America has been a nation of sports nuts for even longer than you might imagine—a thousand years, in fact. In “America’s First Pastime,” Archaeology magazine (Sept.-Oct. 2009) writes about the early Native American game of chunkey, which involved throwing spears or sticks at a rolling, hockey-puck-size stone disk. The game was an important tradition in the culture that sprang up around the great prehistoric city called Cahokia, which existed near where St. Louis, Missouri, now lies. And apparently it was much more than just a game, being used to win converts, settle scores, and spread culture:

The people of Cahokia practiced human sacrifice, incorporated obelisk-like timber posts into their worship, told stories of superhuman men and women, used Mesoamerican-style flint daggers, and understood the cosmos in ways similar to Mesoamerican notions. They then spread this new way of life, which included intensified maize agriculture, across the Midwest and into the South and Plains with a religious fervor. Archaeologists refer to the culture as Mississippian, after the river that flows by many of its known sites.

One of the primary vehicles for the growth of this new civilization may have been Cahokian envoys who carried chunkey stones in one hand and war clubs in the other as they ventured into the hinterlands with the purpose of making peace or political alliances. These emissaries seem to have established and enforced a region-wide peace of sorts, a veritable Pax Cahokiana, an important element of which may have been the game of chunkey.

The article describes the biggest chunkey contests as great spectacles taking place on large town plazas with a 30- or 40-foot-tall obelisk or wooden post in the center on a raised mound. And if you think things get crazy when Manchester plays Liverpool or the Packers play the Vikings, consider that other nearby posts were used to exhibit enemy scalps, skulls, and recently captured foes who would soon be killed. “Not only was chunkey an important event,” the magazine writes, “but there were other possible associations, direct or indirect, with warfare and enemy executions.” Suddenly, burning a Brett Favre effigy seems almost tame by comparison.

The story of Cahokia itself, with its cultural undercurrents of brutality and power, is an incredible tale in its own right. The author of the Archaeology story, Timothy Pauketat, writes more extensively about it in his book, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi, which is the subject of a recent Salon article, “Sacrificial Virgins on the Mississippi.” “Some of Pauketat’s ideas,” writes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, “are both speculative and controversial”—but with characters like “He-who-wears-human-heads-as-earrings,” they certainly are fascinating.

Source: Archaeology (abstract only online), Chippewa Valley Newspapers, Salon

Image by TimVickers, licensed under Creative Commons.

Al Jazeera English broadcasts to 150 million households in over 100 countries—with the exception, until very recently, of North America. As the news service makes headway in the United States and is poised to break into Canada, The Walrus takes an in-depth look at the history and challenges facing Al Jazeera English, “a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV.”

Source: The Walrus

Wow, if this continental drift animation is at all accurate, you're totally going to be able to see Africa from your house.

The facts surrounding Guantanamo Bay detentions are quickly slipping down the memory hole. “A protective order that governs Guantánamo records leaves room for the government to destroy documents, including lawyers' notes,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “or put them off-limits in the name of national security.”

A few dedicated archivists are fighting to make sure the Guantanamo Bay records aren’t lost forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The team is collecting as much source material as possible for a collection that will be held at Seaton Hall, New York University, and using the Web At Risk digital archiving project. Archivists have begun by focusing on first-person accounts from defense lawyers, which will soon be published in a book called The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (New York University Press).

“We know, at the time it's happening, that Guantánamo has potential for iconic and historical significance, and the truth of Guantánamo is going to be a matter of great importance," says law professor Mark Denbeaux, who heads the program. "It's been my experience that the battle to redefine these sorts of events can be lost if one side is more organized and eager to present its point of view." He adds, “It’s not a political exercise, it’s an educational exercise, and a historical one.”

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

You can almost see it from here, but Russia remains an enigma to many Americans, easily reduced to crude caricatures. Start filling the Ural-sized gaps in your knowledge by reading Russian Life magazine’s “100 Things Everyone Should Know About Russia” in its May-June issue (article not available online).

“How was it that one of the most isolated, illiterate societies in Europe produced, in the 19th century, so many giants of literature, science, music, and the arts? Why is it that such a conservative, deeply religious, and agrarian-feudalist society so eagerly embraced the revolutionary, atheistic, and industrial ideology of Communism, and then, 80 years later, with equal vigor, cast this ideology aside in favor of the previously despised ‘bourgeois capitalism’?”

That’s the provocative introduction to the list, a way of commemorating the magazine’s 100th issue since launching in 1995.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Some 70% of Russia is forested and 22% of the world’s forests are in Russia. As such, Russia—which has been called the “lungs of Europe”—is second only to the Amazon in the amount of carbon dioxide it absorbs.

Among “20 Must See Films”: Belorussky Train Station by Andrei Smirnov and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears by Vladimir Menshov.

From “10 Important Legends and Folk Tales”: Koshchey the Deathless, the evil sorceror, kidnaps a princess from Russia and takes her to his kingdom, where the hero must save her by finding Koshchey’s death. The princess tricks Koshchey into revealing where he has hidden his death: on an island in the middle of the sea in a coffer buried under an oak.

St. Cyril did not create the Cyrillic alphabet. [He and his brother created the Glagolitic alphabet, from which Cyrillic descended. Ha!]

Vodka, so pure and purposeful, so ideal for warming the despondent soul in February or cooling passions in August, is a feast or famine sort of drink. One would expect something like vodka to arise from a Northern culture with a communal peasantry, where long winters and tortuously short growing seasons mean back-breaking labor intermitted only by community-building social feasts and drinking bouts.

Source: Russian Life

Reading Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World (Viking) is a great way to wrap your head around many of the technical, geographical, and ethical issues surrounding nuclear power and nuclear weapons. By learning exactly how we came to turn an odd yellow rock into an agent of phenomenal promise and danger, you’ll be better informed to decide the wisdom of reviving nuclear power and letting nuclear weapons proliferate.

One of the book’s most memorable sections is about William L. Laurence, the public relations man who hyped the atomic bomb for the U.S. government. Laurence was a science writer for the New York Times who became so enthralled by nuclear weapons that he became their paid P.R. man while covering the science beat, a brazen conflict of interest that was kept secret until the day after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Zoellner chronicles Laurence’s almost spiritual conversion to the religion of the atom and unsparingly critiques his writing style, which was so over the top that the White House once sent back a press release draft for being too exaggerated:

Laurence never met a classical allusion that he didn’t like, or attempt to employ. ... Uranium was to Laurence, at various points, ‘a cosmic treasure house’ and a ‘philosopher’s stone’ or a ‘Goose that laid Golden Eggs,’ which ‘brought a new kind of fire that lead to ‘the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola.’ These messianic word-pictures of a life to come, though wildly overoptimistic , helped to create in the American public a generally positive and hopeful feeling about the dawn of the new atomic age.

Laurence, known as “Atomic Bill” to some, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Times series about the making of the atomic bomb—a prize that journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman have said should be rescinded. Not only was Laurence on the War Department’s payroll, they contend; he also wrote stories that debunked the deadly effects of gamma ray radiation even as Japanese bomb victims lay dying.

Fairly, Zoellner notes that Laurence himself had misgivings about the “great forebodings” of the nuclear age, and once characterized the human race’s dilemma in his typically dramatic style: “Today we are standing at a major crossroads,” he wrote. “One fork of the road has a signpost inscribed with the word Paradise, the other fork has a signpost bearing the word Doomsday.”

It might have been as close to the truth as he ever got.

Sources: Viking/Penguin, Common Dreams 

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Matt Novak of Paleo-Future. We asked him for five links. He sent us the best online archivists you may not know (want more paleo-future goodness? Listen to our Utnecast interview with Matt).

Charlie Shopsin has cornered the market on 20th century popular science magazines. If you're looking for inspiration from pure American ingenuity, look no further than the Modern Mechanix blog.

While the name of this blog has never made sense to me, the collection of amateur photos from '50s and '60s tourists to American theme parks on Gorillas Don't Blog is pretty interesting to peruse.

The Animation Archive collects comic books, single-panel cartoons and animated films from all eras of illustrated history.

After discovering the Prelinger Archives in college I spent about 3 sleepless months downloading and watching an amazing collection of old industrial and ephemeral films. You've been warned.

BIO: Since he started the Paleo-Future blog 2007, Matt Novak has become an accidental expert on past visions of the future, and has amassed the world's largest (only?) library of media related to the study of paleo-futurism. 

Previous Alt Wire Guests: Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel , Anne Elizabeth Moore 

Meth dealers and addicts have found a destructive way to get money for drugs: by looting artifacts and selling them on the black market. The March-April issue of Archaeology Magazine explores this nexus of antiquities and drugs and finds that “twiggers,” a combination of “diggers” and meth addicted “tweakers,” are fueling "a new epidemic of looting” especially in the American southwest.

The compulsive effects of methamphetamine make it an ideal drug for the repetitive and tedious work of artifact hunting, according to the article (not available online). Since the meth addicts generally have little knowledge of the artifacts, the process of digging them up can be particularly destructive. And since the artifacts are seldom traceable, convictions are extremely hard to come by.

Phil Young, a former agent with the National Parks Service, described one operation saying, “it was a very destructive process to the cultural resource, and of course to the individuals as well.”

Barack Obama’s announcement that he would take the oath of office on Abraham Lincoln’s bible set off a flurry of historical analogies between the two presidents. According to historian Eric Foner, interviewed on Fresh Air, “this whole Lincoln analogy has gone a little too far.”

Any religious analogy would be particularly historically problematic, Foner told Terry Gross, since Lincoln never belonged to a church throughout his life. And, unlike Obama, Lincoln didn’t have a preacher involved in either of his inaugurations. In the 19th century, according to Foner, “it was quite uncommon to have ministers there. You know, they believed in the separation between church and state back then.” In fact, John Quincy Adams didn’t take his oath of office on a bible at all, opting instead for a more secular book of laws.

It should be acknowledged, however, that Obama made strides, at least rhetorically, in the secular realm when he acknowledged “non-believers” in his inaugural address.

Image of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

Thanksgiving is quickly approaching, and many people gathering for turkey will have no idea what they're celebrating. For one thing, most of the pilgrims didn’t eat turkey, according to Neatorama’s list of Thanksgiving myths; they ate deer. And the settlers didn’t call themselves “pilgrims” back then, opting instead for the far more presumptuous moniker of “saints.”

One could assume that the bevy of misinformation is coming from schools, but if reports on civic literacy are to be believed, most people weren’t paying attention in school anyway. A survey from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that more than 68 percent of respondents failed their civics quiz (pdf), scoring less than 50 percent. The survey found that more than “twice as many people know Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than know that the phrase 'government of the people, by the people, for the people' comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”

You can take the civic literacy quiz here.

And for more on the importance of history, read History Lessons by Keith Goetzman, and Can We Handle the Truth? by Howard Zinn from the September-October issue of Utne Reader.

Herewith, a smattering of memorable quotes from America’s history-making election.

“America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves—if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made? This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.”

—President-elect Barack Obama in his victory speech

“I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating [Barack Obama], but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises, to bridge our differences, and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited. Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.” 

—Senator John McCain in his concession speech

“Obama’s gift is that he understood America's great secret, that Americans have a deep and abiding need to love one another, and that we only lack the courage to do so.” 

—Adam Serwer at American Prospect’s Tapped blog

“What I’ve been forced to acknowledge is there has been a shift—it’s not a sea change. But there's been a decided shift in the meaning of race. It’s not an ending. It's a beginning.”

—novelist Kim McLarin, to the Washington Post

“Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.” 

—the Onion

Obama erweckt das neue Amerika
(Obama wakes up the new America)

—headline from Spiegel.com

“The Civil War is over. Let reconstruction begin.”

—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

“If you are incapable of mustering pride in this moment, and if you cannot appreciate how meaningful this day is for millions of black folks who stood in lines for up to seven hours to vote, then your cynicism has become such an encumbrance as to render you all but useless to the liberation movement. Indeed, those who cannot appreciate what has just transpired are so eaten up with nihilistic rage and hopelessness that I cannot but think that they are a waste of carbon, and actively thieving oxygen that could be put to better use by others.”

—Tim Wise at Racialicious

“It really is fun to see those people out there jumping up and down. There’s something about jumping up and down that I think is good for the soul. It’s a universal sign of joy.”

—Fox News anchor Brit Hume, musing at the student crowds that gathered outside the White House on election night

“Good morning, Republicans! Welcome to the wilderness. We saved you a seat right over here, next to us. Looks like we'll have a lot of time to talk in the next four years.”

—libertarian blogger Katherine Mangu-Ward on Reason’s Hit & Run blog.

“[A]s the result of a financial panic that unfairly undermined all Republicans, Obama has stumbled into the most dangerous kind of victory. A mandate for change but not for ideas. A mandate without clear meaning.”

—Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson

“It’s a good to have a president again. The last couple of years we haven’t had one—or rather we have one who decided to give up after failing badly. This has been an especially painful vacuum during the collapse of the economy, and in the face of our diminished reputation in the world. There’s been no one to reassure the country, and no sign that a leader was actually tending to the national well being.”

—New Republic editor Franklin Foer

Did we miss a good one? Add it below in our comments.

If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.

Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.

This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:

Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.

And yet, something is lost:

Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.

In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?

—Steve Thorngate 

Looks like 2008 is going to be a bumper year for graphic adaptations of U.S. history. Metropolitan Books just released A People’s History of American Empire, based on a chapter of Howard Zinn’s 1980 classic A People’s History of the United States. Cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian Paul Buhle collaborated on the luxurious 8½-by-11 book, which utilizes Zinn’s text as narration. (Check out his style in our Sept.-Oct. 2007 excerpt of A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.) Historical photographs play into some of the frames, providing a cool contrast to Konopacki’s lively illustrations.

Then—and you’ll have to wait awhile for these—we recently received a booklet previewing two more graphic adaptations, both of them forthcoming from publisher Hill and Wang. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, the duo responsible for The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, will be back in bookstores this August with After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001-  ). Then, in October, look for The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, written by Jonathan Hennessy and illustrated by Aaron McConnell.

—Julie Hanus

It’s a prestigious journal indeed that can name such luminaries as Mark Twain, Sun Tzu, and Winston Churchill among its contributors. The debut issue of Lapham’s Quarterly features work from these thinkers and many others, which makes for a fascinating read and a pretty startling group of contributor bios (Homer’s and Herodotus’ are crowned by classical-sculpture mug shots).

The hefty new journal (all 200+ pages of it) is a labor of love for former Harper’s editor and unabashed history buff Lewis Lapham. Four times a year the Quarterly’s editors will seize upon the most urgent question in the headlines—foreign war, financial panic, the separation of church and state—and dig up relevant responses from authors whose writings have passed the test of time. Lapham’s method assumes that profound observations of the human character and predicament don't become obsolete.

Each issue adheres to a specific theme (this one’s is “States of War”), which is explored through essays by prominent writers past and present. The way the journal frames the ideas of long-dead thinkers within a contemporary context is engrossing, and the selections from modern writers and thinkers are no less effective or prescient.

Lapham’s Quarterly is careful to avoid narratives bogged down in scholar-speak, instead favoring histories rich in both detail and prose. This commitment to readability makes the journal’s content a unique, pleasant marriage of great storytelling and important historical accounts.

—Morgan Winters 

The first zine in J. Gerlach’s Simple History Series, Christopher Columbus and His Expeditions to America, tells the story of the world’s most famous explorer through drawings of stick figures in various states of  one-dimensional distress. The details are far from simple, though—they transcend mere stick-people problems at every turn—and the zine takes a de-mythologizing tack on Columbus and his ships.

The key to the zine’s charm is that Columbus reads alternately like a textbook and a children’s illustrated history. Gerlach accomplishes this feat by widely varying the zine’s ratios of words to pictures. On some pages, a small rectangle of text acts as a caption for an accompanying illustration; elsewhere, words dominate an entire page. What’s consistent throughout is that the zine does not suppress the gory details of Columbus’ romps to the New World. For instance, illustrator Cindy Crabb’s depictions of stick-figure corpses being dumped overboard are somewhat wrenching: They’re the bodies of would-be slaves.

Nevertheless, Columbus, with its bibliography full of Howard Zinn and James W. Loewen, presents a digestible version of a narrative that is not as familiar as it should be. It’s a useful, friendly zine. Even the title makes it sound like a congenial outdoor excursion by two friends: Columbus and his Expeditions! At last, together again!

—Michael Rowe

  If you’re interested in checking out Gerlach’s Simple History Series zines, contact Danielle Maestretti, the Utne librarian.

The grinding Doppler buzz of Minneapolis’ tornado warning siren, tested the first Wednesday of every month, always puts me in mind of the first apartment I occupied in the city’s southern neighborhoods. Even now, I associate the siren’s harsh stutter with the swelter of June 2006. I envision myself sweating in my apartment, studiously applying my energies to a Graduate Record Examination practice test and wondering what the hell 11 lawnmowers are doing careening back and forth by my window. The memory isn’t necessarily pleasant, but it is vivid.

This aural recollection was triggered as I read Anne Matthews’ article “If Walls Could Talk” in the November-December issue of Preservation (excerpt available), a publication of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Matthews reports on the study of sensory history, a budding field whose purveyors research and reconstruct the bygone sensory content, particularly the sounds, of physical spaces. Matthews highlights not only big-budget reproductions—for example, Philadelphia’s “Lights of Liberty,” a walking tour at Independence National Historical Park that features images projected onto buildings and headphones broadcasting whispers, creaking wheels, and sailing bullets—but also the meticulous efforts of radio producer and reporter Alex van Oss.

Van Oss produces “soundscapes,” sonic essays designed for radio broadcast and CD recording. For a 2005-2006 exhibition on the 19th century architect Adolf Cluss, he coproduced a CD featuring multiple soundscapes of Cluss’s Washington, D.C.-area buildings, including the downtown Masonic Temple. Though the building has been renovated and adapted for modern usage, van Oss generated a recording that pays homage to its sonic past and present.

The soundscape boasts an authentic 1879 Masonic Temple dedication march, played on a contemporaneous piano by the music researcher who unearthed the sheet music. Van Oss also mixed in the sound of footsteps and squeaking floorboards, even multiplying the footfalls to create the impression of an organized gathering: a recreation of the dedication march. Finally, he bookended this historical content with the contemporary sounds, such as automobile traffic, that characterize the Masonic Temple today.

Van Oss has labored to fashion a lasting impression of space across time. He says of the piece, “Truthful? Not really. Authentic? I think so. Evocative? Most certainly.”

Sample van Oss’s recordings and read an interview with Anne Matthews at the Preservation website.

—Michael Rowe

If 2007 is the future, then the future is lame. All the flying cars and ray-guns promised by scientists and science-fiction writers have failed to materialize. Proof of the past’s broken promises can be found at Paleo-Future, a blog devoted to antiquated visions of what today could have looked like. The website recently posted a scanned page of the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1900 that asked  “the most conservative minds in America” what the year 2000 would look like.

Here are a few of their expert opinions (with added commentary):

• Efficiency will force Americans to bid goodbye to the letters C, Q, and X. English will be “a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas.” O RLY? LOL!
• “Ready cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today.” Yeah, they’re called restaurants.
• “Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons.” Well, we don’t have the pneumatic tubes yet, but we do have delivery pizza.
• “Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes” giving even the “best music to the families of the untalented.” Would listening to my iPod count?
• The Ladies’ Home Journal also predicts central heating, airplanes, and international phone service.

For all its anachronistic predictions, the Ladies’ Home Journal article evokes a better and more-efficient future. Most of today's future visions aren’t nearly so hopeful. Where do you see us 100 years from now? Leave a comment here, or discuss it in Utne Reader’s online salon. —Brendan Mackie 

Image from the Library of Congress.