Walt & El Grupo: The Story of Disney’s Political Propaganda

In 1941, Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked Walt Disney to make a goodwill tour across South America, hoping the universal popularity of his characters would help diffuse anti-Axis sentiments in the region. It was a bad time for Walt — on top of his personal inclination for introversion, WWII had cut off his business in Europe, he had just lost a third of his workforce in a fiercely fought strike, and he owed Bank of America $3.4 million. But when the government agreed to underwrite the tour expenses, Disney took off for Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile with his wife Lily and a posse of 16 artists dubbed “El Grupo.” Among them was director Theodore Thomas, son of the celebrated animator Frank Thomas, who took it upon himself to record the extraordinary journey on 16mm film.

Walt & El Grupo is the product of Thomas’ labor, brimming with letters, photographs and rare footage of the places El Grupo visited, as well as interviews with people who welcomed Disney into their homes. The film captures not Walt’s familiar soft, avuncular public persona but his passionate, driven, inventive side as an artist and entrepreneur at the tipping point of a career that forever changed the world of animation.

The DVD features fascinating audio commentary from Historian J.B. Kaufman and the director hismself, three exclusive segments from the Director’s Cut version, the original theatrical trailers for Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944), and a fantastic Photos In Motion feature, which traces how the photos literally came to life.

Walt & El Grupo is a priceless and vibrant timecapsule of a unique time in the history of both the global politics and creative culture, revealing a rare portrait of a man who came to define the childhoods of generations and, in the process, play a key role in shaping the visual literacy of our time.

via VSL

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All in a Word: A Compendium of Linguistic Curiosities

We have a certain obsession with words. But no matter the degree of your linguistic geekery, it’s hard not to find question of words’ origin, life and death fascinating. In All In A Word: 100 Delightful Excursions into the Uses and Abuses of Words, linguist Vivian Cook takes us on a riveting journey into the most curious nooks and corners of language, from how we learn words as a child to how words are born and why they die to made-up words we’ve come to take for granted. (‘Google,’ ‘television’ or ‘robot,’ anyone?)

This book is all about the different aspects of words, ranging from their forms to their meanings, from their roles in organizing our societies to their roles in helping us to think. It consists of a variety of pieces, some short, some long, some serious, some frivolous, some based on scientific research, some on opinion. As each piece is separate from the others, they can either be dipped into or read consecutively” ~ Vivian Cook

Each chapter features a deluge of games, puzzles, lists and quotes for your edutainment. You can test how many words you know with the Basic Words Test, psychoanalyze The Beatles and The Rolling Stones based on their lyrics, and see who invented more words, Shakespeare or Chaucer. (If you’re itching for a sneak peek: Chaucer has linguistic staples like ‘box,’ ‘femininity’ and ‘Martian’ to his credit, while Shakespeare has staked his claim on ‘addiction,’ ‘fashionable’ and ‘priceless’.)

As with any scientific subject, the study of words tries to explain the facts; the behaviour of words is no more a matter of opinion than the behaviour of electrons. Needless to say, many aspects of words are still little studied, many are controversial, while some of the most important await better techniques for analyzing the brain.” ~ Vivian Cook

Like all innovation, Cook’s obsession with spelling was born out of frustration, after one too many people overlooked the crucial gender difference between the British spellings Vivian and Vivien, assuming from his first name that he is a woman. (It’s okay, we did a double take, too.)

via Flavorwire

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Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery is one of humanity’s gnarliest, most shameful scars. So uncomfortable is the subject that we rarely glide past the mandatory history class checklists. But understanding the complex mechanisms and historical contexts of slavery is key to grappling with everything from contemporary race dynamics to modern-day slavery like human trafficking and labor exploitation. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade offers a fascinating record of the mass abduction and abuse of an estimated 12.5 million Africans traded with just about every country bordering the Atlantic between 1501 and 1867.

Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900

Volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade from all African to all American regions

The book, authored by leading historians David Eltis and David Richardson, features nearly 200 original maps from Emory University’s Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online portal covering a range of unsuspected factors that played a role in the development of the slave trade ranging from the topography of coastal areas to the migration of sugar cultivation.

Migration of sugar cultivation from Asia into the Atlantic

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade has been called the Rosetta Stone of slave historiography. But, more than that, it’s a compelling example of something we believe will be of growing importance in the coming years — the cultural value of database-driven storytelling, an increasingly fertile intersection of science and the humanities.

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