history - Taryn . on Diigo

'Mid-Hudson Memories' book available at the Journal | PoughkeepsieJournal.com | Poughkeepsie Journal

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Op-Ed Columnist - Finishing Our Work - Thomas Friedman

Tags: election, 2008, politics, government, history, obama, patriotism, opinion on 2008-11-06 -All Annotations (1) -About

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if:book: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material: A Manifesto, By Rick Prelinger

Tags: art, culture, copyright, history, film on 2008-11-05 -All Annotations (11) -About

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One of the most provocative legacies of conceptual art was de-commodification — departing from object-oriented artmaking and from the tyranny of the art market. And yet it struck me that de-commodification had actually created its opposite. Conceptual works tended to exist primarily in their documentation, in physical traces of the work that had been created by someone so that the work would not disappear from consciousness. Documentation creates objects that are always someone’s property. The value of art documentation rests in whose work it documents and in who made the documents. We are therefore almost back where we started.
how much of the history of working people was contained in films made by corporations. In order to extract it you’ve got to engage in selective appropriation, but it’s there, often eloquently so. There’s a 1936 film called Master Hands which you can download from the Internet Archive; it’s a tribute to mass production at Chevrolet. But what it really shows is how elemental, dangerous and mind-numbing the work at Flint was. It’s a film no one else seems to have, and it’s now on the National Film Registry, but it was dregs — on a cold day in 1983, I paid a man not to throw it away.
Some writers, like John Updike and not like Jonathan Lethem, fear the emerging mashed-up book. They hope their texts won’t be scrambled or altered, that they’ll always retain the same identity and continuity, and follow the same course. But rivers, like information, route themselves around obstacles, and the bends in rivers are where adventures happen. We’ll find new ways to experience and value old works as a consequence of mixing them into newer ones.
We believe in storytelling because we’ve naturalized the consensus that causes us to believe in it. There is no reason for this consensus not to change as the world changes. Storytelling as we know it is not an absolute, and it may slow the courses of culture and history. We value storytelling for its ability to wrap new skins on old skeletons, but even bones don’t last forever.
I collected old educational and industrial films. They were made to instruct and socialize young people with the objective of turning them into dependable workers, good citizens and avid consumers. 1980s audiences became fascinated with these films and a cult following developed.
these films didn’t just describe a lost past, but might also be tracing the contours of possible futures. In other words, we could see them not simply as antiquated, but as predictive.
Everything anyone does to bring archives online is now going to be measured against YouTube’s ambiguous legacy. It presents a massive collection of older and newer material, from video of Malcolm X’s complete speeches to clips of the moose I saw wandering in front yards in Anchorage. It sticks to preview mode, presenting visually degraded Flash video, so it will still get sued, but most rightsholders will rightfully regard what it does as promotion. Best of all, it allows users to upload almost anything and annotate with relative freedom. It is not an archives, but it’s outclassed archives at their own game.

The Uses of Adversity: Can underprivileged outsiders have an advantage? - Malcolm Gladwell

oh, Gladwell...

Tags: poverty, privilege, wall_street, wealthy_and_decadent, elite, dyslexia, entrepreneur, new_york, history on 2008-11-05 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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C. W. Spangenberger, Last President of Cornell Steamboat Company, Dies at 102 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Tags: hudson_river, history, new_york, tribute, boat on 2008-11-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: the hudson valley

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Saturday Breakfast RN - 14 January 2006 - The Hudson River

an Australian station

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The Puritans actually landed in Massachusetts, and closer to another river which is the Connecticut River But the Hudson Valley and the Hudson River was settled initially by the Dutch, and the Dutch were very, very different stock in the 17th century, from a 17th century English Puritan. The Puritans of course had come to this country to establish a religion, and to practice their religion in relative freedom. In the case of the Dutch, they came to the Hudson Valley to make money. And so it's a very, very different attitude that they brought to the river.
The Hudson was the scene of the two greatest battles of the American Revolution, and those were the first and second battles of Saratoga, a place not very far from where I'm sitting right now. And what happened in those battles was that the American Generals made use of the remarkable topography of the river at that place, to halt the British advance down river. And the British had no choice but to meet the American rebels at that place, and on two occasions they fought, and on both occasions the British withdrew, and ultimately lost, and ultimately surrendered.
The houses after the American Civil War, 1865 to about 1890, those houses were extraordinary. We would call those people today nouveau-riche. They were people who'd made enormous killings in stocks and bonds on Wall Street in New York, and the houses that I have seen, and I've seen probably all of them, are opulent. One of the Vanderbilt houses, one of the Vanderbilts said, 'Make it like the Trianon', that is in Paris, Versailles, 'only larger.' So it was just be as opulent as you can. There was the notion that great wealth and displays of great wealth knew no bounds in the middle and late 19th century. And especially after the Civil War.
major bridges there are I think about eleven. But there's some wonderful ones that are strikingly beautiful, and the ones that I particularly love and care for, are the great suspension spans, the George Washington bridge, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, the Bear Mountain bridge (I'm working up the river), which is near West Point United States Military Academy, and then working further up the river, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie. These are wonderful suspension bridges, graceful, with wonderful catenary curves. And the bridges, don't forget, are the creation of the 1920s and 1930s. The width of the Hudson made it impossible to span it reasonably up until really the 20th century.
We take things for granted, in all of your listeners and certainly anyone I know, and even myself, we look around and we don't really see things. We take our natural landscape for granted. And our landscapes should not be taken for granted. They are places of civilisation, they are places of history, and if we don't know that history, we're not just professing ignorance, we're actually professing a kind of rudeness.

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A Modern Use for Thoreau’s Notes on Flora - Linking Patterns to Climate Change - NYTimes.com

see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/science/earth/16moho.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=all

Tags: climate_crisis, biology, biodiversity, thoreau, writer, massachusetts, history on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (1) -About

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David Hoffman on losing everything | Video on TED.com

Tags: video, family, photo, film, history, story, fire on 2008-10-26 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism

Tags: fiction, literature, history, new_historicism, stephen_greenblatt, lit_crit, shakespeare on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (5) -About

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Greenblatt has the power of reading closely, even if he doesn't read closely in the same way his mentors did; he still reads with "the rigor and excitement of the old New Critics." Henderson added that this historical moment is an excellent time for criticism, since "attention to detail and method is very important with a glut of information."
the importance of thinking inside a text, rather than removing the text from its context (as in New Criticism).
referring to the difference between New Historicism (a term Greenblatt himself coined for examining a text within the framework of history, culture, and sociology) and Cultural Materialism, a term for a branch of literary criticism stemming from Marxism that looks at a text not as an object, but as a process that is both politicized and historigraphical.
Henderson added that the great question, then, was how to use history to tell a story. At the moment that New Historicism emerged, it put the individual back into the system (as opposed to high theory and Cultural Materialism). It was about America in individual lives.
As a scholar, Greenblatt advised, decide when you have to cut yourself off; later you may know more but won't end up saying much more. You have to know when to stop. He said he had to learn for himself and his students to be responsible, but not to be so obsessive or so frightened. You must shape around the idea that you have a story to tell, for yourself and your readers.

Maya Jaggi on Colombia's contemporary art scene | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

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Seed: Cultural Evolution - Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do?

A careful look at culture shows that any attempt to determine what is "advanced" is hopeless. Instead, Joseph Tainter and Robert Edgerton have established standards by which some societies may be considered "sick"—they follow cultural practices leading to their own destruction.

Tags: culture, evolution, history, human, polynesia, complexity, anthropology on 2008-10-20 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (4) -About

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Models of cultural change clearly need a large Lamarckian component.
no Mendel has appeared to postulate exactly what is changing as culture evolves. Richard Dawkins's brave conjecture about "memes" (gene analogs) being discrete units of cultural inheritance has not proved entirely fruitful—and the analogy is in retrospect far-fetched. Genes are passed unidirectionally between parent and offspring, and the recipients must accept them. Memes could be passed hundreds of generations at a leap (Aristotle to you), horizontally among peers (gang member to gang member), backwards in generations (learning from your grandkids), and so on. And, unlike genes, not only can cultural inheritances be rejected but they can also be purposefully modified.
We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.
Natural selection in this case appears to have favored gradual changes in structural design rather than rapid adoption of novelties. Presumably, selection slowed down the change in structural features because time-tested designs enhanced success and survival in migrations, fishing, and warfare more than the accidental variants in canoe construction.

if:book: the five drafts of the gettysburg address: a sophie book

USC got $1.25 million to develop Java-based Sophie

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In ‘The Hemingses of Monticello,’ Annette Gordon-Reed Looks Past the Slave to Study Sally Hemings and Her Family

“I wanted to tell the story of this family in a way not done before” so that readers can “see slave people as individuals,”

Tags: united_states, history, slavery, book_review on 2008-10-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Podcast: Our Dutch Heritage - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog

Tags: new_york, new_york_city, hudson_river, history, immigrant, event on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Hudson River Schooled by James Panero - The New Criterion

Tags: art, painting, landscape, catskills, hudson_valley, new_york, history, no_god on 2008-10-02 -All Annotations (7) -About

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student artists “and their beautiful representations of nature will help to lead the culture back to a stronger connection to the landscape.”
Paul Johnson calls Cole, “the first painter to appreciate the immensity of the opportunities offered by the scale and variety of the American landscape.”
At the time of Cole’s initial trip in 1825, the changing wilderness of New York State was very much on the American mind. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was still more than a decade off, but the idea of a natural theology, as articulated by William Paley at the turn of the century, had instilled a new reverence for the natural world. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal, the technological marvel that tamed the West by connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, was built between 1817 and 1825. The rough landscape of rural New York took a literary turn in these years as well. In 1819, Washington Irving located his popular story of Rip Van Winkle in the Catskill Mountains, and four years later James Fenimore Cooper published his colonial story of the Catskill woodsman Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers—one of Cole’s reference books for his trip.
Have Collins’s students been able to approach the majesty of Cole’s great image? Their successes will depend on the final paintings that, like Cole, they work up in the studio from studies in the field. But I am concerned that these students, with their small, scrupulous studies of rocks and stumps, may be missing the forest for the trees of genuine Hudson River School landscape. In his mission statement, Collins maintains, “It is through extensive and real engagement that the artist learns to capture the spirit of the landscape. The many hundreds of hours spent out in the sun and the wind, scrupulously studying nature, transform the artist. It was by this experience that the old masters of the landscape realized their art. And it is how we hope to realize ours.”
Collins’s students may be learning the vocabulary of the Hudson River School, but I saw little evidence that they are being taught how to speak it. Collins’s students are young, mainly in their twenties. They are the products of an art world that shouts but has little to say. So the silence offered by Collins’s draftsman drills, developed in his schools in New York and carried over to landscape, is itself a form of rebellion, a release that looks for depth in the details of leaves and bark. But this must only be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God? This is the question that Collins and his students must confront. Their studies, no matter how precise, may never come together as a whole without an underlying philosophy that goes beyond mere proficiency.
if an artist believes a landscape evinces God, as the original Hudson River School painters surely did, then an artist should not improve on it without cause, or he risks descending into sentimentality.