Culture

The new season, which is also on track to set another Netflix record, takes a deeper look at the economic context and constraints surrounding the surrealistic games.

More than a third of the season takes place outside the actual game setting, highlighting the dystopian life circumstances that drive participants to enter the deadly competition in the first place.

In many ways, Squid Game Season 2 is a very South Korean story. The country has one of the highest levels of household debt in the world, much of which has incurred through a failing social security system.

Most notably, a nominally public health-care system offloads considerable burdens on those who require special treatments or operations. Gambling, too, has emerged as a pressing social and economic problem among young Koreans.

Beyond that, Season 2 highlights one specific feature of a capitalist system built on zero-sum competition: people are drawn into it because of the promise of fairy tale wins for a few, despite it resulting in devastating losses for the many.

The illusion of choice

In contrast to other contemporary critiques of capitalism that tend to highlight the players behind the scenes, Squid Game unearths the reasons why the general public plays along with the system in the first place. It’s a depiction of a very real individual financial abyss.

Squid Game doesn’t shy away from the motive of greed, a sentiment famously encapsulated in the 1987 film Wall Street. However, the show frames this greed against a broader canvas of personal bankruptcy, unpaid health-care bills and gambling losses in the form of failed crypto investments.

Squid Game’s perspective on contemporary capitalism, and why it’s supported by billions of people around the world, is striking. Crumbling public services, privatized insecurity and unattended health issues are not mere side-effects of neo-liberal economic policies — they are designed to push people into the system.

Almost all the players in the game see it as the only option left for them. No one enters the game willingly; they are all thrust in it involuntarily out of necessity.

It is a role in this game that provides the hope of steering clear of the potential abyss against which a declining middle class in many capitalist economies has survived. Like the players of Squid Game buy into the game as their only means of survival, we, too, buy into the capitalism system because we don’t have another choice.

In a global context, the show highlights how extreme poverty and lack of public infrastructure force vast parts of the population in so-called developing countries to participate in exploitative — and often lethal — labour conditions.

Business professor Bobby Banerjee has explored the latter aspect under the label of “necrocapitalism,” while professors Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming have explored the experiences of first-world white-collar workers in their book Dead Men Working.

The promise of more

The repeating votes and battles over the continuation of the game highlight why so many people continue to participate in the broader capitalist system: the promise of more.

Recently, we have seen some junior investment bankers literally working themselves to death. Private gain as the “defining trait of capitalist society” is a well researched phenomenon.

Squid Game plays on the almost comical ability people have to believe in their own capacity to survive and be the chosen winner.

The cruelty and violence of the game itself fuels players’ almost transcendental convictions that they are destined to be the sole victor of the games. These desires, however, clash with the core humanity of the players.

Camaraderie develops as the players work together, and family ties, past friendships, shared experiences, compassion and spirituality all have a clear presence in the show. But in the end, they are overshadowed by the rigid logic of the overarching game.

The most scandalous recent example for such behaviour is American financier Bernie Madoff who ruthlessly defrauded family and kinship in the Jewish community for his personal gain.

‘Temporarily embarrassed millionaires’

Some critics bemoaned that Season 2 is too focused on the lives of the players, with the actual games not beginning until episode four.

However, this shift arguably makes the relationship between the players’ real lives and the games much more explicit. In turn, it makes the show’s critique of capitalism even more pronounced.

While the high-stakes games are undoubtedly the series’ main draw, the popularity of the series still has a lot to do with its intrinsic message, which becomes much more pronounced in the second season. People can identify with the characters risking their survival for the promise of heroically winning another lease on life against all odds.

As American writer John Steinbeck once put it, many middle- and working-class Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.” This mindset encapsulates the relentless participation in a capitalist system that offers only the faint possibility of success.

This dynamic is illustrated in Squid Game Season 2, which explores how individuals rationalize their participation in a game that otherwise runs counter to their most basic human impulses.

The lyrics to Bertold Brecht’s satirical song March of the Calves comes to mind: “Following the drum / The calves trot / The skin for the drum / They deliver themselves.” It’s a sobering metaphor for the way the promise of success often blinds us to the personal sacrifice we may pay to achieve it.

Dirk Matten, Professor of Sustainability, Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

She made her debut in wartime Athens – in Tosca, aged 18. Her willpower was founded on insecurity. She came from a humble background and was judged fat and unattractive by her own family.

Some considered her extensively trained voice beautiful. Others thought it was anything but, finding it to have a rather dry, even ugly quality. There was also no consistent agreement as to which notes on her impressive three-octave range were her finest. Some critics thought her best at the highs of a musical scale, others at lows.

Even Callas disliked her own voice, describing it as something she had eventually come to accept. Yet she forged a successful career in opera based on what else her voice was able to achieve – to conjure something that was truly expressive and poignant.

Rendered practically blind by severe short-sightedness, she found herself isolated from the audience when on stage and was described as a dreamer. She had more than just the gift of beautiful music. Callas turned opera back into what it had been: a dramatic rendition of a story via both singing and meticulous acting.

Such was the transformative nature of her performances that some joked that opera should be divided into two main periods: BC and AC (before Callas and after Callas).

She developed an undeserved reputation for diva-ish outbursts. And her exacting standards meant that she would sometimes cancel events, or walk out of them if she felt unable to deliver.

Regardless of critical opinion of her, a deterioration in Callas’s voice was noted as early as 1956 when she was just 33. This would become more clearly pronounced, making the difficult arias she was previously able to perform impossible. It eventually diminished her voice to a shadow of its former self.

In recent years, a study quantified the audible differences between her recordings of Tosca and Nabucco, a decade apart. They found that she had become increasingly sharp, irregular and unstable.

What prompted the demise of this iconic voice has been a subject of hot debate in the operatic world. Many have credited this decline to her heartbreak at losing Aristotle Onassis to Jackie Kennedy. Others have claimed that it was simply the result of going in too strong, too soon, in her performance. Many of Callas’s earlier roles had been very technically demanding – and may have proved injurious.

Her notable technique focused on intonation to add dramatic effect to her singing, and may also have been responsible for hardening her vocal cords. These are the folds of membrane that vibrate across the outflowing jet of air from your lungs, making a voice or musical sound.

Callas’s diet may also have had an effect. Modelling herself on the grace of Audrey Hepburn, she lost a staggering amount of weight (over 35kg) in her twenties. There was even speculation that she may have ingested tapeworms to do so.

This dramatic weight loss, like that achieved through rapid diets of the modern day, might also have caused her to shed muscle mass. The voice is as much an output of muscle action as, say, flexing a bicep. The movement and vibration of the vocal cords are determined by the action of different groups of muscles in the larynx (or voicebox). These muscles stretch the cords or tense them, like the strings on a harp or violin. They can also make them open or close.

In losing laryngeal muscle, her extreme dieting may have been responsible for her weakened voice.

Another clue may lie with a report that was published more than 25 years after Callas’s death by a doctor who consulted with her in her autumn days, living in Paris. She held out her hands to show how they had changed from “that of Floria Tosca [to] those of a labourer”.

Dermatomyositis

What she was demonstrating was the roughened, swollen, violet-marked hands associated with the condition dermatomyositis. This is a connective tissue disease that causes inflammation in both skin and muscle.

Alongside the same purple rash on her neck, her stooped posture and weakened voice (otherwise called dysphonia) were hallmarks of this illness. After treating the inflammation with the steroid drug prednisolone, Callas noted some improvement. Sadly, it was to be short-lived.

Callas died in Paris, in 1977, of a heart attack. She was 53 years old.

Jolie reportedly undertook seven months of operatic tuition to sing at the film’s climax. Now nominated for her ninth Golden Globe and perhaps looking toward her third Oscar, she gives us a glimpse of her extraordinary capabilities.

Regardless of what she manages to vocalise in Maria, since Callas was famed for embracing her imperfections and creating something truly magical from them, Jolie’s inspired performance is on track to do the same.

Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

He is Wales’s latest chaired prifardd. And while prifardd might be rendered in English as “chief bard” or “chief poet”, the cultural significance of this title is lost in translation – the first of a handful of such terms that I’m going to share with you.

To become a prifardd, you need to compete in the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, the annual Welsh cultural festival. One of its main attractions is the chairing of the bard ceremony.

This event, both solemn and joyful, is officiated by the Gorsedd, which is the gathering of what we call, derwyddon – two further untranslatable terms.

Gorsedd must be left as gorsedd. And derwyddon is the plural of derwydd, translated as “prophet, vaticinator, wise man” as well as “druid”. But these “druids” are not what you might imagine. To become a derwydd in the Gorsedd sense is to be honoured for services to Wales.

While there are references to literary competitions in Wales dating back many centuries, it is generally agreed that the first of these is the record of a competition held in 1176 in Cardigan Castle instigated by Arglwydd Rhys (12th century prince) where it is noted that the winners were each honoured with a chair. Why a chair, though?

This was a time when becoming a court poet in Wales was to join a highly respected profession which later became a nine year-long apprenticeship, with grades from the elementary disgybl ysbas all the way to the heady hights of pencerdd or “head poet”.

Let’s zoom in on the second element in this word: pencerdd, namely cerdd. This can mean “poem” or “music” in Welsh, and is the first element in the normal word for music (cerddoriaeth). Understanding this enables us to begin to grasp the importance of prosody (the patterns of rhythm, sound and stress) in this poetic chair-giving tradition.

After the 1176 gathering, other notable Eisteddfodau are recorded in the 15th and 16th centuries. Fast forward to 1861 and to Aberdare when the National Eisteddfod tradition as we know it today began.

And from then until today, the chair has been offered every year (apart from a few where the ceremonies were postponed due to wars and COVID-19). Offered, but not always won. On a dozen or so occasions the adjudicators deemed that none of the poems entered was worthy of the much sought-after prize.

So what did Eckley do to earn the privilege of driving home in a pickup carrying such a prestigious piece of furniture?

Cynghanedd

He composed a 250-line poem in response to the given theme, Cadwyn (Chain), written according to the principles of cynghanedd. This is our next untranslatable term. Some English reference books describe cynghanedd as “the ancient Welsh strict metres”. In so doing, they confine this most beautiful code to a prison with doors double-locked by bygone times and inflexible rules.

And while this form of writing poetry does indeed have, on the one hand, a very old history, and on the other, a set of stringent rules, the English term here misses the point. A direct translation of cynghanedd is “harmony”. This gets us closer to the “music” – remember the pencerdd – we find in a line of poetry written according to these sophisticated principles.

The first principle is to be able to identify the stress in a word. This is partly why poets face such difficulty when seeking to adopt cynghanedd in English-language verse, for English does not have the overt stress patterns of Welsh. Once the stress has been established, the poet then listens out for the natural caesura of a line. These lines can be as short as four syllables or as long as 12 and more.

Next, the poet forms patterns of alliteration and assonance, end and internal rhyme, that together create harmony between the words on the different sides of the caesura. And while there are only four basic types of cynghanedd lines – cynghanedd lusg (echoing), cynghanedd draws (bridging), cynghanedd sain (sonorous) and cynghanedd groes (criss-crossing) – the variations are infinite.

The tightrope between the absolute and the tolerated transgressions add a thrill of danger to the practice. Those expert in the craft can use it as an instrument to find their own unique voice and express their own unique “songs” on any subject under the moon and the sun, until the craft becomes art.

Listen carefully to this couplet from Eckley’s winning poem, in which he describes visiting, as a four-year-old, the new part of the graveyard where his father lies:

Yna cyrraedd cae arall (then I reach another field)
Y cae yn llai, llai na’r llall. (a field smaller than the other)

The first line splits after the word cyrraedd, creating a rhythmic pattern where each half of the word has matching consonantal sounds and stresses: c/r | c/r. Here, the “|” symbol represents the natural pause in the line, while the “/” indicates the stressed syllables.

The second line follows a more complex pattern with two pauses: llai | llai | ll/. In this line, there is an internal rhyme linking the first and second parts. The second and third parts share consonantal sounds.

Does its power carry over from Welsh? Probably not. It’s a bit like looking at the black dots of a song on a stave; they need a voice to make them sing.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1993 edition may well have declared: “In the detail and complexity of its patterning, cynghanedd is the most sophisticated system of poetic sound-patterning practiced [sic] in any poetry in the world”.

I can add that it’s also a key to a social scene that is popular and entertaining and to a tradition that keeps on attracting new voices, such as Eckley’s.

For my part, as the current Archdderwydd Cymru (our final untranslatable term, which, for now, we’ll call the “leader of the Gorsedd”), I shall close with enthusiastic encouragement to every would-be prifardd to start work on what might be next year’s winning poem. The date of the chairing ceremony is Friday 8 of August; the place: Wrecsam; the theme: Dinas (City). And bear in mind you may well need to hire a pickup.

Mererid Hopwood, Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the span of four years, von Sommer made a few friends, several enemies and a handful of surprisingly excellent maps of parts of Western Australia. His origins, life and career have been rather shrouded in mystery – in no small part because of the flood of disparaging invective about him published in local newspapers of the day.

So who was Ferdinand von Sommer? I traced his story through archival records in Europe, Africa and Asia. In the process of documenting von Sommer’s life and activities, I uncovered a multi-talented, self-assured and audacious individual whose talents and achievements have been largely forgotten.

Mathematics, medicine and minerals

Born in the Netherlands circa 1800, von Sommer studied mathematics at the University of Göttingen under the famous Carl Friedrich Gauss. After graduating in 1822, he claimed to have solved some complex problems in mathematics, but Gauss and others found his results confusing and unsatisfactory.

After serving in the Dutch navy and making a living as a writer and journalist, von Sommer worked as a university lecturer in Berlin. In 1838, he trained as a doctor and set out for India as a missionary before spending a year in Cape Town as a doctor.

Back in London in 1841, von Sommer reappeared as a “Prussian naturalist” named Frederic de Sommer. His efforts to sell an apparently sizeable art collection made news in several European papers.

It was at this time that von Sommer became interested in mineralogy and metallurgy. In 1842, he returned to Berlin to lecture in nautical science and the art of mine surveying. He also published several works of fiction, poetry, autobiography and philosophy in this period.

In late 1844 he set out for New Zealand, where he stayed briefly before heading on to South Australia, arriving in Adelaide in September 1845.

Copper and libel in Adelaide

Von Sommer arrived during Australia’s first mineral boom: the “Burra Copper Boom” (1845–51). The fast-growing Burra Burra copper mine in the Clare Valley, 100km north of Adelaide, attracted thousands.

An eyewitness later recalled von Sommer’s arrival:

dignified by a moustache and distinguished by a palpable want of familiarity with the English language, in virtue of which qualifications he was duly installed as assayer, smelter, and superintendent at the Burra Mine.

Von Sommer was a vocal critic of local mining practices, and made few friends. After only a few months he was dismissed as “too costly to retain”.

Von Sommer remained in South Australia, working as a doctor. However, he was widely derided in the local papers.

One described him as “a German, who had been occasionally mixed up in mining speculations, but lately had not followed any fixed calling”. The criticism reached such a pitch that von Sommer even (successfully) sued John Stephens, the editor and proprietor of the South Australian Register, for libel.

Surveying and ‘backbiting’ in Western Australia

Next stop for von Sommer was Perth, working for the Western Australian Mining Company.

Here he received a more welcoming reception, described as “a mineralogist of eminence” who would help the colony’s attempt at “sharing in the mineral wealth of Australia”.

After six months surveying in Western Australia (during which he once again vocally criticised local mining methods, proposing instead a “proper and practical way of mining”), von Sommer was appointed the first government geologist.

Throughout 1847 he travelled around Western Australia, sending several geological survey reports back to Perth.

During this time von Sommer suffered more of what he called “rather stupid backbitings” in local newspapers. One described him as “a mere charlatan”.

When von Sommer finally had enough, shipping out to what is now Jakarta in August 1848, one paper reported that

Dr von Sommer had quitted Western Australia for Batavia after some queer doings in the way of pretended mineral research and discovery.

Now employed by the Dutch government, von Sommer set out to search for copper deposits on Timor and the surrounding islands. Here, after an unknown illness, he died in 1849.

Parts of von Sommer’s Australian legacy are now found in London. He sent several letters to the Geological Society of London, including maps, and a paper tracing a coal field near the head of the Irwin River, as well as several specimens of rocks and shells.

Postscript

I found a strange postscript to von Sommer’s story. In the late 1850s, German-language newspapers reported with great interest the adventures of a man impersonating Ferdinand von Sommer (perhaps his youngest son, born in the early 1840s, who would have had no personal memory of his father).

Police reported “an alleged Doctor of Philosophy, Franz Wilhelm Ferdinand von Sommer, who was unable to prove that he had lawfully obtained the title of Doctor, just as he was unable to prove that he was entitled to hold the title of nobleman”.

He had “swindled a considerable sum of money from his benefactress, the convent mistress of Renoault [and] squandered this money at the Schandau baths and other places of amusement” in the company of a 17-year-old girl with whom he had co-habited in the spa town.

The impostor was “sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 500 thalers”, but managed to escape when he “was granted leave of absence from prison for some time due to illness […]. Now he has been arrested in Frankfurt am Main after committing new frauds there”.

And with that the name of Ferdinand von Sommer fades from the historical record, waiting to be rediscovered.

Alexandra Ludewig, Professor and Head of the School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Since 1980, the Confederate Festival – a series of cultural performances and culinary experiences combining Brazilian traditions with those of the American South – has occurred each April in rural São Paulo State.

The festival celebrates a mass exodus of white American Southerners to Brazil following the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1890 – dates that roughly reflect when the U.S. and Brazil, respectively, abolished slavery – 8,000 to 10,000 white American Southerners migrated to the country. They were fleeing the vanquished Confederacy and Reconstruction – the federal government’s effort to reintegrate the South and its 4 million newly freed Black people back into the United States.

Southern fried chicken and barbecue is typically served at the Confederate Festival alongside Brazilian side dishes such as “farofa,” or toasted cassava flour. Traditionally, ornately dressed performers cover American country songs and dance the two-step. They present the flags of the 11 Confederate states for thousands of Brazilian tourists and descendants.

But in an international echo of a movement that has gripped the United States in recent years, Confederate symbols are now getting banned in Brazil, too.

Charlottesville echoes in Brazil

I am a geographer who analyzes the history and meaning of Confederate symbols in the U.S. and abroad.

I have been studying Brazil’s Confederate Festival since 2017. That’s when a white supremacist murdered the anti-racism protester Heather Heyer at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The rally opposed the city’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Heyer’s death had consequences over 4,000 miles away in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, Brazil – a country with its own fraught history of racism. In 2018 and 2019, Black civil rights activists picketed the Confederate Festival.

The event, organized by the Fraternity of American Descendants – a nonprofit Confederate descendants organization founded in 1954 to maintain “the historical and cultural heritage of North American immigrants to Brazil” – had been held largely without controversy for over three decades.

“We indignantly and vehemently repudiate the symbols present at the Festa Confederada,” the protesters said in an April 18, 2019, statement written by a local group called UNEGRO and signed by over 100 other civic groups in Brazil.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the festival to shutter. And, soon, George Floyd’s murder reignited a global wave of outrage against symbols of racism and colonialism.

A battle over memory

Since 2015, when the Black Lives Matter movement erupted nationwide, at least 113 Confederate statues have been removed from cities across the American South.

But other removal efforts have been thwarted, usually by state lawmakers. To keep Confederate statues in place, many Southern states have either passed laws protecting them as historic artifacts or dusted off and enforced old preservation laws.

For example, when Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor tried to remove the city’s Confederate monument in 2019, he was blocked by the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017. After a lengthy court battle, the city agreed to pay the state a US$25,000 fine in exchange for the right to remove the memorial.

Similar “statue statutes” in Tennessee, Georgia and elsewhere continue to frustrate local efforts to remove monuments that glorify a chapter of American history that many people find painful.

Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, refused to wait for the state to repeal its preservation law. In 2017 they toppled a monument erected in 1924 “in memory of the boys who wore the gray” themselves.

Commemoration ‘with respect’

Around the same time, a similarly contentious debate was roiling the Brazilian city of Santa Bárbara d’Oeste.

Soon after Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, UNEGRO organized a public debate with the Fraternity of American Descendants on the meaning of the Confederate symbol. The two sides did not find much middle ground. The 2018 and 2019 Confederate Festivals maintained their display of Confederate iconography, and UNEGRO protested them.

Eventually, UNEGRO asked the city council to revoke the fraternity’s event permit if it kept using the Confederate symbol.

In January 2021, council member Esther Moraes proposed a new law prohibiting the use of symbols “that support movements or institutions identified with racist or segregationist ideas” at public events.

Moraes did not oppose the Confederate Festival itself, she emphasized.

“Everyone has the right to commemorate their ancestors,” she said, “but they should do it with respect for the history of other people and the descendants of slavery. Ours is the only city in Brazil where the Confederate symbol flies at a public festival.”

Closed-door debates and public hearings followed. In February 2022, the Fraternity of American Descendants hosted the son of Brazil’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right ally of Donald Trump. Following his private tour of the group’s museum, Eduardo Bolsonaro accused leftist critics of the Confederate Festival of “rewriting memory.”

City officials passed the law banning Confederate symbols from public events in June 2022 anyway. The Fraternity of American Descendants issued a brief statement that its Confederate Festival would not take place in 2023, then went quiet.

In April 2024, instead of its traditional festival, the group held a picnic “open to descendants and friends of the Fraternity of American Descendants.”

The smell of barbecue wafted through the air as Brazilian descendants of the American South filled their plates against a backdrop of Brazil’s first Baptist church.

On the stage where country line dancers once performed, few traces remained of the red and blue paint that had emblazoned it with the Confederate emblem. The stage was gray.

In November 2024, the Fraternity of American Descendants announced plans to rebrand and relaunch its flagship festival, likely for April 2025. The Confederate Festival will now be called “Festa dos Americanos” – Festival of the Americans – and stripped of all Confederate symbols.

“The institution, feeling that it created discomfort for the city and its Black residents, decided to change its position,” said Fraternity of American Descendants President Marcelo Dodson.

‘This symbol miseducates’

Removing symbols of slavery is not, by itself, enough to repair old harms or eliminate ongoing racism. Neither, evidence shows, is simply replacing them with new memorials to past victims.

Yet removing Confederate names, flags and symbols from public spaces at least cracks open the door for a path forward into a different future. It presents countries an opportunity to grapple with history, instead of repeating or ignoring cycles of violence and harm.

My research on Confederate iconography and other work in critical memory studies suggests that interventions focused on alternative commemorations – such as candlelight vigils, public performances, and truth and reconciliation commissions – can help repair a society.

“We have a commitment to the younger generation,” said UNEGRO leader and historian Claudia Monteiro on the day Santa Bárbara d’Oeste banned Confederate symbols. “This symbol miseducates them.”

Jordan Brasher, Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography, Macalester College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many US presidents come from modest upbringings. Born in Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter’s Depression-era childhood was no exception. His home lacked running water and electricity, while his rural high school lacked a 12th grade.

What made Carter exceptional was the degree to which these humble beginnings would influence his life, most notably his time as America’s 39th president from 1977-1981.

How a peanut farmer became president

A farmer, nuclear submarine officer, state governor and proud Christian, Carter assumed office during a tumultuous time in American history. Three crises in particular are not only widely credited with helping elect the former peanut farmer into the Oval Office, but also still influence how Americans think about American power and politicians half a century later.

The first crisis occurred in March 1973, when newscasts on living room TVs across the country displayed what appeared to be the previously undefined limits of American power: the chaotic – and some would say humiliating – US withdrawal from Vietnam.

The second crisis began in October 1973, when members of the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo on oil exports to the United States. It caused the price of oil per barrel to quadruple, the US economy to shrink by as much as 2.5%, and dramatic increases in unemployment and inflation.

The third and most prominent crisis, the Watergate scandal, forced President Richard Nixon to resign – the first presidential resignation in US history – amid considerable evidence that he committed crimes and abuses of power while in office. Nixon’s successor, and Carter’s Republican opponent in the 1976 presidential election, Gerald Ford, famously pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed in office.

The combination of Carter’s humility and idealism amid three major US crises – and his surprise victory in the early Democratic primary state of Iowa – created the unique conditions for a relatively unknown Georgia governor to win the 1976 election. His commitment to restore morality to the White House and US foreign policy, along with his campaign pledge to never lie to the American people, was exactly what many Americans sought from their president after such a turbulent period.

The presidency, 1977-1981

Carter began his White House journey engulfed by existing crises but his time in office undoubtedly featured its own share of crises too. Historians continue to debate how much Carter was responsible for the challenges he faced in office. However, his public approval ratings – 75% when he entered office in 1977 and 34% when he left office in 1981 – give an indication of where the American people placed their blame.

While early in his presidency much of the focus was on addressing the lingering energy crisis, Carter outlined his broader vision and policy agenda in his inaugural address on January 20 1977.

Carter first thanked outgoing President Ford for all that he had “done to heal our land” — a remarkable statement from a man who sharply criticised Ford’s pardon of Nixon. He went on to speak of “our recent mistakes”, the idea “if we despise our own government, we have no future”, and his hope for Americans to be “proud of their own government once again”.

Two years later, he echoed these sentiments in the most well-known speech of his presidency. Amid yet another oil shock that led to long lines at petrol stations, high inflation and an economic recession, Carter’s televised address to the nation decried a “crisis of confidence” amid “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives”.

It was this speech, which posited that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America”, combined with his firing of five cabinet members a few days later, that many now point to as a turning point for the Carter administration from which it would never fully recover.

Carter’s righteous criticism of the Nixon and Ford administrations had been refreshing to voters when he was an outsider candidate. But such moralising lost its appeal and some perceived it as an abdication of responsibility after Carter had occupied the office for more than two years.

Ted Kennedy, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, would go on to criticise Carter’s speech as one that dismissed “the golden promise that is America” and instead embraced a pessimistic vision in which Americans were “blamed for every national ill, scolded as greedy, wasteful and mired in malaise”.

Only four months after Carter’s infamous speech, yet another crisis erupted. Supporters of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini took 52 US diplomats hostage in Iran. They would end up being held captive for the rest of Carter’s term in office while the US government’s failed rescue mission in April 1980 only worsened the situation.

Carter undoubtedly racked up foreign policy successes in his normalisation of ties with China and his facilitating of an unprecedented peace agreement between the Israeli and Egyptian governments, known as the Camp David Accords. Ultimately, however, the perception of him having a failed presidency would be such a weight on his administration that Ted Kennedy chose to challenge Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential ticket.

Carter would end up defeating Kennedy for the Democratic nomination but the damage done to Carter’s presidency allowed a far more optimistic Ronald Reagan to win in a landslide victory over the sitting president in November 1980.

The lasting significance of Jimmy Carter

After the 56-year-old president failed to win a second term, Carter in many ways came to exemplify what a post-presidential life could entail. This included diplomatic and humanitarian efforts that would win him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize but also public commentary that would sometimes frustrate his successors in the Oval Office.

From his own organisation’s work championing human rights overseas to his commitment to building homes with Habitat for Humanity, Carter’s staunch Christian faith and idealism continued to define his life.

Today, most Americans may take it as unremarkable for a US president to champion human rights, but Carter was the first US president to posit that human rights were central to US foreign policy. While human rights have not always remained central to the policies of his presidential successors, it has undoubtedly influenced them. This includes Ronald Reagan, who criticised Carter’s human rights emphasis during the 1980 presidential campaign but would later take a strong stance against Soviet human rights abuses.

Most living Americans were not yet born on Carter’s last day in office. As a result, the former president is perhaps best known for his rich post-presidential life based out of the small rural town in Georgia he was born in – and where his secret service detail’s armoured vehicles were worth more than the home the former president lived in after departing the White House.

Regardless of whether they realise it or not, the humility, morality and idealism with which Jimmy Carter lived and governed continues to have an impact on Americans and American thinking to this day.

Jared Mondschein, Director of Research, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

That year, a volcanic eruption created a dust veil that blocked the sun in certain regions of the world. This, combined with a series of volcanic eruptions in the following decade, is claimed to have caused a decrease in the global temperature. Between 541 and 544, there was also the first and most severe documented occurrence of the Justinianic plague in the eastern Roman Empire (also referred to as the Byzantine Empire), in which millions of people died.

Studies show that there is no textual evidence for the effects of the dust veil in the eastern Mediterranean, and there is an extensive debate over the extent and length of the Justinianic plague. But, despite this, there are still many in academia who claim that changes to the climate and the outbreak of plague were catastrophic for the eastern Roman Empire.

Our research, which was published in November, shows that these claims are incorrect. They were derived from using isolated finds and small case studies that were projected onto the entire Roman Empire.

The use of large datasets from vast territories previously ruled by the Roman Empire presents a different scenario. Our findings reveal that there was no decline in the 6th century, but rather a new record in population and trade in the eastern Mediterranean.

We used both micro and large-scale data from various countries and regions. Micro-scale data included examining small regions and showing when the decline in this region or site occurred. Case studies, such as the site of the ancient city of Elusa in the north-western Negev desert in today’s Israel, were reexamined.

Previous research claimed that this site declined in the middle of the 6th century. A reanalysis of the carbon 14, a method for checking the age of an object made of organic material, and ceramic data used to date the site showed that this conclusion was incorrect. The decline only started in the 7th century.

Large-scale data included new databases compiled using archaeological survey, excavation and shipwreck finds. The survey and excavation databases, which were made up of tens of thousands of sites, were used to map the general changes in the size and number of sites for each historical period.

The shipwreck database showed the number of shipwrecks for each half century. This was used to highlight the shift in the volume of naval commerce.

Changes to naval commerce (150–750)

Our results showed that there was a high correlation in the archaeological record for numerous regions, covering modern-day Israel, Tunisia, Jordan, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt and Greece. There was also a strong correlation between the different types of data.

Both the smaller case studies, and the larger datasets, showed there was no decrease in population or economy in the 6th century eastern Roman Empire. In fact, there seems to have been an increase in prosperity and demography. The decline occurred in the 7th century, and so cannot be connected to sudden climate change or the plague which happened more than half a century before.

It seems the Roman Empire entered the 7th century at the peak of its power. But Roman miscalculations, and their failure against their Persian opponents, brought the entire area into a downward spiral. This left the two empires weak and allowed Islam to rise.

This is not to say that there was no change in the climate during this period in some regions of the world. For example, there was a visible change in material culture and a general decline and abandonment of sites throughout Scandinavia in the middle of the 6th century, where this change in the climate was more extensive.

And today’s climate crisis is on course to bring much greater changes than those seen in the past. The sharp departure from historical environmental fluctuations has the power to irreversibly change the world as we know it.

Lev Cosijns, PhD Candidate in the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford and Haggai Olshanetsky, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Warsaw

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Classics like “Scrabble” are being refreshed and transformed, while newer inventions such as “Pandemic” and “Wingspan” have garnered millions of devotees.

This growing cardboard empire was on my mind when I visited the American Antiquarian Society in August 2023 to research its collection of early games.

As I sat in that archive, which houses such treasures as the 1640 Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British America, I beheld another first in American printing: a board game called “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States.”

This forgotten game, printed the year after Missouri became a state, has a lot to say about America’s nascent board game industry, as well as how a young country saw itself.

An archival find

Produced by the New York cartography firm of F. & R. Lockwood, “The Travellers’ Tour Through the United States” was an imitation of earlier European geography games, a genre of educational game. Geography games generally used a map for a board, and the rules involved players reciting geographic facts as they race toward the finish.

“The Travellers’ Tour” first appeared in 1822, making it the earliest known board game printed in the U.S.

But for almost a century another game held that honor.

In 1894, the game manufacturer Parker Brothers acquired the rights to “The Mansion of Happiness,” an English game first produced in the U.S. in 1843. In its promotional materials, the company declared it “The first board game ever published in America.”

That distinction ended in 1991 when a game collector found the copy of “The Travellers’ Tour” in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society.

A new game for the new year

By 1822 the American market for board games was already becoming established, and middle- and upper-class parents would buy games for their families to enjoy around the parlor table.

At that time, New Year’s – not Christmas – was the holiday for gift giving. Many booksellers, who earned money from the sale of books, playing cards and other paper goods throughout the year, would sell special wares to give as presents.

These items included holiday-themed books, puzzles – then called “dissected maps” – and paper dolls, as well as games imported from England such as “The New Game of Human Life” and “The Royal And Entertaining Game of Goose.”

Since “The Travellers’ Tour” was the first board game to employ a map of the U.S., it might have been an especially interesting gift to American consumers.

It’s difficult, however, to gauge just how popular “The Travellers’ Tour” was in its time. No sales records are known to exist, and since so few copies remain, it likely wasn’t a big seller.

A global database of library holdings shows only five copies of “The Travellers’ Tour” in institutions around the U.S. And while a handful of additional copies are housed in museums and private archives, the game is certainly a rarity.

Teetotums and travelers

Announcing itself as a “pleasing and instructive pastime,” “The Travellers’ Tour” consists of a hand-colored map of the then-24 states and a numbered list of 139 towns and cities, ranging from New York City to New Madrid, Missouri. Beside each number is the name and description of the corresponding town.

Once spun, the teetotum lands with a random side up, revealing a number. The player looks ahead that number of spaces on the map.

If they can recite from memory the name of the town or city, they move their token, or traveler, to that space. Whoever gets to New Orleans first, wins.

An idealized portrait of a young country

Though not necessary to play “The Travellers’ Tour,” the descriptions provided for each location tell historians a lot about America’s national aspirations.

These accounts coalesce into a flattering portrait of the nation’s agricultural, commercial, historical and cultural character.

Promoting the value of education, the game highlights institutions of learning. For example, Philadelphia’s “literary and benevolent institutions are numerous and respectable.” Providence boasts “Brown University, a respectable literary institution.” And Boston’s “citizens … are enterprising and liberal in the support of religious and literary institutions.”

As the game pieces meander toward New Orleans, players learn about Richmond’s “fertile backcountry” and about the “polished manners and unaffected hospitality” of the citizens of Charleston. Savannah “contains many splendid edifices” and Columbia’s “South Carolina College bids fair to be a valuable institution.”

Absent from any corresponding descriptions, however, is any mention of what John C. Calhoun called America’s “peculiar institution” of slavery and its role in the fabric of the nation.

And while four entries briefly reference American Indians, no mention is made of the ongoing dispossession and genocide of millions of Indigenous people.

Though it promotes an American identity based on a sanitized version of the nation’s economic might and intellectual rigor, “The Travellers’ Tour” nonetheless represents an important step toward what has become a burgeoning American board game industry.

Two centuries later, board game culture has matured to the point that new titles such as “Freedom: The Underground Railroad” and “Votes for Women” push the genre to new heights, using the joy of play to teach the history of the era that spawned America’s first board game.

Matthew Wynn Sivils, Professor of American Literature, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hvaldimir (a play on the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and the first name of Russian president) was even given an official autopsy by the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries.

The whale had been uncovered as a spy in 2019, and is one in a long line of animals which have been used by the intelligence services. Among them was a Soviet programme to train marine animals as spies and assassins, which collapsed in 1991.

The US ran similar experiments with animals, some dating back to the 1960s. One of the CIA’s more unusual attempts to use animals as spies was Operation Acoustic Kitty.

The idea was to implant a microphone and antenna into the cat and use it to eavesdrop on potentially interesting conversations. The test of the “prototype” went horribly wrong when the cat wandered off and was run over by a taxi, leading to the programme being quickly abandoned.

The history of spy pigeons

A more successful example was the use of spy pigeons. Equipped with tiny cameras, pigeons could easily access otherwise restricted areas and “take photos” without arousing suspicion before safely returning to home base using their extraordinary homing ability.

What became a very successful CIA programme during the cold war took its inspiration from British efforts during the second world war.

Over time, technology created opportunities to exploit the stealthiness of animals while eliminating their unpredictability. Project Aquiline aimed to create a bird-like drone fully equipped in the style of more traditional spy planes, but smaller and more versatile so it could get closer to its targets.

Another, even more miniature version was the insectothopter that the CIA developed in the 1970s. Although neither the aquiline or insectothopter designs ever became fully operational, they are acknowledged as forerunners of today’s drones.

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and the CIA’s robotic catfish Charlie emerges as one in a longer line of successfully operationalised underwater drones that are more effective and less vulnerable than the hapless Hvaldimir.

Exploding rat carcasses

But effectiveness is not always best measured in the success of an unusual spy method.

A British second world war plan to use explosive-filled rat carcasses and distribute them to boiler rooms in German factories where they would then explode once shoved into a boiler appeared to be doomed when the first consignment of about 100 dead rats was intercepted by the Germans.

But the discovery of the rats, and the sheer ingenuity behind the plan, led to such paranoia that the “trouble caused to them was a much greater success … than if the rats had actually been used”.

While working with animals often proved problematic, attempts to gain advantage by disguising devices as inanimate objects have also proved a source of embarrassment. One such effort involved the MI6 station in Moscow trying to improve on the “dead letter drop” technique of obtaining secret information from spies in Russia.

Rather than risk leaving secret information in a pre-arranged location, MI6’s version of James Bond’s Q came up with the idea that the information could be transmitted electronically to a receiver hidden in a fake rock placed near the ministry in question which could then be downloaded by a subsequent walk past.

The focused activity of many men in suits in one part of this park, however, led to the discovery of the rock. The revelation of the operation in 2006 caused massive embarrassment to the UK government. That this was not MI6’s finest hour was suggested by headlines ridiculing the Moscow spy-rock as “more Johnny English than James Bond”.

While intelligence organisations are always looking for innovative means to enhance their spy craft, arguably the most successful application of intelligence comes in the form of human improvisation. A notable example of this was the clandestine extraction of Oleg Gordievsky in 1985 after the cover of one of the west’s most valuable double-agents working for British intelligence was blown.

A useful bag of crisps

The team of two British diplomats and their wives had to negotiate three Soviet and two Finnish checkpoints. As the first guard dog approached, one of the party offered the sniffing Alsatian a cheese and onion crisp, duly taking the Alsatian off the scent of Gordievsky who was hiding in the boot of the car.

When another dog began sniffing at the boot, a most ingenious and successful method of spy craft was brought into play. The wife of one of the diplomats placed her 18-month old baby on the car boot, changed the baby’s nappy, and then dropped the freshly filled and steaming deposit on the ground, successfully distracting the dog and its handler.

These actions were never part of the extraction plan for Gordievsky but were an equally instinctive and ingenious improvisation by those used to operating in hostile environments and practised at deceiving the unwanted attentions of enemy agents.

Expensive research budgets and promising technological advances provide an edge in certain circumstances, but the most effective spy techniques may still rely on the application of quick thinking and bold, fearless action.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham and David Hastings Dunn, Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These five food titles, ranging from a chef’s memoir to a foodie crime novel, offer a smorgasbord of perspectives on the ways food shapes our culture, our identities, our environment and our selves. All of them will leave you hungry!

A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain

A Cook’s Tour (2001) follows late chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain on a global culinary adventure as he searches for “the perfect meal”. While Bourdain doesn’t find perfection, he does discover the centrality of food in preserving culture and building relationships.

In Portugal, he gets involved in the yearly pig slaughter – visceral and confronting, despite his experience as a chef – and revels in the celebration, conviviality and hospitality that accompanies this centuries-old tradition. In Vietnam, he builds tentative relationships with locals by joining them in drinking “moonshine from a plastic cola bottle” on the banks of the Mekong.

The book is engaging, witty and sharp, but also poignant. It encourages us to not only think about where our food comes from, but about the meanings we ascribe to it and the communities we build around it.

My Life in France by Julia Child (with Alex Prud’homme)

Julia Child was an unlikely culinary icon. She didn’t really learn to cook until she moved from the United States to France with her husband, Paul, in 1948. On her return, she introduced not just her home country but the English-speaking world to the art of French cooking.

My Life in France (2005), co-written with journalist Alex Prud’homme, tells the story of “a crucial period of transformation” in which she found her “true calling” and started writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle.

My Life in France is bursting at the seams with Child’s signature joie de vivre: she certainly doesn’t take herself seriously. It is also a snapshot of postwar French cuisine, as experienced by someone encountering something completely transformative – and deciding to share her experience with the world, despite the obstacles.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat

Judging by the subtitle, Mastering the Art of Good Cooking, Samin Nosrat’s 2016 book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, took some inspiration from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. However, it is eminently more beginner friendly. While the book has recipes (good ones), it is not a recipe book per se. Rather, it is a set of instructions on how to cook: or, if you already have the basics down, how to cook better. Yet, unlike other cooking reference books, it tells a story.

Iranian–American Nosrat, who trained at the acclaimed restaurant Chez Panisse, introduces her readers to her four elements of good cooking, one at a time. She introduces culinary theory, scientific principles and tips and tricks, in an accessible and engaging way.

This information is interspersed with vignettes from Nosrat’s culinary life and supported by excellent illustrations. It is not only a good read, but a cookbook you will reach for time and again.

Death in the Dordogne by Martin Walker

It may be strange to see a mystery novel on this list, but sometimes we want a palate cleanser, a sweet treat to end a meal. Martin Walker’s Death in the Dordogne (2009) is just the thing.

Bruno Courrèges is chief of police in the small town of St. Denis in the Dordogne, in south-west France. While there is a murder to be solved (the death of an elderly war veteran), Bruno’s other major obsession is the food and wine of the Périgord region, which Walker describes in delicious detail.

As Bruno travels around the countryside solving the mystery, he eats: omelettes scented with black truffle, ripe red strawberries, flaky croissants, and fresh trout cooked in the open air. Alongside this feast, the book also probes the complexities of a changing, modern France – including the impact of immigration and the rise of right-wing politics. The perfect Boxing Day read.

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997) is a book about the voracious appetite of the human race and the effects of appetite.

The story Kurlansky tells is not just the millennia-long saga of the low-fat, white-fleshed fish that was indispensable to cuisines across Europe. It is that, of course – but it’s also a story about the rise of colonialism and capitalism, international conflict, the slave trade, the insatiable search for commodities, and the environmental legacy of new technologies.

Cod was first published almost 30 years ago, soon after the North Atlantic cod fishing industry had reached a point of collapse due to overfishing. In 2024, for the first time since the early 1990s, the Canadian government lifted its moratorium on commercial cod fishing off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, in light of improved cod stocks.

Kurlansky’s writing is evocative – you can feel the chill and the fog of the cod banks. Intrepid cooks may even attempt some of the recipes.

Lauren Samuelsson, Honorary Fellow in History, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

These structures were inspired by earlier North American examples, such as Lucy the Elephant (1882) in New Jersey, and several big doughnuts in California.

While they differed in subject matter, all aimed to attract the attention of passing motorists: in the 1950s–1960s, private car ownership had soared and highway construction spread.

Towns and regions across Australia, New Zealand and North America used oversized landmarks to get travellers to stop, take a photo and hopefully spend money at local businesses.

As awareness of these giant landmarks grew, so did the desire of other communities to have their own.

Within a few decades, Australia’s Big Things had become a beloved fixture of road trips and summer holidays.

A big cultural impact

My research shows the number of Big Things being constructed in Australia hit an initial peak in the 1980s before experiencing a temporary decline.

By the 2000s, however, towns as far afield as Tully in Queensland (Big Golden Gumboot), Cressy in Tasmania (Big Trout), and Exmouth in Western Australia (Big Prawn) were reviving the tradition.

Soon, Big Things became firmly entrenched in Australian popular culture: featuring on limited edition Redheads matchboxes (2010), and on sets of Australia Post stamps (2007 and 2023).

But some of the older structures experienced declining popularity: the Big Wool Bales in Hamilton, Victoria (closed 2020), Victoria’s Giant Gippsland Earth Worm in Bass (closed 2020) and the Big Cask Wine in Mourquong, NSW (closed 2012), survive only in holiday photos and people’s memories.

Icons like Larry the Lobster (Kingston, SA), the Big Prawn (Ballina, NSW), and the Big Pineapple (Nambour, Queensland) have battled changes in ownership, threat of demolition, and closure.

Despite these challenges, and debates over heritage conservation, construction of these giant landmarks has not slowed.

The Big Bogan was erected in 2015 in Nyngan, NSW, by community members who were eager to encourage visitors to the area.

A local progress association in the small town of Thallon in Queensland unveiled William the Big Wombat in 2018, also with the aim to bring attention to the area.

Similar hopes were held for the Big Watermelon erected in 2018 (Chinchilla, Queensland), and the Big Tractor (Carnamah, WA) which opened this year.

Through my research, I spoke with many people involved with projects such as these, and they said they’d selected objects that were iconic to their area.

This could be a product they specialise in, a local native animal, or, in the case of the Big Bogan, a joke based on the name of nearby Bogan River.

Most builders openly acknowledge their primary motivation is to promote the region, attract tourist dollars and investment, and revive towns that have seen better days.

But do Big Things actually achieve these goals? Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.

An economic return?

Local economies are complex, as are the reasons people choose to visit. Many Big Things are constructed on the sides of highways that connect Australia’s numerous regional towns.

People who stop for photos may not set out with the goal of visiting that Big Thing – it may simply be convenient to take a break there while on the way somewhere else.

And if people do stop, it doesn’t guarantee they will spend more than the cost of filling up their car with petrol, if that.

Over the years, tourism researchers have developed several different models for calculating the impact of rural and regional tourism on local economies.

However, none of these approaches has proven to be universally effective. Most scholars agree tourists aren’t likely to travel long distances for any one reason.

They will consider a range of factors including food and accommodation, and the closeness of numerous attractions. In other words: building a Big Thing won’t guarantee a sustained increase in tourism to the area on its own.

Communities should factor this in when considering erection of a Big Thing, especially given the cost of construction.

The Big Mango in Bowen reportedly cost $A90,000 when it was built in 2002, while the organisers of the Big Tractor in Carnamah raised more than $600,000 to cover its price tag.

The spread of social media and easy access to media outlets via the internet offers communities another reason to build Big Things, however.

Australians are not the only ones fascinated by Big Things, and when a new one is unveiled — or an existing one goes “missing”, as the Big Mango did in 2014 — it is often covered by the press and then shared online.

These giant landmarks are also highly “Instagrammable”: a 2015 survey revealed that six of Australia’s 20 most Instagrammed tourist attractions were Big Things.

This sort of coverage doesn’t necessarily guarantee the long-term revival of a town’s economy.

But it can help to remind people of the town’s existence, and it gives locals a memorable image on which to build.

Amy Clarke, Senior Lecturer in History, specialising in built heritage and material culture, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One wonderful yet confounding thing about this show is that depending on where you see it, you will see significantly different productions – from Intiman Theatre in Seattle to Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul or the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston.

This might seem counterintuitive, but it is exactly what was intended by the author: Langston Hughes.

1 artist, 2 movements

Hughes, a noted although still underappreciated writer, is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance just after World War I, which spurred the growth of jazz. This era – when he penned some of his most famous poems, such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” – was the first African American arts movement since Emancipation.

But Hughes is one of a handful of artists whose work spanned both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which partnered with the modern Civil Rights Movement. In 1961, when Hughes created “Black Nativity,” the Black Arts Movement was still in its infancy, but its early ethos was in the air.

Back in the 1920s, civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois developed the Krigwa Players, a group that originated in Harlem but had satellite organizations in Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The objectives of the Krigwa Players, published in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, were that African American communities create art “for us,” “by us,” “about us” and “near us.” As Black consciousness grew and evolved in the 1960s, however, Black artists wanted to go beyond that criteria. They wanted to place African American life in all corners of existence, including ideas that were imposed on Black culture and transforming them to empower Black people.

Hughes’ desire to write “Black Nativity” was his attempt to reclaim the story of Jesus’ birth for African Americans – to show the son of God, the ultimate salvation, emerging from the Black community. American notions of Jesus were almost always depicted as white, with just a few exceptions. Hughes’ play, on the other hand, called for an entirely Black cast, including the mother and father of Jesus.

Freedom and flexibility

Moving people from the margins of a story to the center can prompt artists to find more creative forms. What Hughes developed was less like a simple, straightforward narrative and more like jazz, with improvisation at its center.

The playwright wanted to make a production with elasticity: a ritual with a basic frame, but plenty of flexibility. Hughes started to experiment with this ritual form in his 1938 play “Don’t You Want to Be Free?” performed by the Harlem Suitcase Theater. The play used African American history as a frame, calling to unite poor Black and white people to fight the exploitation of the rich.

“Black Nativity,” originally titled “Wasn’t That a Mighty Day,” is rooted in gospel music. The 27 songs in the original text serve as a sonic framing tool. It was to have a large choir – 160 singers strong, in the first production – as well as a narrator, and two dancers to embody Mary and Joseph. The script calls for “no set (only a platform of various levels,) a star and a place for a manger.”

Hughes was an appreciator of modern dance and enlisted two of the best to hold the roles of Joseph and Mary: Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade. Yes, that Alvin Ailey, who went on to found one of the country’s most famous dance ensembles.

By all accounts, the dances that Ailey and de Lavallade constructed were brilliant – but were never seen by the public. The pair quit the show last-minute and were replaced by new dancers who could not use their choreography.

My former professor, the late George Houston Bass, was once Hughes’ secretary. Bass told me that Ailey and de Lavallade left in dispute over the title, which Hughes wanted to change to “Black Nativity.”

Ailey and de Lavallade, however, thought that “Wasn’t That a Might Day” was more inclusive. The dancers felt the show told the story of Jesus, and there was no need to focus on the emphasis on race – not entirely different from debates today. Should we emphasize that Barack Obama was a Black president, or a president who happened to be Black?

‘Black Nativity’ in the 21st century

I directed “Black Nativity” for Penumbra Theatre for a few years, starting in 2008, partnering with the Twin Cities’ TU Dance company.

Lou Bellamy, the founder and artistic director of the theater, told me there were audience members who came back every year. It was a tradition for many families originally from the Twin Cities to come from the four corners of the earth to see “Black Nativity” and visit their relatives – in that order of importance.

He went on to tell me that the audiences liked when we tweaked the show, but we had to keep the frame – including many of the gospel classics from the original, such as “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

In the original text of the play, the narrator told the story of Joseph traveling to Bethlehem with his pregnant wife, because Emperor Caesar Augustus had required that everyone be taxed. It starts with Mary and Joseph looking for a room.

In my version, the interior narrative centers on an upper-middle-class Black family that is visited by a stranger who helps them find the true meaning of Christmas. Mary and Joseph are a truly extended part of the family who show up with the stranger and need a place for the holidays. They are not left to a manger, but brought into a home – prompting the audience to reexamine how to welcome the Lord into their homes and hearts.

Bellamy, the artistic director, also said that I had a responsibility to the theater’s bottom line. He pulled out a spreadsheet and showed me the proceeds of the previous year’s mounting. I believe Bellamy’s quote to me was, “I don’t care if you put the devil in the middle of it. We have to make this number.”

Financially, Hughes’ ritual play has become fuel for African American cultural institutions to maintain themselves. Penumbra, for example, has been an anchor in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul for almost half a century. “Black Nativity” is also an anchor for the National Center of Afro-American Artists, which has produced its own version since 1968; Karamu House in Cleveland; the Black Theatre Troupe in Phoenix; and many more.

The flexibility of this play and the resilience of these institutions is why “Black Nativity” is still here – and will stay for a long time. Hughes’ vision allows for African American theaters as old as Karamu House, the nation’s oldest, or the newest playhouse today to make their own “Joy to the World.”

Dominic Taylor, Acting Chair of Theater, School of Theater, Film and Television, University of California, Los Angeles

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.