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Thursday, December 28th, 2017
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| 9:00a | The American Revolution: A Free Course from Yale University [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <div class="oc-video-container"http://cdn8.openculture.com/>
<p>When you have a little time, you can drop in on a free course that revisits a seminal moment in U.S. history--the American Revolution. Taught by Yale historian <a href="https://history.yale.edu/people/joanne-freeman">Joanne Freeman,</a> the course explores how the Revolution brought about "some remarkable transformations–converting British colonists into American revolutionaries, and a cluster of colonies into a confederation of states with a common cause." You can access the 25 lectures above, or on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDA2BC5E785D495AB">YouTube</a> and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-revolution-video/id429467735?mt=2">iTunes</a>. Also <a href="https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-116?qt-course=1#qt-course">find a syllabus for the course on this Yale web site</a>.</p>
<p>"The American Revolution" will be added to our list of <a href="http://www.openculture.com/history_free_courses">Free History Courses</a>, a subset of our larger collection, <span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses">1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities</a>.</span></p>
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<p><strong>Related Content:</strong></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University" href="http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/the_history_of_the_world_in_46_lectures.html" rel="bookmark">The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University</a></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to 14,000 Free Images from the French Revolution Now Available Online" href="http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/14000-free-images-from-the-french-revolution-now-available-online.html" rel="bookmark">14,000 Free Images from the French Revolution Now Available Online</a></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures" href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/a-master-list-of-1300-free-courses-from-top-universities-45000-hours-of-audiovideo-lectures.html" rel="bookmark">A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures</a></p>
<!-- permalink:http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-american-revolution-a-free-course-from-yale-university.html--><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/the-american-revolution-a-free-course-from-yale-university.html">The American Revolution: A Free Course from Yale University</a> is a post from: <a href="http://www.openculture.com">Open Culture</a>. Follow us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/openculture">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/openculture">Twitter</a>, and <a href="https://plus.google.com/108579751001953501160/posts">Google Plus</a>, or get our <a href="http://www.openculture.com/dailyemail">Daily Email</a>. And don't miss our big collections of <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses">Free Online Courses</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline">Free Online Movies</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks">Free eBooks</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks">Free Audio Books</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons">Free Foreign Language Lessons</a>, and <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses">MOOCs</a>.</p>
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| 12:00p | Invisible Cities Illustrated: Artist Illustrates Each and Every City in Italo Calvino’s Classic Novel
If you want to read a book about cities, you still can't do much better than a slim, plotless work of fiction by Italo Calvino wherein the explorer Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan of what he's seen in his travels across the world. Originally published in Italian in 1972, Invisible Cities has inspired generations of readers, hailing from all across the world themselves, to think in entirely new ways not just about cities but about travel, place, perception, reality, myth, and literature itself. Though very much a work concerned with what's seen only in the imagination, the book has also inspired artists to try their hand at rendering the 55 fictitious cities Polo describes within.
A few years ago we featured "Seeing Calvino," a joint effort by artists Matt Kish, Leighton Connor, Joe Kuth to illustrate, among other elements of the Calvino canon, each and every one of Invisible Cities' fantastical, often impossible collections of structures, lives, and, ideas. More recently, the Peru-based architect and artist Karina Puente has, with her Invisible Cities Project, put herself to work on a similar endeavor. Each of Puente's intricate renderings takes about a week to produce, and as she tells Archdaily, "they are not only drawn – I use different types of paper and draw on each one before cutting them out with exacto knives. All the drawings are composed of layers of paper which are cut out and glued." At the top we have Puente's city of Dorotea where, bearing in mind the rules of its infrastructural division by gates, drawbridges, and canals and those of the marriages between the trading families that reside there, "you can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present, and future." In the middle is Isaura, a city built on a deep subterranean lake whose gods, "according to some people, live in the depths," and to others live in the associated buckets, pump handles, windmill blades, pipes, and every other built element of this "city that moves entirely upward."
Just above you can see Zobeide, laid out according to a series of dreams of "a woman running at night through an unknown city," pursued but never found, altered to conform to each dream until new arrivals "could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap." While at first Polo's descriptions of the cities all across Khan's empire may strike readers as completely fantastical, they'll soon hear echoes of the places they live in in these metaphorical metropolises. And if they take a look at Puente's illustrations as they read, they'll see them as well. Visit Puente's Invisible Cities Project here. via Archdaily Related Content: Invisible Cities Illustrated: Three Artists Paint Every City in Italo Calvino’s Classic Novel Hear Italo Calvino Read Selections From Invisible Cities, Mr. Palomar & Other Enchanting Fictions Italo Calvino Offers 14 Reasons We Should Read the Classics 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. <i>Invisible Cities</i> Illustrated: Artist Illustrates Each and Every City in Italo Calvino’s Classic Novel 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.  |
| 2:30p | Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe Featuring David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe & More
It’s not immediately apparent that Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe would have that much in common. It’s true Reed inherited a gothic sensibility (though one could argue that this element in the Velvet Underground came mainly from Nico and John Cale), and he worked in a self-consciously literary vein. But in almost every other respect, he spoke a totally different idiom. Drawn to the seedy bars and street corners rather than the great houses, laboratories, and scholar’s nooks of Poe, Reed inclined his ear toward the common tongue, in contrast to Poe’s carefully composed Romantic diction. But while it’s hard to imagine Poe thinking much of Reed’s rock and roll, the themes of sexual obsession, madness, terror, and morbid reflection that Poe brought into prominence seem to find their fruition over 100 years later in the work of the Velvets (and the thousands of post-punk bands they inspired), and in much of Reed’s subsequent solo work—up to his final album, the critically-reviled Lulu with Metallica, which his longtime partner Laurie Anderson declared full of “fear and rage and venom and terror and revenge and love,” and which David Bowie pronounced a “masterpiece.” While we know where much of Reed’s personal angst came from, we can also hear—in the vivid shock of his imagery and the extremity of his emotions—the echo of Poe’s crazed protagonists. Leave it to Reed, then, to take on the task of interpreting Poe in the 21st century, in his 2003 album, The Raven, a collection of Poe-themed musical pieces (“This is the story of Edgar Allan Poe / Not exactly the boy next door”), with such collaborators as Anderson, Bowie, Ornette Coleman, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Antony, Elizabeth Ashley, and Willem Dafoe, who reads a Reed-adapted version of the poem at the top (track 9 in the album below), over a video tribute to B horror actress Debbie Rochon (for some reason). What did Reed seek to accomplish with this conceptual project? As he himself writes in the liner notes, “I have reread and rewritten Poe to ask the same questions again. Who am I? Why am I drawn to do what I should not?... Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing?” These are timeless philosophical questions, indeed, which transcend matters of style and genre. Again and again, both Poe and Reed pursued them into the darkest recesses of the human psyche—the places most of us fear to go. And perhaps for that reason especially, we are perenially drawn back to their work. Related Content: The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Supernatural Poem to 3D Paper Life Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear Lou Reed’s <i>The Raven</i>, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe Featuring David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe & More 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. |
| 4:30p | The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map
Begun by user "BackForward24" and crowdsourced through Reddit, this map of the world illustrates the most beloved/popular book of each country by pasting a scan of the book cover over its space on the world map. For book lovers who want to read themselves around the world, it will prove invaluable. (And if you can’t read the map, no worries, there is a text version available.) But let’s unpack the larger (and yes, first world) countries first. The United States is represented by To Kill a Mockingbird, which ticks off a lot of the marks that make it quintessentially American: most high schoolers have read it, and it deals with both racism and our shameful history and the faith that the law can eventually right wrongs. Canada has Anne of Green Gables. Great Britain has Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Ireland Ulysses (no surprise there.) Our Australian readers might want to weigh in on Tom Winton’s Cloudstreet (a quite recent novel), and New Zealanders please tell us about The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
My takeaway and possibly yours from the map is how many titles are new to the Westerner. Europe has some familiar titles: Spain gets Cervantes’ Don Quixote (of course), Italy gets Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and France gets The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. And while Russia is represented by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Eastern Europe is rather unfamiliar, at least compared to South America, where Argentina has Borges’ Fictions, Chile has Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, and Colombia has Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, all well known from decades of prizes, book club attention, and film adaptations. This Reddit thread contains much criticism and debate, so please check it out. Some good points are raised: if the Iliad represents Greece, why not the Mahabharata/Ramayan for India? “Honestly there is work to do (in) the Africa part,” says another (very politely). There’s also debate over countries not being represented at all, such as Tibet (under Chinese occupation), along with Western Sahara, Somaliland, Kashmir, Balochistan, and Kurdistan. Frankly, if you start trying to talk about the culture of nations, there will be debate over what constitutes a nation. (I’m not sure if Palestine is covered, but some Redditors are voting for Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.) Another thing to keep in mind: the novel is very much a Western genre. For many countries, that might not be the case. However, I sense that that debate (and future map) will be another Reddit thread, somewhere, sometime. Related Content: A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection An Interactive Map of Every Record Shop in the World Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map 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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