Meet Stanley (Cup)

Football has the Lombardi trophy, and baseball has that thing with all the flags, but there’s no trophy in sports quite like the Stanley Cup. Molly Brooks illustrates its history in this comic for The Nib, starting all the way back in 1888 when a certain Lord Stanley moved to Canada. One of the most important facts that had previously been lost to history: unlike other trophies, the Stanley Cup does not belong to a league. After the National Hockey League’s infamous lost season, a few rec league players took the NHL to court. The result? Should the NHL have another lock-out or cancelled season, one of North America’s premier sports trophies will be up for grabs.

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See the full story at The Nib.

The World Mourning Lincoln

150 years ago, America lost its President, but the whole world grieved the death of Abraham Lincoln. Matt Ford chronicles the range of responses in this stellar article for The Atlantic, including correspondence and newspaper reactions to the assassination from around the globe. It’s a fascinating way of thinking about his life and legacy, and a wonderful remembrance of one of the country’s greatest presidents.

 

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln—president of the United States, preserver of the Union, and liberator of four million slaves—died the next morning. He would be the last casualty of a war that cost some 750,000 American lives—more than all other American wars combined, and among the deadliest wars of its century.

Read on at The Atlantic. 

The Birth of a Debate

D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist film The Birth of a Nation, which tells a mythicized origin story of the KKK, is experiencing something of a revival. As Dorian Lynskey explains in this piece for Slate, the reason has less to do with the story the film tells, so much as it does with the debate the film sparked: should there be a limit to what subjects art can handle, and if so, who gets to set that limit? It’s the kind of eternal debate that has always mattered in the art world, but especially matters in our current clime, when First Amendment freedoms, censorship, and government oversight frequently dominate political discussions. And according to Lynskey, this question of whether dangerous art can ever merit suppression, has been one of the very debates that defined American history.

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Actors costumed in the full regalia of the Ku Klux Klan chase down a white actor in blackface in a still from ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ the first feature-length film, directed by D. W. Griffith, California, 1914. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1916 a 41-year-old man in Los Angeles published a short pamphlet called “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.” In passionate if somewhat pompous tones, the author described motion pictures as “the laboring man’s university,” but warned that their power to educate and instruct the nation could be “muzzled by a petty and narrow-minded censorship” that would create “a sugar-coated, virtuously-garbed version … in order to satisfy the public mentors of our so-called morals.” He quoted dozens of journalists and politicians who opposed censorship, cited Shakespeare and the Bible for good measure, and protested that “this new art was seized by the powers of intolerance as an excuse for an assault on our liberties.”

The pamphlet’s author was the film director D.W. Griffith, and the subtext for his First Amendment flag-waving was the fierce campaign against his 1915 motion picture The Birth of a Nation.

Read on at Slate.

Going West: The World of Live Action, Competitive Oregon Trail

What is the meaning of life? To be or not to be? Do you want to ford the river or caulk the wagon and float across? These are the questions that have plagued mankind through the ages. If you grew up in the last 20 or 30 years, you might recognize that last question as coming from a classic computer game, the Oregon Trail. Mundane though it was, the game turned into a sort of cultural touchstone, and in this story for The Atlantic, Emily Grosvenor looks back at its history. Her inspiration, as the title would suggest, is a group of Oregonians who remain so enthralled with the game some 30 years later that they now act it out as a live action role play. (moose note: as you’ll see in the comments, there is a mistake w/r/t one of the photos, as well as a few errors in the writing. I’m not sure what the deal is with that, but I’ve found other accounts confirming basic facts of the story, and I thought it was kind of funny, so I’m posting it anyway.)

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Dysentery strikes the Oregon Trail LARPers.

On a sunny Saturday last week, I found myself pushing a 200 pound man on an ancient kiddie wagon with two missing wheels up a hill with about a 40 percent incline while he shouted out facts about how to preserve meat. The sun beat down on us as we maneuvered him from a shady spot next to a historic wooden mill in Salem, Oregon, to the steps of the Pleasant Grove Church, an 1848 sanctuary for travelers who survived the Oregon Trail.

For me, it was a digital flashback of sorts: “You have killed a bison, but you can only carry 200 pounds of meat with you.”

Sound familiar? If you grew up in the 80’s, you might remember the line. It’s from the Oregon Trail—a beloved computer game that, on this particular Saturday, I was playing again. Only this time it wasn’t on the computer, it was in real life.

Keep reading at The Atlantic.