Posts Tagged ‘folklore’
“Our research universities are the best in the world. But a leadership position is easy to lose and difficult to regain.”…
Revisiting a key topic that we’ve touched before…
The modern U.S. research universities arose in the late 19th century. Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific, technical, commerical, and cultural leaders and innovators.
Today, as a product of what historians have called a “virtuous circle of incentives and resources,” American academic research institutions are top of the pops… and not at all coincidentally, so is the U.S economy:
… But that dominance is under attack, both by the Trump Administration and by state governments around the country actively undermining the work of their state universities.
It’s worth remembering that, into the early twentieth century, German Universities– the original models for the American approach— dominated the list.
As the U.S. increasingly models the behavior of German authorities in the 1930s, the vital contributions of research univerisities are at risk.
When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the leaders of America’s most august universities didn’t all comport themselves as one might have wished. We can only hope that this time– as the threat is aimed directly at them– they will respond more strongly and directly.
Meantime, we can all add our voices to the defense of academic freedom and support for vital research.
* Research Universities and the Future of America, a report from The National Research Council, 2012 (Page 68)
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As we cease self-sabotage, we might spare a thought for a professorial paragon of the virtues of the institutions in question (in his case, on the cultural as opposed to the scientific/technical front), George Lyman Kittredge, a professor at Harvard; he died on this date in 1941. Kittredge’s edition of Shakespeare’s work was the scholarly standard in the early 20th century; he promoted the study of folklore and folk songs (encouraging students like John A. Lomax, and thus Lomax’s son, Alan); and he was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press.
“What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things”*…
Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer was on a constant hunt for inspiration– and found novelty everywhere on his travels…
In 1520 Albrecht Dürer was in Brussels when the contents of a treasure ship sent back from the Americas by Hernán Cortés were put on display to celebrate the coronation of Charles V. The cache contained, among other items, obsidian weapons, jaguar pelts, feathered shields, gemstones and mosaic pieces, and gold wrought in innumerable inventive ways. Dürer, the son of a Nuremberg goldsmith, was flabbergasted. “All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,” he wrote, “for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art.” But then, for him, everything was a work of art – either God-made or man-made. His well-known watercolours of a piece of turf and the iridescent wing of a blue roller bird are themselves marvels of creation that show marvels of creation.
For Dürer, even more than for most artists, the world was a place of wonder. If Leonardo da Vinci, his senior by 19 years, looked longest and deepest at natural phenomena – from the flow of water to the action of veins and sinews – Dürer (1471-1528) was in thrall to materiality, where sight became an extension of touch…
How a Renaissance master and inveterate traveler journeyed in a permanent state of fascination: “The wonders of Albrecht Dürer’s world,” from Michael Prodger in @NewStatesman.
* Albrecht Dürer
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As we wonder, we might spare a thought for Ludwig Emil Grimm; he died on this date in 1863. A painter, art professor, etcher, and copper engraver, his subjects included his two brothers, the folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
“All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man will have their lasting place in the history of mankind”*…
In 1999, Santa Cruz, California software engineer John Bruno Hare founded what he hoped would become “a quiet place in cyberspace”…
Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore, and the esoteric on the Internet… Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language…
This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed at this site are solely those of specific authors, and are not endorsed by sacred-texts. Sacred-texts is not sponsored by any religious group or organzation.
This site strives to produce the best possible transcriptions of public domain texts on the subject of religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric. The texts are posted for free access on the Internet. This site is like a public library: it is accessible to anyone, contains unfiltered information, and does not advocate any particular point of view. However, nobody is going to shush you if you make too much noise while using this site…
Sacred texts is one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic, consistently one of the top 10,000 sites in Australia, the US and India, and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source: Alexa.com)…
Spirituality in all of its shapes: The Internet Scared Text Archive.
* “All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man will have their lasting place in the history of mankind; and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for–real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.” – Max Müller, Introduction to the Upanishads Vol. II
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As we delve into the devotional, we might recall that it was on this date in 1848 that a document that isn’t in the Sacred Text Archive, but that is arguably apposite, was published– a political pamphlet by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Commissioned by the Communist League and written in German, it appeared as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt. Subsequently, of course, Marx elaborated on his argument (with Engel’s help, after Marx’s death) in Das Kapital.
“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help”*…
Horseshoe charm made from a fragment of German shell by a wounded Belgian soldier.
During (and after) World War I, British folklorist Edward Lovett made a point of collecting examples of lucky charms and amulets that soldiers had carried to war. Some of these—included in a new book about the Imperial War Museum’s World War I collections, The First World War Galleries, by Paul Cornish—are below.
Lovett was a contemporary folklorist, collecting and analyzing material from his own city of London instead of working with archives or in other countries. Most active during the 1910s and 1920s, Lovett worked at a bank by day, gathering examples of amulets, charms, and talismans in his free time.Lovett was interested in seeing how country folklore lived on in working-class parts of London. He investigated the use of such charms to cure illnesses, wish ill upon enemies, or attract good luck. You can see some of his larger collection online through this Wellcome Library digital exhibition.
The charms Lovett collected from soldiers were sometimes fashioned from materials with some significance to their owners: bog oak or Connemara marble, carried by Irishmen as mementos of home; [or as in the photo above] bits of armaments that could have killed the bearer, but didn’t.
Take in more talismans at “The Lucky Charms Soldiers Carried Into WWI.”
* Calvin (Bill Watterson)
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As we rub our rabbit’s feet, we might spare a thought for George Frederick Ernest Albert, George V, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India; he died on this date in 1936. In a statement, the King’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, reported that the King’s last words were “How stands the Empire?” But in his diary, uncovered much later, Dawson recalls a less elegant end: The physician confessed in his memoir that he prescribed the fast-failing King a fatal sedative so that his death would be announced in the Tory morning papers (and opposed to the afternoon tabloids). George’s actual last words, as a nurse approached with the morphine- and cocaine-filled syringe, were “God damn you, you’re going to kill me!”
George V
Let me tell you a tale…
This map, by social realist artist William Gropper, was created to showcase the diversity of national myths and folk stories and was distributed abroad through the U.S. Department of State starting in 1946…
Gropper, born in New York City’s Lower East Side to a working-class family, deeply identified with labor movements and the Left throughout his life. He worked as a cartoonist for mainstream publications New York Tribune and Vanity Fair, as well as the leftist and radical newspapers Rebel Worker, New Masses, and Daily Worker. During the Depression, like many other out-of-work artists, Gropper designed murals for the Works Progress Administration.
The “folklore” on display in this richly illustrated map is a soup of history, music, myth, and literature. Frankie and Johnny are cheek-by-jowl with a wild-eyed John Brown; General Custer coexists with “Git Along Little Dogies.” Utah is simply host to a group of “Mormons,” in which a bearded man holds up stigmata-marked hands to a small group of wives and children, while a figure labeled “New England Witches” flies over New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont…
Click here (and again) to see the map in much larger format (or find it at the Library of Congress); read the full story at Vault.
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As we revel in regional differences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Theodor Geisel– Dr. Seuss– published The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Geisel had published And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street the prior year; 500 Hats was his second children’s book and the first of three (it was followed by The King’s Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939), all of which were, atypically for him, in prose. He returned to the rhyming form for which he’s known with his fifth book, Horton Hatches the Egg.
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