Posted on 6th March 2008 by Judy Breck in art | history | music
joplin, katy, missouri, music, ragtime, railroad, scott, sedalia
Here as this learn node begins are links to two of the many superb music modules on Connexions by Catherine Schmidt-Jones:
One is about Ragtime.
The other is about the great Ragtime artist Scott Joplin.
Scott Joplin and Ragtime are booming at The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, where the biography page about Scott Joplin includes the piano-player illustration shown here. Moving on through this virtual Ragtime online network, an invitation to the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (every June) takes us to Sedalia, Missouri.
On a visit to Sedalia’s Web site for a look at its music history, it is easy to get sidetracked into its rich railroad history, as this Katy engine image from the Sedalia site recalls. It seems certain Scott Joplin often passed through the now restored Katy Depot — and perhaps there was a piano in the waiting room where ragtime was played in his hey day.
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Posted on 1st March 2008 by Judy Breck in history
african, american, chicago, great, migration, nebraska, omaha, violence
Learn node topic: African American Great Migration. “From 1860-1920, the number of people living in towns of 8000 or more grew from 6 million to 54 million, with immigrants from Europe and rural migrants from the U.S. forming the bulk of newcomers.” We learn this from a Notre Dame African American history lecture on The Migration. A lecture on The Great Migration: Blacks in White America from the University of Wisconsin adds:
Blacks turned to the “Promised Land” of the North in search of jobs and greater racial toleration. However, such basic demands fueled increasing debate over the place of blacks in predominantly white America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska State Historical Society tell in detail of the period’s corruption and racial violence in Omaha. Along with the image show with this post of soldiers on guard in Omaha, others from the Nebraska article include a photograph of the burning of Will Brown’s body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 1919. The Library of Congress collection in its African-American Mosaic includes Chicago as a destination for the Great Migration. Digital History provides another overview of The Great Migration in the 1920s period and The Jazz Age.
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Posted on 19th February 2008 by Judy Breck in history | literature
dante, divine_comedy, inferno, paradise, poetry, purgatory, works
This learn node is a digital landing page that points to a virtual paradise of open material online about the works of Dante Alighieri. The above image is from the magnificent multimedia collection at the University of Texas called Danteworlds. The materials in the UT project combine “artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings–through the three realms of the afterlife (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) presented in Dante’s Divine Comedy.” A links page points to four Dante websites that contain the text of the great poem (and much more!) at: Columbia University, the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze’s Dante Online – which calls it subject:
The greatest poet of Italy, generally acclaimed with Shakespeare and Goethe as one of the three universal geniuses of western European literature, Dante Alighieri was also a prose writer, rhetorician, theorist of his own Italian vernacular literature, moral philosopher, and political thinker, with an immense variety of literary output.
Truly a wondrous labyrinth, Dante open Internet resources are formed by the rich interlinking of ideas and information among the major sources mentioned above, and to myriad more facts and facets of that can be connected, like this one from a Yale University open course on Modern Poetry transcript:
And the endnotes we have here are worth contemplating. In a sense, Eliot’s notes are a kind of extension of the poem, part of the poem. These lines bear the note “four”:
“And below I heard them nailing shut the door / of the horrible tower.” [The speaker of those lines that Eliot is alluding to, half-quoting, is Dante's Count Ugolino in the thirty-third canto of The Inferno.] The traitor Ugolino tells Dante that his enemies imprisoned him and his children in a tower to die of starvation.
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Posted on 8th February 2008 by Judy Breck in art | biography | history
art, artillery, history, memorial, memories, oral, solider, veteran, world_war_I
In this history learn node, the World War I soldier shown is my grandfather Clarence L. North (1884-1969). In his obituary, which is posted on my family website, his role in assisting General John Pershing is recorded. Grandpa would have loved the Internet. He was a very innovative guy: as the obituary records, he invented cinder-brick! By posting his story here, I am putting his memory a bit into recorded history. Perhaps future scholars of Pershing’s war management and/or the history of brick manufacturing will add Grandpa in as a footnote somewhere, citing the obituary. By posting Grandpa here, I have created an online node where one can learn his story in the vast Internet network.
Biography of people alive today is being preserved with new, robust digital methods. A good place to find out examples of this kind of preservation is the Library of Congress Blog, where for example the new recording of people recalling history is described in this post: Library Preserves Voice of Last Living World War I Veteran.
Remembering World War I in a different way are memorial structures and spaces. These are studied in The Open University’s Arts and History course on the Commemoration of War, which includes this page on The Royal Artillery Memorial.
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Posted on 31st January 2008 by Judy Breck in biography | history
biography, history, penn, pennsylvania, william
A biography learn node of William Penn with the story of his role in the history of Pennsylvania is a large topic. The Internet has many excellent nodes of materials on the subject. This blog post is a small learnode combining a sampling of William Penn webpages:
The image that illustrates this post is from an excellent introduction to Penn at HippoCampus.org. To see the image in the introductory presentation click on “Pennsylvania and Delaware” on HIppoCampus’s page: Browse US History, English Colonies.
Long, official and authoritative Penn biographies are woven into the online exhibits of two official institutions of the State of Pennsylvania and one from the university of the state to the south of Penn’s former colony, at the University of Virginia:
- Pennsylvania General Assembly of history: The Quaker Province: 1681-1776
- Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
- Extensive account of the life of William Penn at the University of Virginia
More learn nodes at: learnodes.com
Posted on 21st January 2008 by Judy Breck in history
blog, congress, content, crowd, flickr, inaugual, library, lincoln, open, photograph
The online original of the image illustrating this learn node is can be seen in much larger format at the Library of Congress website. The title of the image is Washington, District of Columbia. Crowd at President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration and the page where it is found connects to a network of Lincoln era photographs, drawings and beyond, into the sumptuous virtual treasures of this national knowledge institution. The image of the second inauguration is one of three that have recently come to light, as the Library of Congress Blog explains: “after a Library of Congress patron alerted [a curator] to the fact that these visually similar photos had radically different identifications in the Library’s online Civil War photographic negative collection.”
On the Library of Congress Blog this week is this enthusiastic comment by Matt Raymond, the Library’s director of communications who writes the blog, about the power of opening content online:
A user of our Prints and Photographs Online Catalog raised questions about the images, which sent Library of Congress curator Carol Marie Johnson sleuthing. Careful comparisons to the only other two known images from that event and meticulous combing through records led her to this discovery.
My point is that if we can uncover those kinds of treasures, thanks in part to our discerning Web users, imagine what might happen after setting loose hoards of eager photo fans at Flickr.
I’ve heard reports that the story for a good portion of Wednesday was the most-clicked on CNN.com. It was written about by the L.A. Times and was also mentioned on NBC’s “Today Show,” among others.
Even David Letterman made a reference to it on last night’s “Late Show.” That definitely ranks closely in pop-culture significance to the moment when our staff burst into applause when the Library of Congress was first mentioned on-screen in “National Treasure: Book of Secrets”!
The Flickr project referred to is The Commons, and the response from the public to this project announced this month has “been nothing short of astounding.” It is the wisdom of the crowd that is captured in these new methods that are only made possible by opening content online. As Flickr says: Many hands make light work.
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Posted on 15th January 2008 by Judy Breck in engineering | geography | history
canal, crisis, geography, history, suez
The Suez Canal, featured in this learn node, is an enormous topic spanning the globe in influence, and with a story that continues over several millennia. This learnode contains 3 sources that individually and together provide a general overview and lead into other materials so you can traverse this rich subject for yourself.
The postcard that forms the title illustration, “Port Said, Steamer Traversing the Suez Canal,” is from the TIMEA collection. The postcard is displayed on a Rice Connexions unit about Places in Egypt: Lower Egypt, which gives this historical background:
Linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, this feat of engineering opened in 1869. Although not the first canal (earlier ones, though not exactly in the same location as the modern one, include ones built by Darius I and Trajan), the modern canal stretches over a hundred miles, from Port Said on the Mediterranean to Suez and the Red Sea. Its opening was the cause of international celebration and was attended by royalty from all over the world; it was also marked by the opening of the “Old” Cairo Opera House, which has since been demolished.
For general background to this vast subject a good place to begin is the Suez Canal overview at Tour Egypt! Another rich cluster of knowledge and links to more for the Suez Canal is the BBC Key map webpage for the 1956 Suez Crisis.
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Posted on 29th December 2007 by Judy Breck in art | history | literature
art, artist, catlin, ethnologist, george, george_catlin, hiawatha, history, indian, literature, longfellow, paintings
This learn node from American history begins where the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosts the website where you can:
“Take a virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin. This site compiles paintings, historical documents, and commentary from contemporary experts so you can explore the intersections of two cultures, both in Catlin’s time and today.”
The museum also welcomes visitors to a George Catlin Indian Gallery where 34 of his paintings can be studied individually. As an example of following history and art through the fenceless trail of the open Internet:
- Catlin’s painting of Pipestone Quarry leads us to locate a National Parks Website about that famous Minnesota location.
- The Pipestone County Museum provides very local and detailed memory of the area’s history.
- And the famed poem The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow echoes in our thoughts:
On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.
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Posted on 13th November 2007 by Judy Breck in history | sciences
beans, beer, chemistry, chocolate, cocoa, history, MIT
This tasty learn node includes reports of discoveries in the history of chocolate from the Los Angeles Times, New York Science Times and other open sources relaying to the public science news that is from a source is limited to its paid subscribers (in this case the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
The chocolate news from the LA Times report:
Humans began exploiting cacao beans for alcohol before they started using them to make chocolate, according to new findings that push the earliest known use of cacao back about 500 years.
Residue scraped from pottery vessels dating to 1400 B.C. to 1100 B.C. indicate that residents of Honduras’ remote Ulua Valley fermented the sweet pulp of the chocolate plant to make an alcoholic drink well before they began grinding the bitter seeds and mixing them with honey and chiles to produce the equivalent of modern cocoa. . . .
Open chocolate history, chemistry and food information are richly available online. To pick a few pieces out of the virtual chocolate knowledge box: This MIT Kitchen Chemistry page includes a topic-by-topic online chocolate topic tour. Chicago’s Field Museum has an online chocolate knowledge feast Chocolate: The Exhibition. And the US Food and Drug Administration has a page (from which the image of chocolates above is taken) on its standards for chocolate.
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Posted on 19th September 2007 by Judy Breck in biography | history
biography, churchill, england, history, iron_curtain
An iron curtain has descended across the continent.
The speech in which Winston Churchill used those words and gave the phrase “iron curtain” to the 20th century Cold War era was given in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946. A few of the sentences from the speech, including the words above and Sir Winston’s enunciation of the “capitals of the ancient states” behind the curtain can be accessed in Churchill’s voice from the Library of Congress. This audio node is included in a major exhibition by the LOC and Annenberg Foundation titled Churchill and the Great Republic. The exhibition networks photographs, texts, sounds and commentary into a distinguished digital biography of Churchill. (For a look at some realities of the Cold War that the Iron Curtain brought on: The Berlin Airlift.)
The Internet has many superb Churchillian nodes, which when interlinked form a web of Sir Winston’s rich weave into the fabric of 20th century history and thought. The grand appreciation for him is expressed in a BBC archived exhibit of his state funeral. To catch something of the vigor and courage of this great man, the Churchill Center’s page of quotations is a good place to start. For example, Churchill told the United States Congress in 1941:
“I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. ‘Trust the people’ that was his message….I owe my advancement entirely to the House of Commons, whose servant I am. In my country, as in yours, public men are proud to be the servants of the State and would be ashamed to be its masters. Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly….By the way, I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own!”
