History

In November 1953, Ebony magazine published an essay by African American singer Anne Brown, who wrote about her life in Norway after relocating from the United States. The change was first set in motion during the mid-1940s, when Brown made a stop in Oslo during a five-month European concert tour that also took her to Belgium, France, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland and Italy. She traveled back across the Atlantic Ocean for a brief interlude in the U.S. before deciding to return to the Nordic region. “I arrived without a concert booking,” she wrote. “I just wanted to be in Norway for a while.”

Brown had fallen deeply, blissfully in love. At first it was with the shade of green she discerned on the snow-covered trees; the sense of serene isolation surrounding the cabins she encountered in the woods; and the warmth of the Norwegian people, who had just emerged from the shadow of war yet showed her nothing but welcome and sincere admiration.

And then, eventually, there was a man. He was in the audience at one of the concerts she’d booked upon her return, making such intense, electrifying eye contact that Brown could scarcely focus on her performance. After the show, the stranger went backstage to introduce himself. His name was Thorleif Schjelderup, and he was a philosopher, a trained lawyer and one of Norway’s most talented ski jumpers.

Not long after meeting, the pair began a correspondence that culminated in a letter sent by Schjelderup while Brown was on tour in Denmark. “Now, Anne,” it read, “we have to decide several things. Shall we live in Europe or America? Shall we have 10 children or 20? Shall we have a big house or a small one? … On a mountain or deep in the woods?” The couple married ten months later.

Today, an original copy of Brown’s Ebony essay, titled “I Gave Up My Country for Love,” sits beneath a glass case in “Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century,” a multimedia exhibition at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. Grounded in years of co-curator Ethelene Whitmire’s scholarly research, it focuses on African Americans who made their way to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between the 1930s and the 1980s. The group included visual and performing artists, filmmakers, diplomats, and activists, who arrived in the region for temporary visits, for extended stays or to permanently resettle.

The exhibition tells these individuals’ stories via a collection of testimonials, televised interviews, sound recordings and archival footage. The items are placed in conversation with artistic works from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as loans from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other cultural institutions around the world. The exhibition is on view until July 21, after which it will travel to the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, and Scandinavia House in New York City.

In the popular imagination, the history of African American expatriates in Europe tends to begin and end in Paris, focusing on prominent figures like entertainer Josephine Baker and writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright. “Nordic Utopia?” takes visitors beyond Paris to Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and other Nordic cities, introducing them to a less familiar, though no less influential, group of travelers.

Many members of this loose cohort began their international ventures in Paris but were soon unable to resist the pull of the Nordic countries. As Whitmire, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, “African Americans visited, performed, studied and lived in Scandinavia for a variety of reasons: a sense of adventure, love, the pursuit of educational and professional opportunities, and the freedom to explore their sexuality.”

South Carolina-born visual artist William Henry Johnson moved to the City of Light in 1926 to study Modernism and immerse himself in a dynamic creative community. While on an artistic sojourn to the French fishing village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he produced several stylized paintings of its landscape, Johnson met and fell in love with Danish textile artist Holcha Krake. The couple married and eventually moved to southern Denmark, spending most of the 1930s in the southern coastal town of Kerteminde, whose houses, streets, windmills and harbor became the focus of much of Johnson’s work.

Expressionist painter Herbert Gentry followed a similar route. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, Gentry served during World War II, then moved to Paris in 1946 with the help of the G.I. Bill. An invitation to exhibit his work in Copenhagen in 1958 led to a five-year stay in the Danish capital, which was in turn followed by a move to Gothenburg, Sweden, with his Swedish wife and their son.

By the mid-20th century, the Nordic countries enjoyed a reputation as not only havens from the rampant racism of the U.S. but also centers of dynamic artistic production. They soon became destinations in and of themselves. Painter Walter Williams traveled to Denmark with the support of a fellowship, while artist Howard Smith accepted an invitation to travel from Philadelphia to Helsinki as part of a U.S.-sponsored cultural festival that quickly led to commissions for mixed-media creations. He regularly collaborated with Finnish textile and ceramics firms, producing a variety of floral prints, animal figurines and ceramics.

“One surely interesting thing made possible by my being in Finland,” Smith once said, “was the cooperation of industry, whereas in America we know that the Black artist has little, if any, possibility to work in a creative way with any industry. There, I was able to accomplish a good deal.”

Other types of artists found opportunity in the Nordic countries, too. In the 1960s, saxophonist Dexter Gordon moved to Copenhagen, where he tapped into a deep pool of collaborators in the city’s burgeoning jazz scene and found regular opportunities to record a steady stream of hits. A decade later, pianist Duke Jordan encountered a similarly welcoming scene when he arrived in the city, where he joined forces with African American drummer Ed Thigpen and Danish bassist Mads Vinding to record Flight to Denmark, an album produced by the Danish label SteepleChase Records.

Both Gordon and Jordan were frequent headliners at Jazzhus Montmartre. Founded in 1959, the Copenhagen club communicated its twin ambitions via its name, which paid homage to the African Americans who had made the Parisian arrondissement a legendary center of jazz music and cultural production in the 1920s, and—more importantly—invited a new generation of Black performers to make their mark on a new part of the world.

Indeed, African Americans wielded profound influence in the region. As “Nordic Utopia?” co-curator Leslie Anderson says, “From musicians who performed on tour to visual artists who established their lives and careers in the Nordic countries, this exhibition celebrates the roles that African American creatives played in a mid-century cultural efflorescence.” Jazz musicians like Gordon and Jordan, for example, fostered a deep appreciation for the genre, which is evident today in the long-running Copenhagen Jazz Festival. And Smith’s collaborations with design companies Vallila and Arabia informed the Finnish domestic interior and objects of everyday life.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore the question mark looming over the exhibition. As Whitmire says, the show’s title “was selected, at least in my mind, to acknowledge that the Nordics are not utopias for non-American Black people … in the 21st century.” Literary and cultural historian Monica L. Miller has made similar observations in her work on Sweden, which has cultivated an image of itself as a social democracy and center of equity and inclusion despite its long history and enduring legacy of racism and xenophobia toward migrants from Africa and the Arab world.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the same period the country was welcoming American expatriates, its scientists embraced eugenics, while its white artists—predecessors and peers to Johnson and others—embraced racist, colonialist tropes in their work. According to Miller, “As Sweden took the steps to create its liberal, progressive, generous welfare state, it did so based on notions of inclusion, worth and community that necessarily relied on notions of exclusion and hierarchy.”

Even for African Americans, the day-to-day reality of living in the Nordic countries presented its share of complications. In her Ebony essay, Brown (whose story provides important gender balance in the exhibition, since most of her featured contemporaries are African American men) wrote of the “little stupidities” she encountered in Oslo, like a maid who was reportedly asked, “What’s it like working for Anne Brown? Does she smell different from anybody else?” Another woman raised a racist question to a friend of Brown’s husband: “How does it work out, that marriage between a primitive and such a high-bred person?” The friend responded, “Oh, it works out fine, but what makes you think that Thorleif is primitive?

While none of these experiences steered Brown away from her devotion to Norway, where she continued living until her death in 2009, they served as a reminder that for African Americans, there was no complete escape from racism. In Another Man’s Country, a two-part documentary that aired on the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in 1970 and appears in the exhibition, African American expatriate Bernie Moore (who, according to a wall label, once co-owned a restaurant in Copenhagen called Soul Kitchen) put it plainly: “I am a Black man in Denmark, and I have the same problems here. There isn’t that great a change. I can’t get an apartment readily.”

Referencing yet another reason why the Nordic countries could never truly be a utopia for African Americans, Smith once said, “I got lonesome there [in Finland]. … I need the spiritual input, I guess, of being around Black people. … This life that we all need is the fire that comes more abundantly from Blacks to me than from others.”

“Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century” is on view at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle through July 21.

The Former Royal Melbourne Mint, the building the Hellenic Museum is proud to call home, is celebrating 150 years since its official opening on 6 June 1872. In celebration of this incredible milestone, we’ve gathered 15 of our favourite facts about the site and its history – one for every decade!

1. Home of Melbourne’s first game of cricket

2. Pasturage for police ponies

3. The original Exhibition Building

4. Pipped at the post by Sydney

5. An unstoppable force

6. A joint endeavour

8. Renaissance & Rome

10. A hidden detail on the Coat of Arms

11. Fast facts of the first decade

12. Not all that glitters is gold

13. Decimal decimation

14. From denominations to ‘I do’

15. The present day

In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church wielded immense power over the population, primarily through fear. The church used various methods to instill obedience among its followers, one of the most striking being the terrifying imagery found in churches. Sculptures known as “hell mouths” depicted monstrous beasts devouring sinners, sending a clear message: disobedience would lead to eternal damnation.

Additionally, the concept of purgatory was manipulated to the church’s advantage. Parishioners were encouraged to donate money, goods, or even their children to the church to shorten their stay in this intermediate state. This not only enriched the church but also ensured a steady supply of clergy, as children were easier to mold into obedient servants of the church.

Another method of control involved the use of weeping or bleeding statues, which were interpreted as divine omens. These miraculous signs were used to maintain an atmosphere of fear and obedience among the superstitious population. The church also capitalized on guilt, selling indulgences that allowed the wealthy to buy forgiveness for sins, even in advance.

Public shaming was another tactic. Adulterers, for instance, faced the “walk of shame,” parading naked through the streets under public ridicule. This harsh punishment served as a deterrent and reinforced the church’s moral authority.

The church’s use of fear extended into art and architecture. Churches were adorned with vivid and gruesome depictions of the Last Judgment and sinners in hell, designed to remind parishioners of the consequences of disobedience. These artistic works were instrumental in maintaining the church’s grip on medieval society, ensuring both spiritual and financial control.

Top image: Botticelli’s illustration from Inferno XV is part of the third round of Inferno, depicting the punishment of those who acted violently against God, nature, and art. Source:  Public Domain

By Robbie Mitchell

Danny Lyon considered himself a bikerider, but there were glaring differences between him and the members of the Chicago Outlaws, a notorious motorcycle club. They were blue-collar Midwesterners riding Harleys and living on the outskirts of society. Lyon was a college-educated photographer who rode a Triumph and toted around two cameras and a seven-pound tape recorder.

It was the mid-1960s, and Lyon was following in the footsteps of Hunter S. Thompson, the journalist who rode with—and wrote about—the Hells Angels around the same time. Lyon even sent a letter to Thompson, perhaps expecting encouragement from a like-minded chronicler. Instead, the writer advised Lyon to “get the hell out of that club. … I’ve seen the Angels work, and they scare the hell out of me.” Lyon bristled at this advice, which he later summed up thusly: “[Thompson] advised me not to join the Outlaws and to wear a helmet. I joined the club and seldom wore a helmet.”

Lyon documented the Outlaws for several years, but he was not an objective observer. When The Bikeriders, a collection of photographs and interviews, came out in 1968, Lyon—who had become a full member of the club in 1965—billed it as an “attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bikerider. It is a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for.”

THE BIKERIDERS – Official Trailer [HD] – Only In Theaters June 21

Now, more than 50 years later, The Bikeriders forms the basis of a new movie adaptation of the same name. Directed by Jeff Nichols, the film uses verbatim quotes from Lyon’s interviews for around 70 percent of its dialogue. The plot, meanwhile, is a work of fiction created by weaving the interviews together.

The movie is concerned less with telling a true story than with capturing the feeling of freeways and freedom, of outlaws and open roads—what Lyon calls the “spirit of the bikeriders: the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion.”

Here’s what you need to know about The Bikeriders (both the book and the adaptation) as the film, which stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, arrives in theaters in the United States on Friday.

The outlaw archetype

In 1957, about a decade before The Bikeriders, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, his famous chronicle of disillusioned, peripatetic young travelers wandering the country and searching for answers. One reviewer described Kerouac as a “kind of literary James Dean,” the actor responsible for a formidable percentage of the motorcycle’s cultural cachet.

Like many young men, Lyon, who was 15 when On the Road came out, was inspired by the book. In the summer of 1962, after wrapping up a semester at the University of Chicago, he asked friends to drop him off along Route 66, “the road Jack Kerouac used,” and hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, where he saw future congressman John Lewis speak and began photographing scenes from the civil rights movement. By 1964, he was back in Chicago, where he started planning The Bikeriders.

Around this time, Lyon wrote to a publisher about the project. When he revisited the letter many years later, he realized he came across as “a kind of crazy person who writes in this sub-Jack Kerouac-style prose about the open road and the freedom of being an outlaw,” as he told the Observer in 2014.

American motorcycle clubs were also fueled by this outlaw spirit. Their history stretches back to the end of World War II, when returning veterans—particularly those having trouble reintegrating into civilian life—began to form new groups. The lifestyle combined several values these former soldiers clung to: As Vox put it in 2015, “Nostalgia for the camaraderie and risk-taking of the war made the clubs’ focus on male bonding and dangerous activities like, say, riding motorcycles particularly attractive.”

Many such clubs were part of the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). Membership in the organization, which was founded in 1924 and still exists today, requires adherence to strict rules. Some clubs resisted these rules and formed without the group’s stamp of approval. As Lyon wrote in The Bikeriders, they “are so far in spirit from attitudes of the AMA that they neither want nor could receive AMA sanction. These are known as outlaw clubs.”

CAPTURING A CULTURE – EP04 DANNY LYON: OUTLAW BIKERS

Members of outlaw clubs are also known by another term: “one-percenters.” This identifier comes from an oft-repeated (but possibly false) story about the AMA insisting that 99 percent of motorcyclists are mainstream, law-abiding Americans. The outlaw clubs proudly position themselves in that remaining 1 percent.

One of the first such clubs was the McCook Outlaws, which formed in McCook, Illinois, in the 1930s. After a period of dormancy during World War II, the group came back together and ultimately relocated to Chicago, becoming the Chicago Outlaws in the 1950s, about a decade before Lyon started tagging along.

The bikeriders’ best storyteller

Each of Lyon’s interviewees had a unique perspective on outlaw culture and how they fit into it. Cal, a former airman, had been to 18 countries and “seen what most people have read about.” Rodney Pink, meanwhile, was a motorcycle racer who insisted that “being on a motorcycle don’t make you special at all” and lamented that while “everyone wants to be part of something,” nobody wants to “have any responsibility unloaded on ’em.”

The bikeriders also spoke candidly about the dangers of their lifestyle. Johnny Goodpaster, who once broke his leg in 17 places, called such injuries an “occupational disease,” while “Funny Sonny” described watching a “little guy on his Honda” with a “helmet and everything” who accidentally drove over a cliff.

But as Lyon recalled in a 1997 preface to a new edition of the book, the “best storyteller” of the group was Kathy Bauer, 26, who “didn’t even ride a motorcycle, but was married to Benny, a member of the club.”

According to her interview, Kathy noticed Benny while she was at a bar with a friend, who advised her not to get involved. “Every time he gets up on his bike, he has an accident,” the friend warned. Benny persisted, planting himself outside Kathy’s house and refusing to go home.

“My boyfriend would still come over, and Benny would still sit here, and I’d tell him, ‘You better go home.’ And he wouldn’t go,” she recalled. “So finally, my boyfriend left, and Benny was still around. So he says, ‘Let me take you to the meeting. Everything’ll be real nice.’ So I went to the meeting. After that, I started goin’ out with him. I only went out with him, never with any of the other guys in the club. And five weeks later, I married him.”

In The Bikeriders, Kathy describes the arc of the couple’s relationship in a series of startling anecdotes and off-the-cuff reflections:

I’ve had nothin’ but trouble since I married Benny. I’ve seen more jails, been to more courts and met more lawyers, and it’s only a year. That’s a short time for so much to happen.

 

Benny thinks that when you die, you’re better off than when you’re living. You know, like when his dad died, he said, “It’s just as well, he’s better off that way.” When his friends got killed, well, they’re better off that way. No feelings.

 

I thought I could change him, you know? Every woman thinks that she can change a guy. Not to her own ways, but to be different. Not to be different, but to be, I don’t know. Like he’s wild. I used to think he’d get over that. But he don’t.

Lyon’s book features one photograph of Kathy. Sporting a dark beehive haircut with side-swept bangs, she stands in a bathroom with three mirrors, each reflecting her profile at a slightly different angle. In the main reflection, she looks directly at the camera, lips slightly parted, at ease but alert.

Benny, meanwhile, is an elusive figure. While Kathy describes him at length, he was never interviewed. The book features two photographs identified as him: One shows him gripping a pool table covered with ring stains; his head hangs between his shoulders, obscuring his face. The other captures him from behind on his motorcycle, wearing a “Chicago Outlaws” jacket and backlit by headlights.

Adapting The Bikeriders for the screen

The film adaptation, which debuts Friday, follows characters based on Kathy (played by Comer), who also narrates the story, and Benny (Butler). Some scenes play out just as the anecdotes in the book, such as the pair’s first meeting. Kathy is at a bar with a friend when she notices Benny, who is leaning against a pool table in a nearly perfect recreation of Lyon’s photo. Here, though, he looks up. We see his face, hear his voice and find out what happens next.

Ahead of the movie premiere, Lyon heard from a man named Kirk: Kathy and Benny’s son. He learned that Kathy had died, but Benny was living in Florida. “So I call Benny up,” Lyon tells the Telegraph. “We have a great talk. He’s totally upbeat. And then he says, ‘Hey, you know the picture of me at the pool hall?’ I said, yeah. He says, ‘It’s not me.’ What? ‘Check out the tattoos. It’s not me.’”

The movie is structured in two parts. The first half follows a group of misfits finding a family; much like Lyon’s book, it is meant to “glorify the life of the American bikerider.” As one of the club members, Brucie (Damon Herriman), says, “We don’t belong nowhere else, so we belong together.” The second half is a darker meditation on the dangers of outlaw life. As members of a younger generation join up, they introduce a newfound aggression and propensity for cruelty.

“[The violence] in the second half is fairly cruel, and that’s the important part,” Nichols tells PA Media. “If you just have the first hour, this would be a film glamorizing violence. Nobody wants that, nobody needs that, the world doesn’t need that. If you take the two parts as the whole, I think it says, ‘Here are the consequences of choosing to live this kind of life.’”

The book does not feature this second chapter. But while Lyon has retained an affection for the outsider spirit—“I like rebels and think they are intrinsic to the survival of our democracy,” he told the Chicago Reader in 2014—his views have evolved with time.

By the end of his stint with the Outlaws, Lyon was already growing disillusioned with the group. As he said to the Observer, he remembers getting into a “big disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic rug to put our beers on. By then, I had realized that some of these guys were not so romantic after all.”

What became of the Outlaws

Today, more than 300 outlaw motorcycle gangs operate across the United States. According to the Department of Justice, which defines the groups as “organizations whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises,” the Outlaws have some 1,700 members in more than 100 chapters around the world. The club has engaged in criminal activities such as “arson, assault, explosives, extortion, fraud, homicide, intimidation, kidnapping, money laundering, prostitution, robbery, theft and weapons violations.”

The real Outlaws are “certainly aware of the film,” Nichols tells the Globe and Mail, but he has not had any contact with them. In the film, the club is called the Vandals, a fictional name intended to distance the project from existing groups, which the director had no desire to portray on screen. “If I’m being completely honest, I’m not really interested in contemporary biker culture,” he adds. “I was interested in the people in Danny’s book.”

Besides, Lyon believes the two groups have little in common. The people he knew in the 1960s were quite different from today’s biker types, whom he notices in connection with news events like the January 6 insurrection. Instead, the photographer tells A Rabbit’s Foot, the closest analogues are perhaps “the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux fighting the oil pipeline and the catastrophe of climate change.”

Today’s Outlaws appear to have an internet presence, albeit a limited one. One website, belonging to the Outlaws M.C., instructs, “Everything is done face to face NOT online DO NOT write us asking how to join! Find an Outlaw and ask him!” Another site, belonging to the Outlaws M.C. World, features an article titled, “What is [an] Outlaw M.C. one-percenter today?” “To say that one-percenters are criminals or people of a lesser moral code than the rest of society is a tainted opinion,” the pseudonymous author argues. “We may not live by the rules of society, but we do live by its laws.”

Another language quibble: “Bikerider” is not a word, strictly speaking. It does not appear in the dictionary. According to Lyon, it is a word that once held a narrow definition, describing a subculture as it existed at a specific time and place.

“Back then in Chicago, they had a lot of names for things, names that were of the Midwest, and of that city, words belonging to that place and to the people who lived there,” wrote Lyon in the 1997 preface. “One of those words was bikeriders. No one there ever called them motorcyclists. The machines were called bikes, and the riders were called bikeriders. The word biker was simply never used in the Midwest by anyone at that time.”

After finding a publisher for the book, a copy editor explained that the title would need to be two words: The Bike Riders. Lyon pled his case—and won. In the years that followed, he was aghast to see “biker” become widespread. “I even use it myself,” he wrote. “The term that I heard and loved, and used with such pride, has all but been forgotten.”

Melbourne is bringing the brrrrr! But it doesn’t have to mean being stuck inside. Pop on some layers and join us for a day of coffee, culture and cocktails with a Hellenic twist.

(Pssst! Read to the end for a discount at one of Melbourne’s hottest cocktail bars.)

First things first – coffee, obviously.

Next on the menu – a dose of culture.

Spot of lunch?

A rooftop cocktail with a twist

It’s winter friendly

It’s rich with Mediterranean storytelling

A star-studded team

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A groundbreaking discovery in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has unveiled the oldest known narrative cave art, dating back at least 51,200 years. This revelation, published in the journal Nature, not only rewrites the timeline of human artistic expression but also showcases the advanced storytelling abilities of our ancient ancestors.

Unveiling the Ancient Artwork

In the Maros-Pangkep region of Sulawesi, researchers have identified a cave painting featuring human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. The depiction of these scenes suggests a level of sophistication in early human culture previously unrecognized.

“Our discovery suggests that storytelling was a much older part of human history… than previously thought,” study co-author archaeologist Adam Brumm told a press conference, reported Phys.org.

Using a novel dating method, scientists have provided a more accurate age for this artwork, pushing back previous estimates by at least 5,700 years. This finding suggests that early humans were creating complex narrative scenes much earlier than previously thought.

The Challenge of Dating Prehistoric Art

Dating prehistoric rock art accurately has long been a challenge for archaeologists. Traditional methods, like the solution-based uranium-series technique, involve analyzing calcium carbonate deposits that naturally form on top of cave paintings. By measuring the radioactive decay of uranium into thorium within these deposits, researchers can estimate the minimum age of the underlying art. However, the complexities of rock growth histories often result in underestimation of the art’s true age.

To overcome these limitations, Adhi Agus Oktaviana, Maxime Aubert, and their colleagues employed a cutting-edge approach known as laser ablation uranium-series imaging (LA-U-series). This method uses a laser coupled with a mass spectrometer to analyze calcium carbonate samples in exquisite detail. By focusing on materials closer to the pigment layer, this technique yields more accurate age calculations.

Revolutionary Dating Method

Applying the LA-U-series method, researchers analyzed a hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, previously dated to at least 43,900 years ago. The new analysis suggested the painting is at least 48,000 years old, making it one of the oldest narrative paintings in the world.

Hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4: the top image shows a photostitched panorama of the rock art panel; the bottom image is a digital tracing of the rock art scene. (Ratno Sardi / Adhi Agus Oktaviana/Nature)

The researchers then turned their attention to a previously undated painting at Leang Karampuang, depicting three human-like figures interacting with a pig. Using the advanced dating method, they determined this artwork to be at least 51,200 years old. This makes it the earliest known figurative cave art and the oldest narrative scene discovered to date.

Aerial Photo Karampuang Hill, where the oldest narrative art has been found.  (Google Arts & Culture/Nature)

Implications for Human History

The discovery of such ancient narrative art challenges existing assumptions about the evolution of human artistic expression. Previously, it was believed that the portrayal of human-like figures and the use of narrative scenes in art became common towards the end of the Late Pleistocene, around 14,000 to 11,000 years ago. However, the Sulawesi findings indicate that these complex forms of artistic expression emerged much earlier.

The implications of this discovery extend beyond just the age of the artwork. It suggests that early humans possessed advanced cognitive abilities, enabling them to create and comprehend complex narratives. This capacity for storytelling and symbolic representation is a fundamental aspect of what makes us human.

Advancing Archaeological Methods

The success of the LA-U-series method in providing accurate dates for the Sulawesi cave paintings shows the potential for this technique to revolutionize the field of archaeology. Compared to the traditional solution-based method, the LA-U-series approach is faster, more cost-effective, less destructive, and provides better spatial resolution. This improved accuracy is crucial for developing a clearer understanding of early human culture and its development over time.

The findings from Sulawesi not only enhance our knowledge of prehistoric art but also pave the way for future discoveries. As researchers continue to apply advanced dating techniques to other ancient artworks, we can expect further revelations about the origins and evolution of human creativity.

The study ‘Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago’ has been published in Nature. 

Top image: Dated Rock Art Panel at Leang Karampuang             Source: Provided by Griffith University /Nature

By Gary Manners

“I belong to no organized party,” the humorist Will Rogers said in 1924. “I’m a Democrat.”

Rogers had just witnessed the longest and by some accounts “wildest” political convention in American history: the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which took 16 days and 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate.

Beginning on June 24, the summer convention was a bleak, sweltering affair for the Democrats. Initially buoyed by optimism over divisions and corruption within incumbent President Calvin Coolidge’s Republican Party, the Democrats quickly became aware that their coalition was even more divided. Dueling factions representing starkly different constituencies, policies and worldviews had come together in New York City’s Madison Square Garden to tear each other apart with no plans for reconciliation or compromise.

The divisions within the party were so profound that fights broke out on the convention floor and across the New York metropolitan area. At one point, 20,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, which backed leading candidate William Gibbs McAdoo, “battered to a shapeless pulp” an effigy of New York Governor Al Smith, the other front-runner, at a demonstration across the Hudson River in New Jersey, wrote historian Robert K. Murray in The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden.

By the final ballot on July 9, delegates had abandoned their first-, second- and 102nd-choice candidates and settled on John W. Davis of West Virginia, a conservative lawyer, congressman and compromise candidate who satisfied almost no one.

After all the chaos of the convention, the Democrats lost badly to Coolidge in the 1924 presidential election. The Republicans’ slogan, “Coolidge or chaos,” resounded across the country, reminding voters of the troubled state of the Democratic Party. Davis won just 12 states—all of the former Confederate states plus Oklahoma—and 29 percent of the popular vote.

Because of its disorganization and ultimate failure, the 1924 DNC has been largely forgotten. But its flaws—as well as the glimmers of hope that squeaked out of Madison Square Garden—offer valuable lessons 100 years later, as a new generation of Democrats prepares to nominate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for re-election in Chicago this August.

A party divided against itself

Ahead of the 1924 convention, the Democratic Party was in the throes of an identity crisis.

Since its founding in 1828, the Democratic Party had been committed to an agrarian vision of American democracy, rooted firmly in land ownership, limited government and conservative social policy. Through the Civil War, the Democrats contrasted themselves with the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and big government. By 1932, however, these positions had started to shift, with Democrats dominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition supporting an expanded federal government and socially progressive policies that are more in line with the party’s platform today.

The 1924 DNC caught the party in an awkward spot, with a progressive wing slowly differentiating itself from the old guard in light of socioeconomic transformations unfolding across the country. “The old local, or even regional, economy was giving up ground to a national economy,” says Rory McVeigh, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame. Small-scale producers in rural areas faced increasing competition with large-scale capitalism in major cities.

Waves of immigration from Central and Eastern Europe also upset the interwar social order, leaving white Protestants across the country in “deep pockets of discontent,” McVeigh adds.

Those who felt left behind, replaced or threatened were susceptible to manipulation by the KKK, which underwent a resurgence in the 1920s, in part because of its ability to prey on middle-class economic fears, misplaced patriotism and overt bigotry.

On the other hand, more progressive Democrats in the Northeast United States were “trying to appeal to this growing working-class immigrant population,” McVeigh says.

In place of its once-unified agrarian base, the Democratic Party was now profoundly divided.

The unapparent heirs

The three major candidates for the Democratic nomination “epitomized the party’s urban-rural, religious and sectional divisions,” wrote historian Jane Dailey in Building the American Republic, Volume 2.

McAdoo was the leading candidate for much of the lead-up to the convention. Born in Georgia in 1863, McAdoo had served as a lawyer in Tennessee, a tunnel-building businessman in New York City and secretary of the Treasury in Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet. After the death of his first wife, McAdoo married Eleanor Wilson, the president’s daughter, in 1914. McAdoo’s friends and political allies from his time in the cabinet pushed him to become Wilson’s heir apparent in the 1920 election, but he refused the mantle and moved to California to avoid hostile East Coast politics.

The Democratic Party’s success in the 1922 midterm elections encouraged McAdoo to return to politics and announce his candidacy. Soon enough, the Chicago Tribune reported that the Democratic race was “rapidly developing into a McAdoo and anti-McAdoo affair.”

McAdoo’s base was concentrated in the rural South and West, where the politician quietly courted the support of the KKK, which was waging a moral war in favor of Prohibition and continuing its Protestant white supremacist crusade.

Leading the anti-McAdoo contingent was Smith, the governor of New York. He set himself up against the KKK, a group that was existentially opposed to this descendent of Irish Catholic immigrants and the diversifying, urban Northeast he represented.

“Smith was the thing that people would hold out … to scare native-born white Protestants who flocked to the Ku Klux Klan,” McVeigh says.

Between these worldviews, little common ground existed. But pockets of nuance existed.

The third front-runner entering the convention was Oscar W. Underwood, a senator from Alabama. A Southerner through and through, as well as a loud opponent of the KKK, Underwood drew impressive support from his home state, with one local paper dubbing him “democracy’s safeguard.” But his nuanced position failed to capture the restive mood within the party or dissuade delegates from backing other local nominees.

As Camille Kaminski Lewis, a communications scholar at Furman University, wrote in a 2020 journal article, “Every state wanted its man on the top of the ticket, and the bosses were ready to lock horns.”

Democratic convention in New York City 1924

The “Klanbake” begins

The New York Daily News reported that on June 24, the first day of the convention, the “Klanbake steamed open at 12:45.”

The party was “irreconcilably divided over the Klan issue,” McVeigh says. Whether to condemn the KKK by name was the most pressing issue that the Democratic Party had to confront before it could make any real progress.

A majority of the committee members who were tasked with drafting the party’s religious freedom platform (including failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who suggested the party turn to Jesus and ignore the KKK issue outright) did not want to condemn the hate group by name. Their proposal only vaguely stated how the party would “deplore and condemn any effort to arouse religious or racial dissension.”

A rival plank, meanwhile, pledged “to oppose any effort on the part of the Ku Klux Klan or any organization to interfere with the religious liberty or political freedom of any citizen … or to limit the civic rights of any citizen or body of citizens because of religion, birthplace or racial origin.”

Support for the two planks was mostly cast along regional lines. Delegates from Southern and Western states—those who would later back McAdoo—favored the Klan-sympathetic platform. Northern, pro-Smith delegates tended toward the alternative option.

Andrew Cobb Erwin, a delegate from Georgia, was one of the few who “spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK,” wrote Lewis.

In an interview, Lewis explains how much of a political rarity Erwin was. He descended from “the gentry class in Virginia,” she says. “He was a longstanding aristocratic Southern gentleman.” His father was the first recipient of the Confederate Cross of Honor, and his enslaver ancestors had neighborhoods in Athens, Georgia, named in their honor.

Despite his pedigree, Erwin told the crowd of delegates at the convention that he would “favor a plank denouncing [the KKK], or any other secret society, in as strong words as a human hand can write.”

“You can, by adopting the report of the majority, evade the issue, which would, in effect, give your approval to the activities of this organization,” he said. “Follow this course, and you may prepare for an ignominious defeat at the polls in November.”

Erwin added, “Meet the issue squarely, as the people of this country expect you to meet it, and a glorious victory will be yours.”

The reaction was mixed—a cacophony of jeers, hisses and applause. Many Southerners turned their back on Erwin. But New York’s delegates lifted him up and paraded him around Madison Square Garden. A woman from Rhode Island ran up to Erwin and kissed him on the mouth.

The convention ultimately adopted the majority platform and failed to condemn the KKK by name. The pro-McAdoo Democrats had made their position clear, widening the rift within the party. “That’s where the convention turned,” Lewis says. As for Erwin, his prediction of political doom in November would soon prove all too prescient.

“Women in star roles”

Despite the Democrats’ regressive stance on the KKK, the party still showed signs of social progress.

Together with the 1924 Republican National Convention, where women “ruled the floor,” according to historian Rebekkah Rubin, the DNC gave women more opportunities than ever before to wade into the muck of party politics. Daily News reporter Imogene Stanley wrote that women made up “almost half the milling crowd in the Garden,” with some “in star roles,” including 54 members of the party’s national committee.

The 1924 DNC marked the first time a women was nominated for vice president at a major party’s political convention. Lena Springs, a women’s rights activist from South Carolina, won 44 votes, while two other women received at least one vote each. Ultimately, none was successful.

Behind the scenes, Smith’s closest adviser, Belle Moskowitz, was “the nearest thing to a woman political boss in the United States,” reported journalist Josephine van de Grift. “At Albany, they openly call her the ‘prime minister of New York State.’”

In her 1987 biography of Moskowitz, historian Elisabeth Israels Perry noted that the adviser “was in the thick of the 1924 contest.” She was by Smith’s side throughout the convention, where she “churned out publicity and handled all correspondence on Smith’s candidacy.”

Speaking with van de Grift in 1924, Moskowitz said, “Women in politics can achieve more behind the scenes than in office.” She added, “I’m more interested in policies than politics.” But the chaos that followed was pure, messy politics, and the subtleties of policy differences were all but left behind.

“An idiotic and depressing spectacle”

Even before voting began, partisan tensions among the Democrats stretched into every part of the convention’s pomp and circumstance.

The great American songwriter Irving Berlin was commissioned to write a keynote song for the convention that one organizer said would be “as important as the keynote speech.” But Berlin’s song ultimately became a pro-Smith ditty called “We’ll All Go Voting for Al”—not exactly an anthem of party unity.

In Madison Square Garden, rival factions started chanting. “Mac, Mac, McAdoo” was quickly answered by “Smith, Smith, Alfred Smith” and “Ku, Ku, McAdoo.” Physical altercations and fights broke out on the floor. The unrest didn’t bode well for either McAdoo or Smith, who would have to take two-thirds of the delegates—732 votes—to secure the nomination.

On the first ballot, McAdoo took 431.5 votes, and Smith took 241, for a combined 61 percent of the total votes. Underwood, the anti-KKK senator from Alabama, won 42.5 delegates. Other votes were spread among 16 candidates, who received between 1 and 59 votes each.

Across dozens more ballots, state delegations kept voting for their “favorite sons,” like Albert Ritchie, the governor of Maryland, who consistently hovered around 17.5 votes—an insignificant 1.6 percent of the delegates.

As journalist H.L. Mencken wrote in a column for the Baltimore Evening Sun, “The delegates kept on voting for their pets as before, like children poll-parroting a meaningless rhyme. It was an idiotic and depressing spectacle.”

He continued, “If you can imagine 3,000 dogs in one great pit, all frantically chasing their tails, you can imagine what it looked like.”

Will Rogers found much comedic material in the convention’s length, which far surpassed the previous record of 46 ballots needed to nominate Wilson in 1912. He told readers in gleeful detail about the piles of whittling carvings that the Arkansas delegation had made, as well as the ever-growing whiskers of one bearded Utah delegate.

But there were kernels of truth in his pages of jest. “Pick [a nominee] now,” he implored. “In fact, I would pick out three or four to run in rotation in 1928, ’32, ’36 and so on, because you will never get Democratic delegates to give up the best part of their lives by attending another one of these things.” (As if to highlight the growing absurdity and deterioration of the convention—or perhaps in agreement with Rogers’ commentary—Arizona’s delegation cast a single vote for the humorist on the 67th ballot.)

Little by little, favorite sons like Ritchie dropped out. McAdoo and Smith maneuvered furiously for votes, but neither could reach the two-thirds majority, and by the 99th ballot, neither saw a path to victory. The two candidates simultaneously told their supporters to vote freely, but neither formally withdrew, waiting for the other to fold first. Some stuck with McAdoo or Smith for a few more votes before dwindling off. The stalemate was coming to a close.

Davis, who had been quietly trailing the two front-runners for most of the convention, often in a distant third place, emerged as the leading contender, and over the next several ballots—until the infamous 103rd—“state after state fell in line until … he had a majority,” according to the Olean Evening Times.

In the wee hours of July 10, in a surprisingly efficient turn of events, the Democrats gave Charles W. Bryan, governor of Nebraska and brother of William Jennings Bryan, the vice presidential nomination in a single ballot.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that Davis “had never met his running mate … until the opening of the convention.” The two men, the paper reported, “are direct opposites. Almost as much unalike as McAdoo and Smith, but in a different way.”

These revelations did little to inspire party unity or confidence about the nominees.

“Chaos or Coolidge” and how the Democrats lost the 1924 election

Though Davis was a compromise candidate, his nomination did little to patch up the party’s wounds, and neither side was particularly pleased with the outcome.

McAdoo blamed Tammany Hall and its “obstructionist tactics” for his loss, wrote Lee N. Allen in a 1963 journal article. Smith was convinced the KKK and his own Catholicism cost him the nomination: He “never received more than a single vote from the South” across the 103 ballots, according to Murray.

By the time Davis secured the nomination, Madison Square Garden, once the sweltering site of intense, at times violent enthusiasm, was all but abandoned.

Both fundamentalist Democrats like William Jennings Bryan and liberal Democrats were skeptical of Davis’ close ties to Wall Street from his time as a corporate lawyer. To counter what he saw as a false choice between two conservatives, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin ran independently as a progressive, socialist candidate in the general election.

The press was not too impressed with Davis, either. The Boston Globe ran a humiliating article about how “Davis as a boy was afraid of girls.” The Democratic nominee for president was alleged to have “no plans for the immediate future, other than to obtain a needed rest.”

On a national scale, the internal strife within the party, its raucous convention and its tacit support of the KKK scuttled the Democrats’ hopes of electoral success.

“This was certainly an embarrassment because it was the first convention that was broadcast on radio,” Lewis says. “So people could tune in and hear all of the folderol.”

As the Yonkers Herald predicted, “The Democratic Convention of 1924 registered chaos so long that even the benign and dignified figure of Mr. Davis will hardly assuage the doubts of the voters.”

Coolidge, running as a stable, time-tested leader, cruised to re-election, winning 54 percent of the popular vote in the three-way race against Davis and La Follette.

“They got what they deserve,” Lewis says of the Democrats’ defeat. “That’s a terrible thing to say, yes. [But] they created this conflict, and they chose poorly.”

The legacy of the 1924 Democratic National Convention

One hundred years after the Democrats came together in Madison Square Garden and nominated Davis, the 1924 DNC still casts a long shadow. It was a convention of extremes—the longest, the first to be broadcast on the radio—but it also came at a moment of deep internal strife for both the party and the nation.

In McVeigh’s view, the KKK’s malign influence, as well as the Democrats’ subsequent loss in the election, was responsible for the “acceleration of realignment in the parties that was already taking place,” paving the way for Smith’s eventual nomination in 1928 and Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition in 1932. (Smith lost to Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election, carrying just eight states.)

1924 marked the first time a Black delegate attended the DNC. A.P. Collins, an alternate from New York, replaced a white delegate who dropped out. In 1928, however, no Black delegates participated in the convention.

Similarly, although the 1924 DNC marked the first time that women were put up for the vice presidential nomination, a woman didn’t secure the candidacy until 1984, when Democrat Geraldine Ferraro ran alongside Walter Mondale.

Reflecting on the 1924 convention’s legacy, Lewis finds hope in its examples of resistance, like Erwin, who spoke up against the KKK. She tells the story of Erwin’s grandson, a seventh-generation Athenian named Milton Leathers, who repeated his grandfather’s speech during a 2017 town meeting about removing a Confederate monument in Georgia.

In Erwin’s words, carried into the 21st century by his proud family and by dedicated scholars like Lewis, “I say that those Georgians who do not take a stand against this hooded menace, which prowls in the darkness, that dares not show its face, is not worthy of his ancestry; and I call upon you, my fellow Georgians, … to purge from your hearts this senseless prejudice.”

In celebration of National Colouring Book Day, download your free PDF colouring sheet below. Simply print at home and colour away!

Happy 1947th birthday, Hadrian!

I made some Cato’s Globi (Pastry Balls) as Hadrian’s birthday cake this year.

Globi (original recipe from LacusCurtius):

Mix the cheese and spelt in the same way (as Libum), sufficient to make the number desired. Pour lard into a hot copper vessel, and fry one or two at a time, turning them frequently with two rods, and remove when done. Spread with honey, sprinkle with poppy seed, and serve.

Ingredients: (recipe taken from Mark Grant’s Roman Cookery)

• 1 egg
• 100g spelt flour
• 60g clear honey
• 200g Cheddar cheese (or ricotta cheese)
• 85g poppy seeds & sesame seeds, lightly toasted
• olive oil for deep frying

Sift the flour into a bowl. Beat the cheese until it’s soft and stir it into the flour along with the egg. Form a soft dough. Break into small pieces and roll each of these in your hands, forming balls about 2.5 cm/1 inch in diameter.

Prepare a simple deep-fryer in a saucepan using olive oil, which will need to be at least 2.5 cm deep. When the oil is hot but not smoking, gently drop 2 or 3 pastry balls into the oil and turn them occasionally until they are golden brown on the outside. Lift from the oil and drain on paper towels. Cook the rest of the pastry balls in the same way.

Heat the honey in a frying pan until it is very runny. Pour the poppy and sesame seeds onto a plate, and roll the balls in the honey until thoroughly coasted. Roll in the roasted sesame seeds or the poppy seeds. These pastry balls are delicious, eaten either hot or cold.

In celebration of Hadrian’s birthday, I also opened a bottle of Mulsum. This Mulsum is today produced in Germany (you can buy it from der-Roemer-shop here) and is made according to a recipe from Apicius. As testified by Pliny the Elder, the blend of wine, honey and a certain number of plants and spices are used to make this famous wine, which was often served as the gustatio (before the meal as an aperitif) or as a refreshment on its own.

One thousand nine hundred years ago, Hadrian celebrated his 47th birthday in Tarraco (Tarragona, Spain). Having returned to Gaul from Britain, Hadrian made his only known visit to his native land as emperor during the winter of AD 122/3 (read more here). He took up his residence at Tarraco (Tarragona), Rome’s oldest foundation on the Iberian Peninsula and the capital of Hispania Tarraconensis, and restored the Temple of Augustus at his own expense.

Related

The largest geophysical survey ever commissioned by the National Trust has been undertaken at the Attingham Estate in Shropshire. The one-of-a-kind survey, encompassing over 1000 hectares (2,471 acres) used innovative scanning and mapping technology, and was commissioned to provide a better understanding of Attingham’s archaeological remains to help the conservation charity develop its ambitious nature recovery plans for the area.

Stripping Back the Layers at Attingham

Geophysics is a method of archaeological survey that helps to understand what is beneath the soil in a non-invasive way where potential for archaeological remains is likely, reducing the need for excavation and ground disturbance.

A geophysical survey at Attingham Park. (National Trust)

The Attingham Estate encompasses a portion of the buried Roman city of Wroxeter (Viriconium Cornoviorum), cared for by English Heritage, and some of the land surrounding the city.

Among the significant features identified by the survey work was evidence for what are believed to be two previously unknown Roman villas and a Roman roadside cemetery, on a road leading out of Wroxeter.

The two rural villas, (the equivalent of a large country estate) show evidence of at least two construction or occupation phases, along with floor plans with internal room divisions and associated outbuildings.

Villas of this nature in the UK were usually heated by hypocausts (underfloor heating), they often had their own bath houses and were decorated with painted plaster and mosaic floors. It is likely that both villas identified would have had similar features. Only six other Roman villas are currently known in Shropshire.

Greyscale geophysics data showing the site of a possible Roman villa on Attingham Estate in Shropshire. (National Trust)

Older Farmsteads Found

Eight ditched enclosures and associated remains, many believed to be Iron Age or Romano British farmsteads, have also been detected by the survey. These would have likely been small farms perhaps supplying food for the adjacent city, four of these were completely unknown until now.

In addition, evidence for several Roman roads to the west of Wroxeter were identified and surveys have substantially enhanced archaeologists’ understanding of the settlement activity immediately outside the defenses of the city and the changing use of the area during Roman times.

Elsewhere on the estate, new features associated with a previously known Anglo-Saxon Great Hall complex have been detected, as well as substantial evidence which furthers existing knowledge of RAF Atcham airfield, and its runways, perimeter defenses and landscaping.

An artist’s impression issued by National Trust of an iron age farmstead enclosure. (Jennie Anderson/National Trust)

Preservation Plans

Enhanced understanding of this archaeologically significant landscape provided by the survey results is enabling the Trust to progress with confidence as it plans land use changes with its tenants to help capture carbon, build climate resilience and support nature restoration in North Shropshire. Insight and learning from this work will be shared to help others sensitively plan for new woodlands in complex historic environments around the country.

National Trust Archaeologist Janine Young said:

“Attingham Estate has always been known to have high historical and archaeological significance which has now been confirmed by the largest geophysical survey the National Trust has ever undertaken. We’ve seen tantalizing hints of these remains over the years, with evidence showing up in cropmarks, aerial imagery and through small surveys and excavations. But until now, what lies beneath the surface of the ground has never fully been investigated.

This new geophysical survey has really transformed our knowledge by establishing a comprehensive ‘map’ of what is below our feet, providing us with a fascinating picture of the estate’s hidden past, revealing previously unknown sites of importance.”

Teams from Magnitude Surveys, the largest independent provider of Archaeological Geophysical surveys in the UK, used the very latest technology to carry out a magnetometer survey, which records subtle changes in the local magnetic field. This innovative surveying method enables large areas to be covered in a relatively short time, with anomalies produced when buried features exhibit different magnetic properties to the surrounding soil.

Alice Collier, National Trust Project Manager said:

“Having this detailed knowledge of the way the land has been used in the past is directly informing our plans for how the land could best be used in the future for the benefit of nature and people. The survey results are helping to influence the location and design of potential woodland and wetland projects by highlighting areas we will need to work around to protect important archaeological remains.

We are working collaboratively with our farm tenants, to look at how we can deliver changes for nature and help to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change whilst respecting the heritage of the landscape.”

John Deakin, Head of Trees & Woodlands at the National Trust added:

“This project will help Attingham to work with its farm tenants to identify opportunities for tree establishment across its land in North Shropshire, whilst ensuring the protection of heritage features. This has been a one-of-a kind investment for the National Trust, due to the size of the estate being mapped and the complexities presented by the rich archaeological heritage of this area of North Shropshire.

Learnings from this project will help inform the Trust’s approach to planning for nature and heritage together in different landscapes, supporting its ambitious work to improve the state of nature in the UK.”

Winn Scutt, Senior Properties Curator at English Heritage commented:

“Although we know a great deal about the city of Wroxeter in Roman times from surveys carried out in the 1990s, the wider area around the site still has much to reveal. This latest geophysical survey by the National Trust is exciting, and along with further excavation by English Heritage this July and surveys by Historic England, we are all vastly growing our understanding of this important historic site.”

The project was supported by bequests and donations to the National Trust to support its nature conservation, tree planting and heritage work.

Top image: Visualisation of one of the Attingham Roman villas.             Source: © Jennie Anderson/National Trust

This article is a press release by the National Trust, originally titled, ‘Largest geophysical survey ever undertaken on National Trust land identifies what are believed to be two Roman villas’.