite of what most people—or most people who write about these things—expected to happen, quite reasonably in many respects. Perhaps through sheer historical momentum, print retains its aura of authority. But everyone knows that buying isn’t reading, which may indeed be in decline given the primacy of images, audio, and video, of YouTube explainers and documentaries such as the one above, which tells the tale of the “Pack Horse Librarians." These forgotten heroes, like the famed Pony Express, braved wind, rain, and rough terrain to deliver books to isolated settlers who otherwise may have had nothing to read.
But this is not a tale of cowboys and frontiersmen. The Pack Horse Librarians appeared in an Industrial Age, and what’s more they were mostly women. Called “book ladies” and “packsaddle librarians,” the librarians were deputized during the New Deal, when FDR sought to end the Great Depression by creating hundreds of jobs addressed to the country’s real social, material, and cultural needs. In this case, the Pack Horse Librarians responded to what many of us might consider a crisis, if not a crime. “About 63% of the residents of Kentucky were without access to public libraries,” and somewhere around 30% of rural Kentuckians were illiterate. Those rural Kentuckians saw education as a way out of poverty, and the Works Progress Administration agreed, overseeing the book delivery project between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” made around $28 a month (a little over $500 in 2017) delivering books to homes and schoolhouses. By 1936, writes the site Appalachian History, “handmade and donated materials could not sustain the circulation needs of the pack horse patrons.”
To compensate for scarcity, a University of Kentucky presentation notes, librarians themselves created books of “mountain recipes and scrap books of current events." But the service quickly grew to delivering more than 3,000 donated books per month, after a drive in which every PTA member in the state gave to the cause.
Eleanor Roosevelt (photographed above visiting a Packhorse Library in West Liberty, KY) was a champion of the service, which founder Elizabeth Fullerton modeled after a similar venture in 1913, itself a professionalization of work done by the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs in the late 19th century. We can see that the history of women librarians on horseback goes back quite a ways. But it is a history now forgotten, despite the efforts of recent books like Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. A recent trend involves suggesting historical American figures who might replace all those monuments to the Confederacy. We might well add Pack Horse Librarians to the distinguished list of candidates.
The service lost its funding in 1943, “leaving some communities without access to books for decades,” Appalachian History writes, “until bookmobiles were introduced to the area in the late 1950s.” These services seem quaint in an era when widespread delivery by drone seems imminent. We seemingly live in the most information-rich, instant access society in history. Yet a significant number of people in the U.S. and around the world have little to no access to the internet. And a similar degree of illiteracy—at least of basic information and critical reasoning—may warrant a similarly direct intervention.
Related Content: The Future of Content Delivery Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression 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. |
| 2:00p | 1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600-1912)
Surely we've all wondered what we might do as prominent nineteenth-century industrialists, and more than a few of us (especially here in the Open Culture crowd) would no doubt invest our fortunes in the art of the world. Railcar manufacturing magnate Charles Lang Freer did just that, as we can see today in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Together with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Sackler having made it as "the father of modern pharmaceutical advertising"), it constitutes the Smithsonian Institution's national museum of Asian art, gathering everything from ancient Egyptian stone sculpture to Chinese paintings to Korean pottery to Japanese books.
We like to highlight Japanese book culture here every so often (see the related content below) not just because of its striking aesthetics and consummate craftsmanship but because of its deep history. You can now experience a considerable swath of that history free online at the Freer|Sacker Library's web site, which just this past summer finished digitizing over one thousand books — now more than 1,100, which breaks down to 41,500 separate images — published during Japan's Edo and Meiji periods, a span of time reaching from 1600 to 1912. "Often filled with beautiful multi-color illustrations," writes Reiko Yoshimura at the Smithsonian Libraries' blog, "many titles are by prominent Japanese traditional and ukiyo-e ('floating world') painters such as Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)."
Yoshimura directs readers to such volumes as Hokusai's One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Utagawa Toyokuni's Thirty-Six Popular Actors, and artist, craftsman, and designer Kōetsu's collection of one hundred librettos for noh theater performances. Even those who can't read classical Japanese will admire an aesthete like Kōetsu's way with what Yoshimura calls his "caligraphic 'font,'" all "skillfully printed on luxurious mica embellished papers using wooden movable-type."
While the online collection's scans come in a more than high enough resolution for general appreciation, to get the full effect of bookmaking techniques like mica embellishment — which only sparkles when seen in real life — you'd have to visit the physical collection. Some things, it seems, can't yet be digitized. Enter the collection of Japanese Illustrated Books here. Related Content: Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600-1912) 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. |
| 5:00p | An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965)
A visit to an artist’s studio can shed light on his or her work. The British Arts Council’s short film above affords an intimate glimpse into Alberto Giacometti’s studio in Montparnasse circa 1965, the year when he was the subject of major retrospectives at both the Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist passed most of his working life in cramped space at 46 rue Hippolyte. Early on, he entertained plans to relocate “because it was too small – just a hole." Others visitors to the studio described the artist’s environs in more literary terms: In a charming little forgotten garden he has a studio, submerged in plaster, and he lives next to this in a kind of hangar, vast and cold, with neither furniture nor food. He works very hard for fifteen hours at a stretch, above all at night: the cold, his frozen hands – he takes no notice, he works. - Simone de Beauvoir And: This ground floor studio... is going to cave in at any moment now. It is made of worm-eaten wood and grey powder.... Everything is stained and ready for the bin, everything is precarious and about to collapse, everything is about to dissolve, everything is floating.... And yet it all appears to be captured in an absolute reality. When I leave the studio, when I am outside on the street, then nothing that surrounds me is true. - Playwright Jean Genet And: The whole place looking as if it had been thrown together with a few old sticks and a lot of chewing gum.... In short, a dump. Anyway he said come in when I knocked.... He turned and glanced at me, holding out his hand which was covered in clay, so I shook his wrist.... He immediately resumed work, running his fingers up and down the clay so fiercely that lumps fell onto the floor - Essayist James Lord These impressions paint a portrait of a driven, and disciplined artist, who logged untold hours modeling his formes elongee in clay, unceremoniously crumpling and rebuilding in the pursuit of excellence. The camera documents this intensity, though his untranslated remarks suggest a man capable of taking himself lightly, certainly more so than the accompanying narration does. Like the narration, Roger Smalley's dissonant score lays it on thick, the sonic equivalent of heads like blades and "limbs bound as though bandaged for the grave." Perhaps we should conceive of the studio as a scary place? In actuality, it proved a hospitable work environment and the impulse to relocate eventually waned, with the artist observing that “the longer I stayed, the bigger it became. I could fit anything I wanted into it.” Explore the recent Tate Modern Giacometti retrospective here and take a closer look at the studio via Ernst Scheidegger’s photos. "Giacometti" will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Iconic Artists at Work: Watch Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet and More 1.8 Million Free Works of Art from World-Class Museums: A Meta List of Great Art Available Online Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965) 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. |
| 9:29p | Tom Petty (RIP) and the Heartbreakers Perform Their Final Song Together, “American Girl” (Sept 25 at the Hollywood Bowl)
&start=154 It was already a terrible day. Then came the news that Tom Petty has passed away at the age of 66. The cause, apparently a heart attack. This summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to see my first Tom Petty show, knowing it might be his "last trip around the country," the final big tour. And I'm so glad I did. It was a wonderful show, a magical two-hour singalong, which ended with "American Girl." Above, you can see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play their last song together--again "American Girl"--at their final gig at the Hollywood Bowl. This video was recorded on September 25, 2017, just a few short days ago. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Tom Petty (RIP) and the Heartbreakers Perform Their Final Song Together, “American Girl” (Sept 25 at the Hollywood Bowl) 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. |
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