CityLab: When Monuments Go Bad

The centennial monument and 40 others are now under the equally critical gaze of the Chicago Monuments Project, an advisory committee of civic leaders, artists, designers, academics, and culture workers (including X) tasked with re-evaluating how the city handles its stock of monuments (which Schneider says he supports). The city formed the committee in the wake of the uprisings against racist police violence in July 2020. During a demonstration at Grant Park against a monument to Christopher Columbus, police assaulted journalists and activists; within days, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had statues of Columbus in Grant Park and Little Italy removed “temporarily.” To come up with long-term policies for monumentalization, the advisory committee began meeting in September and tentatively hope to release a set of recommendations by late June. [...]

No other American city has opened up this sort of wide-ranging dialogue about how cities make monuments. Swept up in this inquiry are five statues of Abraham Lincoln, as well as monuments to George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Italian Fascist Italo Balbo. The 41 items under discussion are just a small percentage of the hundreds of monuments in the city, but committee co-chair Bonnie McDonald, president of Landmarks Illinois, says the work of the committee is just a start. She’s asking for public participation on how current memorials should be handled, as well an in the commissioning of new monuments. [...]

The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) Project arranged several exhibitions calling for public input, uniting survivors, activists and South Side residents through a radically democratic process. “That process of stepping back and inviting everyone to contribute their creativity, their imagination, the desire to work for justice really opened up a process,” says Joey Mogul, CTJM co-founder. “It invited different members of the public beyond lawyers, legal workers and organizers.” The task for CTJM is to communicate “the horror and the pain and the generational trauma that occurred, while also [making] sure we acknowledge people’s agency and resistance,” says Mogul.

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Longreads: Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

 Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.[...]

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) [...]

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. [...]

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness.

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CityLab: Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture

For some, it’s too fantastical to believe … or perhaps not fantastical enough. A dedicated group of YouTubers and Reddit posters see the Singer Building and countless other discarded pre-modern beauties and extant Beaux-Arts landmarks as artifacts of a globe-spanning civilization called the Tartarian Empire, which was somehow erased from the history books. Adherents of this theory believe these buildings to be the keys to a hidden past, clandestinely obscured by malevolent actors. [...]

The Tartaria storyline is not directly related to the adrenochrome-harvesting Satanic-pedophile cabal that lies at the heart of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that crashed into the real world in 2020. But it shares some of what Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in conspiracy theories, calls QAnon’s “cafeteria quality:” There’s no overarching narrative or single authorial voice interpreting events. It’s just a gusher of outlandish speculation; adherents can pick and choose which elements they want to sign on to. [...]

The Tartarian milieu is an intensely visual medium, occupied with riffing on photos and maps, picking out apparent inconsistencies and making one-off conjectures instead of weaving together comprehensive timelines. The theory is notably light on reasoning as to why and how the greatest cover-up in history was undertaken, but it does offer a few options for how Tartaria was erased and the great reset propagated. Many say that an apocalyptic mud flood buried its great buildings; some suggest the use of high-tech weaponry to tactically remove Tartarian infrastructure. A consistent theme is that warfare is an often-used pretext to wipe away surviving traces of Tartarian civilization, with the two world wars of the 20th century finishing work that may have begun with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. [...]

At its core, the theory reflects a fear of how quickly things change. As they look at today’s cityscapes, Tartaria believers see an eerie and alienating place, filled with abstract monoliths that emerged out of nowhere in a brief period of time. They’re skeptical of the rapid rise and development of the U.S., and even more suspicious of how quickly Modernism came to dominate the landscape. One favorite case study, useful for illustrating this aesthetic whiplash, is the grand domed Henry Ives Cobb Chicago Federal Building, built in 1905. Like the Singer Building, it was razed after just 60 years in favor of an icy black Mies van Der Rohe tower. [...]

In fact, the governing ideology of the modern architecture that Tartarians despise was a critique of this system. Modernism argued for an egalitarian architecture that would help break the shackles of the past, rejecting backbreaking representational craftsmanship to honor omnipotent kings and divine beings in favor of simple, universal forms that would leverage restraint and efficacy into a broad uplift for the masses. Minus the weirdest stuff — the global mud flood, the ancient energy weapons, the vanished race of giants — the Tartaria theory is just an extreme form of aesthetic moralism, the idea that traditional architecture styles are inherently good and modern architecture is the product of a degenerate culture.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books: French Secularism, Reinvented

 The proposed measures appear to mark a dramatic shift in the purpose of secularism. But despite the different contexts and reversed power relations, there are revealing continuities between the Third Republic’s campaign against Catholicism in the early 20th century and the current campaign against Islamist “separatism.” In fact, 19th-century secularists talked about Catholicism and Islam in such similar ways that some French Catholics even began accepting this comparison, seeing Muslims as allies against the aggressive secularism of the French state. This makes it all the more ironic that conservatives now embrace laïcité as a bludgeon against Muslims. In France, secularism has never been about removing religion entirely from the French public sphere but rather defining it, neutralizing it, and using it for the state’s own purposes.[...]

Many of the common complaints against Jesuit priests were similar to the anti-Muslim tropes of today. They were accused of being an unpatriotic “state within a state,” a communitarian, unassimilated minority; like today’s Muslims, their real loyalty was allegedly to a power outside and beyond that of the French state: their superior in Rome. As John Padberg, Geoffrey Cubitt, and other scholars have detailed, the Jesuits were long accused of being “a political corps” hiding “under the veil of a religious institute.”[...]

And yet, church attendance continued to decline. Despite a brief resurgence in religiosity after the war, some Catholics — such as the famed scholar of Islam Louis Massignon — looked to the religious practices of Muslims in French Algeria as a source of renewed spirituality for an increasingly secular France. Much of what these Catholics admired in Muslims was the all-encompassing nature of religion in their lives, which they believed promoted a deeper and more genuine spirituality. As Talal Asad has pointed out in his critiques of secularism, Catholicism and Islam are both uncomfortable with the relegation of religion to private life; both have aspired to shape society, from public space to education. Opponents of recent European headscarf and burka bans have found allies among Catholics, who argue that states overstep their rights when they seek to regulate personal expressions of faith in the public sphere.

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Vox: How museum gift shops decide what to sell

 Gift shops are like the final exhibit of an art museum. They’re often located toward the exit and are unmissable on your way out the door. Souvenirs inside can range from Vincent Van Gogh socks to giant stuffed soup cans to Mona Lisa rubber ducks. But how do gift shop curators decide what to sell?

Stocking decisions often revolve around how curators want visitors to perceive the art lining museum walls. When you see a certain piece of art on a lot of merchandise, that usually means curators think that artwork is important. And thanks to a psychological phenomenon called the mere-exposure effect, the more you see that art, the more you begin to think it’s important.

The Red Line: Could China Conquer Taiwan?

 Xi has thrown down the gauntlet and stated that Taiwan will return to the Peoples Republic of China by 2049, whether Taiwan wants it or not. So now a countdown timer has started, and Taiwan scrambles to prepare for what Beijing may throw at it. Should they build a large navy? Should they try and push the Chinese back into sea fighting on the beaches? Should the Taiwanese retreat to the jungles and fight a bloody insurgency from there? We ask our expert panel what strategy Taiwan is likely to take, and whether or not it is likely to be effective against the entire PLA. This weeks panel Eric Gomez (CATO Institute) Sheena Chestnut Greitens (University of Texas) Robert D Kaplan (Geopolitics Author) More info at - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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PolyMatter: Why Statues are North Korea’s Biggest Export

 

UnHerd: Why architecture is political

 Architecture is an inherently political act, which is precisely why it is so contested. It is the grandest and most permanent marker of a civilisation, and the clearest and most dramatic expression of a society’s relationship to power. Consider, on the one hand, Trump’s executive order, one of the last of his administration, mandating neoclassicism as the house architectural style of the US federal government; on the other hand, see the New Statesman’s neurotic fear of classical architecture as a form of fascism wrought in stone. Architecture is not just the expression of our positive political values, but also of the pathologies and debilitating culture wars enfeebling our civilisation. [...]

Yet leading up to the Acropolis, winding its way around the ancient hills of Athens, was an alternative vision of modernity, neglected, under-appreciated but far better suited to our current political moment. In the middle of the 20th century, the Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis was tasked with replacing the ugly asphalt road that led to the Acropolis. Hiring provincial stonemasons, accustomed to working in a vernacular style, and using as his materials marble blocks from 19th century buildings recently levelled to create the concrete cityscape of modern Athens, Pikionis fused his aesthetic interest in Modernist art with his appreciation of the old, the worn and characterful. [...]

Yet Critical Regionalism, as outlined by Frampton, is not a retreat into the vernacular, which he expressly warns against as lazily reactionary, and carrying within it the incipient threat of totalitarianism. Frampton cautions against the “demagogic tendencies of Populism” in architecture, “the simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” Instead, he argues, the task for architects is to achieve a “self-conscious synthesis between universal civilisation and world culture.”

In practice, this means marrying the best of the vernacular tradition — a sensitive appreciation of place, climate and culture, the tactility and warmth of natural materials, a rootedness in the specifics of the local and a suspicion of the bland totalitarianism of modernism — with an awareness that we cannot undo the Modernist moment; we are moderns, and any attempt to undo this basic fact will result only in a feeble and debilitating pastiche. [...]

Critical Regionalism is inherently post-liberal in its vision of the good; it is open to the world, not narrow and exclusive, yet rooted in the specifics of place and culture. Instead of defining itself by what it is not, and locking itself into a futile and mutually destructive cycle of opposition to liberalism, perhaps post-liberalism can be profitably reimagined as a form of political Critical Regionalism: alive and responsive to the values of community, tradition and localism, yet at the same time willing to take what is good from liberalism, what is genuinely superior to what came before it, and to reshape it to its own ends.

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UnHerd: What did the Habsburgs do for us?

 For Rady the unquestionable key to the dynasty’s might was its mystique. It was imbued with an aura of sacral legitimacy which not only held the loyalty of subjects but imbued the family’s members with a driving sense of vocation: “they conceived of their power as both something they had been predestined for and part of the divine order in which the world was arranged.” The self-concept was manifested through intense Eucharistic and Marian piety — well beyond that of other royal households. [...]

For contemporaries, their own lived experience was different. Presentations of the royal house in popular literature had a sense of “sacred drama” about them. The personal sorrows of Franz Joseph, who lost both wife and son before their time, together with the burdens of ruling “were likened to Christ’s Crown of Thorns, confirming the emperor as not only the ruler of peoples but also their redeemer.”

Ethnic fragmentation was contained because the emperor “became the almost exclusive focus of loyalty and symbol of an idea that transcended nation.” Unlike in today’s culture war and Brexit battles, national-separatist ambitions were more pronounced among the intelligentsia than urban-worker and rural-labourer population bases. [...]

Maybe Franz Joseph was influenced by the late medieval chroniclers who constructed elaborate lineages linking the Habsburgs back to the Kings of the Old Testament and even to Noah. Certainly, the very real affection the Empire’s Jews felt towards him is attested to in surviving silver Torah scroll holders, capped with the Habsburg double-eagle, produced in significant numbers during his reign.

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Social Europe: Brexit and the misunderstanding of sovereignty

 From the start, Brexit was a quixotic project. Take the symbolic centrality of fishing—which makes up less than 0.1 per cent of the UK’s economy—to the negotiations over the future relations between the UK and the EU. There are many substantive issues at stake, but understanding Brexit requires a grasp of the strange, profoundly anachronistic, English understanding of sovereignty upon from which it is derived. [...]

Even within global politics sovereignty no longer refers exclusively to the capacity of the state to make arbitrary decisions, but rather to its international obligation ‘to preserve life-sustaining standards for its citizens’, while more widely observing the rule of law and postwar conventions on human rights. Sovereignty is thus about the responsibility to protect the rights and interests of the population, not control.

The key feature of the ‘Westminster model’ is that it does not differentiate between constitutional and normal law. Not only can any piece of legislation be undone by simple-majority vote; Parliament is also omnicompetent, as its legislative powers can override all claims to fundamental rights. For example, John Selden famously argued that Parliament could even make staying in bed after 8 o’clock a capital offence.[...]

Given all this, the European public can only hope that leaders in the UK and elsewhere—especially in those central- and eastern-European states whose obstinacy about the rule of law is based on a similar misreading of sovereignty—learn this lesson without doing too much harm to their peoples. If they do not, the result will be a less co-operative, less prosperous, more divisive and more dangerous environment, in Europe and around the world.

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PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

 

UnHerd: Must we always demolish the past?

 One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.” [...]

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble. [...]

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

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Notes from Poland: Polish cities switch off lights in protest against government’s EU budget veto

 Almost 50 Polish cities this evening turned off the lights at famous landmarks in protest against the government’s blocking of the European Union’s budget and coronavirus recovery fund, as well as against a bill that would reduce the share of tax revenue going to local authorities. [...]

All of Poland’s ten largest cities joined the blackout, including Wrocław, Łódź and Poznań. Among the smaller cities taking part was Sosnowiec, which switched off part of its EU-funded street light grid. [...]

Cities, which are mostly under opposition control, have also expressed concern at a move by the central government to cut the share of tax revenue allocated to local budgets. A bill to that effect was passed by the lower house of parliament on 28 October.

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CityLab: Trump’s Defeat Didn’t Stop His ‘Ban’ on Modern Architecture

 President Donald Trump never signed that executive order, which would have banned modernist designs for new federal buildings. After a spate of outrage — it was roundly condemned by the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the dean of architecture at the famously traditional University of Notre Dame and at least 11,000 architects who wrote to the White House — the order faded from view amid the many other crises of 2020. Last week, Trump lost his reelection bid, making the executive order a dead letter.

But the forces that his White House set in motion could outlive his administration: The GSA appears to have adopted a modernism ban, without any authorization in place. What seemed to be a pipe dream for admirers of classical architecture back in February now looks like procurement policy at the federal agency that manages office space and needs for the U.S. government. Design is already underway in Alabama for what might be Trump’s first mandatory classical courthouse. [...]

A classical mandate is also potentially limiting in terms of selecting qualified candidates for federal projects, which are often complex briefs with unique security and logistics needs. One firm, Jenkins Peer, which has prior federal experience renovating a courthouse in Charlotte, was shortlisted for both the Fort Lauderdale and Huntsville courthouses. Payne Design Group, which won the GSA bid for the Huntsville project, is a three-person firm, according to the sales intelligence service Dun & Bradstreet. The federal contracting site GovTribe lists just one federal contract for Payne Design — the Huntsville courthouse, a choice $3.7 million award. Otherwise the firm has largely designed traditional churches and schools in Alabama and Georgia. [...]

The strictly left-versus-right, modern-versus-classical argument reflects an old-fashioned view of architecture, an artifact from design salons of yesteryear. It’s at odds with the conversation in Europe, where policymakers have turned to the Bauhaus school for inspiration for a new aesthetic movement focused on achieving the goal of decarbonizing the continent’s building stock. In the U.S., today’s forward-thinking debates about design and planning center on social and environmental justice. Even the notion that classicism is fundamentally conservative is mistaken.

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The Red Line: Nagorno-Karabakh II (A Frozen Conflict Goes Hot)

 Like many of the ex-soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been part of the frozen conflict now since the early '90s, but Azerbaijan has spent the last few years building up a massive modern army. Baku has now used that army to engage in a full-scale war with Armenia in an attempt to recapture the land lost in 91. With the Armenians in full retreat and the Azeris moving into their old positions what will this mean for the region? Will Ankara or Moscow have the final say on the battlefield? We ask our expert panel. ALEX RAUFOGLU (Eurasia Journalist) NICK MUTCH (Byline Times) CAREY CAVANAUGH (Fmr US Ambassador) LAURENCE BROERS (Chatham House) More info on - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus Support the show at - www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast

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UnHerd: How Big Slave ruled Britain

 Throughout, the forces of Big Slave have the nation in their grip, bound with a tithe on every barrel of sugar brought from the West Indies — money that affords the plantation owners a £20,000 annual marketing budget to promote the titular Interest in the press and politics. This was lobbying, pure and simple. As detailed and devious as anything Bell Pottinger ever cooked up, served with much the same shrug of corporate amorality. Thus, for every Anti-Slavery Monthly Review, there are plenty of journals like the popular Quarterly Review, in which Regency Richard Littlejohns bash out punchy jeremiads against the wet snowflakes of abolitionism. [...]

In his opposition to emancipation, Canning was joined, often for quite different reasons, by figures as grand as Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and the future prime minister William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy slave owner. Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently canonised by Pope Francis, called on slaves to be content with their situation. [...]

When non-white guests came to dine at Wilberforce’s society, Taylor reminds us, they had to sit at the other end of the table, behind a screen. Macaulay deplored “miscegenation”, and the anti-slavery barrister George Stephen announced he would not help a family of “halfcastes”. Who could have predicted none would have the mores of a 2020 Goldsmiths grad student?

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The Guardian: The fatal hike that became a Nazi propaganda coup ( 6 Jul 2016, modified 2 Nov 2020)

 The day after the survivors’ return, a special railway van that had been adapted to resemble a small chapel and attached to the mail train from Harwich, arrived in London at 8.21am. It contained the bodies of the dead boys, in coffins of Black Forest timber – “from the very woods in which they perished”, as one reporter put it. They were met by relatives and schoolmates as well as officials from the education department, all of whom removed their hats and stood silent on the platform of Liverpool Street station. So many people gathered on the upper walkways overlooking the platform that extra police had to be called in to control the crowds. [...]

The idea of erecting a memorial to the events of 17 April were first raised publicly around a month later in the official Nazi newspaper the Alemannen, as well as in the British press. The people of Hofsgrund had mooted the idea early on, communicating to Freiburg’s tourism director their desire for an inscription carved into the rock, which would have recalled the incident and acknowledged that without the locals’ help, many more would have died. After much vacillating, the Hitler Youth took over management of the project. [...]

The memorial was due to be inaugurated on 12 October, in the presence of a member of the British royal family, the head of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and the British ambassador, in a ceremony which once again was supposed to affirm the German-British friendship. The inscription concluded: “The youth of Adolf Hitler honours the memory of these English sporting comrades with this memorial.” [...]

Eaton had wanted the inscription to conclude with the line: “Their teacher failed them in the hour of trial.” But the German authorities forbade the last sentence. A blank space shows where it would have been inserted. In the entrance to the village church, the parents also erected their own memorial, the only one in which the villagers are thanked for coming to the schoolboys’ aid.

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New Statesman: The twilight of the Union

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed the trial, and made the constitutional debate about Scotland’s future seem trivial. Suddenly there were other more pressing issues to think about, a lethal and mysterious plague that threatened to overwhelm the NHS and devastate the economy. Although, technically speaking, NHS Scotland is a distinct entity, founded on separate Scottish legislation, this fact belongs to the arcane lore of policy wonks: the NHS is widely regarded in Scotland as a UK institution. During lockdown Scots banged pots and pans on a Thursday night for the NHS, not specifically for the NHS in Scotland. And everybody knew that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme came courtesy of the deep pockets of the UK Treasury.

Yet, bizarrely, the Scottish Question did not hibernate. Instead, opinion about Scottish independence shifted significantly during the Covid lockdown. At the start of the year, the pro- and anti-independence camps were running neck and neck in the opinion polls, and remained tied as late as May. But more recent polls demonstrate a marked rise in support for independence, which is now running at 54 per cent, once the don’t knows are excluded. [...]

To be sure, nationalism plays a significant part in the independence cause. But in the broad miscellaneous coalition of voters that supports independence, flag-waving nationalists, though the most obviously visible cohort, rub shoulders with a range of other social types. There are the voters, often middle-aged, who think independence is the best way of preserving what remains of Britain’s cherished welfare state; those who want to live in a normal northern European country – like Denmark or Norway – with a Nordic model of egalitarian social democracy; those who despair of the Brexity delusions of Britain’s post-imperial nostalgia; and a radical younger generation that identifies with Rise, the alternative movement for “Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism”.

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CityLab: How Reykjavik's Sheet-Metal Homes Beat the Icelandic Winter

 This housing’s relative newness still reveals a striking factor that distinguishes Iceland from the rest of Europe: Though Iceland has been inhabited for almost 1,200 years, only a modest number of its surviving domestic buildings predate the late 19th century.

That’s partly because, as Iceland emerged from centuries of hardship, it turned its back on traditional building types associated with poverty, leaving them to deteriorate. Until the late 19th century, most Icelanders lived in turf houses. Compensating for a lack of local trees, which grow slowly in Iceland, these houses built up walls of earth and grass-growing sod around timber frames. The few remaining survivals look delightful under their coating of lush grass. To live in, they were frequently damp, dark and poorly warmed by a single kitchen hearth, while the walls needed regular repair or rebuilding to remain solid and watertight. “People think of turf houses as like regular ones but with grass-growing roofs” says Icelandic TV host, former city councilor and campaigner Gísli Marteinn Baldursson, “but in fact living in one was almost like living in a hole in the ground.” [...]

These houses became the default type both in Reykjavik and elsewhere in Iceland. When the city experienced a major fire in 1915 that left metal-clad houses largely unharmed, the city made this trend into law, requiring a corrugated coating for all new houses built close together. Kept in place until the mid-1920s, this bylaw ended up giving Iceland’s capital the largest cluster of metal-clad buildings in the world.

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Politico: What Trump Is Missing About American History

 The 1619 Project’s focus on slavery and racism, including its assertion and then revision about slavery and the Revolution, highlights how history is always in the process of revision through new information and new perspectives. But that process flies in the face of common ideas about history, that it is static and certain. Criticisms of the project and misunderstanding about revision come from this basic misapprehension about how we know what we know about the past.

Journalists and politicians are examples of two groups that are differently but equally susceptible to a desire for clarity and simplicity about the historical past. But the past is rarely clear and was never simple. We understand the motivation—in both cases they are eager for a usable past, a way of explaining in straightforward terms the context for the present. [...]

In essence, what happened with the New York Times is an example of how anyone—including journalists and politicians—can step into the stream of historical knowledge without acknowledging that the stream is moving. American history—indeed, any history—is actively created as researchers learn new facts and gain new perspectives on the past. History is unfolding chronologically: We each experience this in our lives as time moves inexorably forward. There is a tension between experiencing history—time moving forward—and representing history—holding time still. But how we represent the past is also moving; it never stays still for long, and it never has. [...]

If our history is constantly evolving as we develop new understandings of the past, does it mean all claims about the past have equal integrity—or validity? No. Understanding the past requires evidence marshaled to a narrative (or argument, or interpretation). Not all evidence is equally germane, not all arguments about the past are equally persuasive. Understanding the process by which historians make them better equips us to assess them.

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