Walking needs no publicist. The simplest, most accessible form of exercise has been around since humans first foraged and traveled on the ground.

But today, walking seems to have entered its influencer era.

It’s the subject of countless viral videos, of people doing it silently, collectively, for their mental health, for their physical health, for “hot girl” reasons (lawsuit pending), and yes, even for their gastro needs.

There’s something more to these micro trends than fitness personalities looking to make a quick buck off of brand-name water bottles or $30 socks. A new wave of fitness personalities—many of them women of color, of a variety of body types—have been able to reach people who, due to numerous factors from safety to layers of systemic discrimination, have historically shied away from the activity. This is exemplified by the explosion of walking groups in the U.S. in recent years, with headline after headline chronicling the rise of these meet-ups across the country, which has encouraged hundreds of strangers to come together each week and exercise.

This isn’t the first time a diverse group of influencers has widened the scope for walking. In the 1870s and 1880s, an unlikely assemblage of Americans became some of the nation’s earliest celebrities with the rise of the pedestrianism movement.

These professional walkers traversed hundreds of miles, around tracks and across state lines, to compete in the nation’s first spectator sport. Though the craze was short-lived, it left behind a legacy that challenges the stereotypical face of fitness to this day.

American pedestrianism began with a fateful bet: In 1860, the door-to-door bookseller Edward Payson Weston wagered a friend that Abraham Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election. Were Lincoln to win, Weston declared, he would walk the 478 miles from his home in Boston to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration—and he would do so in under 10 days.

After Lincoln won, Weston set out to make good on his promise, publicizing his itinerary in local papers along the Eastern Seaboard. People waited for hours in the cold to watch him pass through their towns. A run-in with a debt collector left Weston four hours and 12 minutes short of his goal; Lincoln, who was following his progress along with the rest of the country, was still so impressed by the feat that he offered to pay the latecomer’s fare home. (The press-savvy Weston demurred, seemingly knowing that the refusal would only earn him more coverage.)

Following the Civil War, Weston took his walking show on the road. Thousands of spectators lined up to buy tickets and place bets on whether he could beat the clock. In a divided country, his walks were a unifying event. “He’s so apolitical, and I think that helped his popularity,” Matthew Algeo, the author of Pedestrianism, told me in an interview. “He could go anywhere and walk, and people wouldn’t object to it.”

Walking was not a popular form of exercise in the U.S. when Weston began staging his exhibitions, but he and the competitors who rose up to challenge him spread “pedestrian fever” among the public. “A Plea for Pedestrianism,” published in the New York Times in 1878, was a typical literary endorsement of leisure walking. The op-ed supplied readers with a sample walk they could do around Staten Island, recommended attire (“easy, yet, stout, laced boots with broad soles and low heels”), what to eat (“a sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs in your pocket”), and how to prepare (“Those not accustomed to much walking ought to practice it moderately during the week before marching a whole day in the country”).

Celebrity, long reserved for royals and political figures, was expanding—allowing pedestrians, or “peds,” to gain real influence as some of the country’s first mass-market stars. They used their platform to promote not just the sport, but also everything from shoe brands to trading cards. They even were the first to sell advertising space on their competition outfits.

One of the reasons pedestrianism resonated with so many, Algeo suggested, is that these athletes took an activity that was relatable—an “expression of the everyday”—and pushed it to the extreme. The result, he said, struck people as “personal,” “genuine,” and “real.”

Professional walkers reflected an array of Americans, too. Because these walking matches were largely unregulated, there were no clear rules excluding certain groups from competition. One of Weston’s greatest rivals was Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant who became “Champion Pedestrian of the World” in 1875 after defeating Weston in a six-day race. O’Leary took multiple athletes under his wing, including Frank Hart (born Fred Hichborn), a Haitian immigrant. Hart became one of the sport’s great stars and winner of the second-ever O’Leary Belt in 1880, where he earned more than $21,000 total, the equivalent of two-thirds of a million in today’s dollars.

Women “pedestriennes” also made a significant impact on the sport. At a time when conventional science held that strenuous athletic activity did lasting harm to female bodies, wiping them of their “vital energies” and their ability to reproduce, athletes like the Englishwoman Ada Anderson rose up as powerful counterexamples, showing what sportswomen were capable of.

“It is good for women to see how much a woman can endure,” Anderson told the New York Sun in 1878.

But there was a dark side to women’s pedestrianism. The sport was largely promoted and organized by men (including one of P.T. Barnum’s own PR people). A majority of women came to professional walking out of desperation, to escape poverty or abusive relationships. Then they pushed their bodies to the limit. They did what men did—24-hour walks, 100-mile walks, six-day walks—but also attempted even more extreme stunts, like walking 3,000 quarter miles over the course of 3,000 quarter hours.

“This was a really tough life,” Harry Hall, author of The Pedestriennes, told me. Women walked in hard-soled shoes, he said, because saboteurs threw rocks, tacks, and glass on their track, hoping to fix race outcomes.

The same laissez-faire setup that had allowed the sport to evolve so organically also led to it becoming synonymous with exploitation and scandal. Pedestrianism saw race fixing, early steroid use, and an extortion attempt that ended with a manager’s suicide. With the rise of bicycle racing in the 1880s, the public moved on, leaving pedestrianism to fade into a historical footnote.

“There was no way pedestrianism was going to last forever,” said Algeo. “But it’s a shame it kind of killed itself.”

Today’s walking influencers have different aims and goals, not to mention more agency, than the stars of the sport a century and a half ago. But both walking waves can be seen as promoting “physical activity in spaces where they’re not traditionally or not as easily done in the past,” as Damon Swift, an exercise scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, told me.

For those looking to hop on the trend today, but aren’t ready to commit to a 10,000 daily step count—let alone a trek from Boston to D.C.—you might find some wisdom in that 1878 Times trend story, which advised readers to “walk as long as [you] like.”

Do just that, it promised, and you’ll return home “healthier and happier.”

The post America’s Earliest Sports Stars Were … Professional Walkers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I tripped over the term NPC, quite literally, on my way to an event the other night. Rushing to get there, I fell right in front of the venue. Embarrassed by how many people had just watched me eat concrete, I texted my friend Claire.

“They’re just NPCs,” she wrote back instantly. “Who cares what they think?”

NPC, the acronym for “non-player character,” is a gamer concept that’s been around for 50 years now. Often thought of as a background character—a villager, a barkeep, a shop owner—who helps to flesh out the world around the protagonist, it can refer to anyone in a game who is not controllable by a human player.

But the way Claire used it speaks to a modern trend: referring to real-life people as NPCs.

It’s no surprise that the concept has taken off today. At a time when chatbots are doing everything from helping you buy a pair of jeans online to answering insurance questions, the idea of interacting with someone who turns out not to be, well, human, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It’s likely one of the reasons that NPC has been gaining prominence, with “non-player character” even making it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary last year.

As the term enters our everyday speech, though, it’s worth asking what we’re actually saying when we call someone an NPC. Already people have weaponized the concept, seized on the NPC label as a means of distinguishing “free thinkers” (themselves) from people whose thoughts and actions are, supposedly, pre-programmed (pretty much everyone else).

But to understand the history of the term NPC is to recognize that this kind of dehumanizing discourse hijacks its original conceit.

Born out of early tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), NPCs were never intended to erase anyone’s personhood or to imply actual humans were mindless automatons. Rather game-builders developed NPCs to do the very opposite: help RPG moderators build a world of possibilities for players.

The term NPC was first popularized by Dungeons & Dragons, created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The genre-defining collaborative storytelling game allowed you to play as your alter ego in an imaginary world brimming with adventure. You could be a fighter, magic-user, cleric, or chief; a human, dwarf, half-elf, or hobbit; as well as lawful, neutral, or chaotic. A designated Dungeon Master (DM) facilitated the game, developing and fleshing out the campaigns you embarked on, and serving as referee and judge when necessary.

Anything (really, anything, the game stressed) could happen. That’s how non-player characters took off; DMs leaned on NPCs to broaden and further story arcs. The original D&D rulebook even included a section dedicated to the “non-player character,” which touched on basic rules of engagement, like what happens when you hire the services of an NPC (they could help if they “receive their pay regularly, are treated fairly, and are not continually exposed to extra-hazardous duty, and receive bonuses when they are taking part in some dangerous venture”).

Signifying the importance of NPCs, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons released “Non-Player Character Records” in 1979. The booklet of blank character sheets helped formalize the concept, allowing DMs to keep track of the abilities, combat skills, descriptions, possessions, and backgrounds of the characters. “No longer will the DM need to worry about lack of continuity or lost records on non-player characters, for these sheets provide the DM with easy-to-store records of the many non-player personalities which populate his or her campaign,” the introductory text promised.

D&D is generally credited by game scholars as the first commercial tabletop RPG. As the genre grew in the late 1970s and ’80s and from there started expanding beyond kitchen tables onto computers and video games, conventions from D&D, including NPCs, followed suit. On screen, these characters could be especially comical, limited by computer programs’ rudimentary movement algorithms and scripted responses. That’s how NPCs gained a reputation for being goofy and robotic. Think of the tavern owner in a video game who never moves from behind the bar, or the stranger on a road who can only repeat canned lines, like, “Hello, fellow traveler, have you heard about the werewolf destroying the crops?”

People have had fun with these characters over the years, dressing up as them and channeling their jerky movements and clunky expressions. Today there’s enough of a niche audience for this kind of content that influencers even imitate NPCs for money.

An anonymous poster on 4chan was likely drawing on this clunky version of the NPC concept in 2016, when they shared a “theory” about a fixed number of souls on Earth, designating non-player characters as “the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us.” Pro-Trump supporters seized on this depiction of the NPC as a means of denigrating liberal activists.

What makes the slur more loaded than, say, “sheeple”—surprisingly not internet-speak but a term that dates back to at least the 1940s—was that NPC implies that the person you’re in ideological disagreement with is not just wrong, but incapable of independent thought and action. This distinction meant that a “mass outcry against, say, serial harassers, racial injustice, or Trumpian ideas,” could be “dismissed as not just inherently uncritical but prima facie evidence of a lack of human consciousness,” wrote journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio in 2018, as an NPC meme featuring Wojak (a blank-faced cartoon character recycled from an earlier 2010 meme) gained prominence.

Far-right watchers have since characterized NPC as a fascist “dog whistle” and a way to dehumanize people. They’ve noted that it’s part of a broader kind of rhetoric that’s leading to extremist violence around the world.

This use of NPC could have a natural expiration date IRL, as the in-game characters themselves evolve. A longtime goal of game designers and programmers has been to make NPCs more believable, and they’re getting closer. Take the simulation game Animal Crossing, which took off during COVID lockdowns; its anthropomorphic villagers are capable of doing most of the same things that playable characters can, and even are assigned specific personality types, like lazy, cranky, sisterly, and smug. While we’re still far from seeing the kind of NPC character promised by “Project Milo,” the graveyarded Microsoft Xbox 360 venture that claimed to have invented an “emotional AI” more than a decade ago, new technological advancements promise to continue to stretch the idea of what an NPC can look like.

Maybe in time, this will push the concept of NPCs in the culture, too, returning it closer to its foundational definition—not someone without free will, but a player like any other in this world we build together. One who, I’d hope, still wouldn’t care about an errant sidewalk stumble.

The post Who You Calling ‘NPC’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last month, an “immersive” Willy Wonka event took over my news feed.

Normally, I’d keep scrolling.

Promoters market these voguish multisensory experiences—which are supposed to literally immerse you in an environment through projection mapping technology, virtual and augmented reality, sound, physical sets, and sometimes even actors—as “transformative,” “out-of-this-world,” and “sublime.”

I haven’t understood the appeal. The few I’ve tried out have fallen short of those ambitious statements. Far from offering a transcendent experience, they seemed gimmicky, not to mention overpriced.

But Willy’s Chocolate Experience got my attention, largely because the event, a debacle that reportedly ended in tears, could, in no credible way, pretend to sell awe by the $44 ticket price.

The company behind the production, House of Illuminati, had used generative AI to advertise a show where “dreams become reality.” But the projection equipment, the linchpin of these fantasyscapes that use light to turn any physical object or surface into a life-like display screen, didn’t arrive in time. That meant the kids who showed up for the event didn’t get to see “giant mushrooms filled with sweets,” “colossal lollipops,” or “candy canes that seem to touch the sky”—just a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland, filled with a few props. Any illusion that they were taking a jaunt through Roald Dahl’s candy factory (or even its off-brand cousin) was shattered. Within hours, angry parents got the whole thing shut down.

The internet ate it up. For the next few days, visuals from the Wonkapocalypse, like a lonely plastic prop rainbow that resembled a Jeff Koons sculpture and an exhausted-looking actress hunched above a candy laboratory, were inescapable on my social media.

I watched as these posts about the breakdown of a constructed reality mingled alongside real news stories about the world we live in, at a historical moment where our shared sense of actual reality has catastrophically broken down. As all of this blurred together, it helped me to finally see what it is that people seek out in immersive entertainment.

I don’t think they believe they’ll find wonder there. But they know they’ll find a carefully curated escape from the present.

Our current immersive era, in this way, can be understood as the 21st century’s answer to the pleasure gardens of the past.

Commercialized pleasure gardens, seemingly natural spaces of leisure drenched in artifice, emerged in the 17th century as entrepreneurial English aristocrats opened up their private gardens to the public for the price of admission. Inside the walls of these manufactured Edens, artists created complex trompe l’oeil, which made two-dimensional surfaces on elaborate walking paths appear three-dimensional. Musicians played “fairy music” to establish a fantasy atmosphere, and over at Vauxhall, one of England’s grandest pleasure gardens, workers even imitated nightingale calls after the birds left the grounds in 1730. The ultimate act of fiction, of course, was that pleasure gardens created a space where commoners could brush elbows with the gentry.

Scottish author Tobias Smollett captured the feeling of entering one in his 1771 travel novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker:

I was dazzled and confounded with the variety of beauties that rushed all at once on my eye. Imagine … a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples, and cascades, porticoes, colonnades, and rotundas, adorned with pillars, statues, and paintings; the whole illuminated with an infinite number of lamps, disposed in different figures of suns, stars, and constellations.

Like today’s high-definition floor-to-ceiling projections, light, as Smollett observed, played a crucial role in creating the mirage.

Pleasure gardens boasted thousands of colored lamps, called illuminations, as well as painted linen canvases backlit by candle or lamp light, and endless fireworks of all shapes and designs, according to Anne Beamish, a scholar of pleasure gardens. I was struck by how modern the stylish pyrotechnic displays feel in Beamish’s descriptions. “Some involved attaching fireworks to structures or devices that moved,” she writes. “Others relied on sheets of paper that were pricked and backlit. As the paper moved, an optical illusion gave the appearance of movement, such as falling water.”

In the 18th century, pleasure gardens hit their peak popularity worldwide. They attracted a new, rising middle class with expendable time and income, eager to trade the smog and stench of industrializing city life for a few hours of gilded fantasy. Working people could enter these walls of pretend, roam curated pastoral grounds, and experience the latest technological wonders of the day, like the hot air balloon.

Not everyone could buy a ticket inside, however. In the U.S., pleasure gardens were predominantly white-only. Still, there are records of Black pleasure gardens in New York, such as the African Grove, established in 1821. Two hundred years later, for a 2021 MOMA exhibition, the artist Tourmaline characterized the Black pleasure gardens as “spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery.”

Black pleasure gardens show that these grounds of amusement held the potential to be revolutionary. But more often than not, pleasure gardens ended up bound by self-imposed limitations. As cultural anthropologist Deborah Philips reminds us in Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground, they were created for profit. Because of this, she argues, they were constructed as “unthreatening and contained” spaces meant to “reassure rather than challenge.”

This is worth remembering as we enter a new age of immersion today.

Our modern inheritors of commercialized pleasure gardens can offer a dreamy respite to people eager to leave behind their worries for a few hours. But though they will continue to promise the world—or at least sights out-of-this-world—they are not set up to achieve such feats.

The Wonka experience’s empty warehouse is a good reminder that, by design, these new pleasure gardens can offer us little more than a trick of the light.

The post What the Wonkapocalypse Can Teach Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“In these anxious days,” wrote Aaron Latham in the original Esquire article that inspired the movie Urban Cowboy, “some Americans have turned for salvation to God, others have turned to fad prophets.” But more and more people, Latham noted, were turning to the cowboy for guidance.

When Latham’s article was published in 1978, only about a quarter of the U.S. population reported that they could trust their government “at least most of the time.” Radically shaken by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, barreled under stagflation at home, and facing the threat of nuclear holocaust abroad, the public, unable to put their faith in their nation’s institutions, were increasingly putting it in one of its most durable myths.

Is it any surprise then that when Urban Cowboy premiered two years later, the movie ushered in a cowboy boot craze so frenzied that, at its height, farmers and ranchers reportedly struggled to get their hands on the footwear. It took the rise of Lycra-blend aerobics gear to finally tip the scales of ’80s fashion.

For over a century and a half now, the cowboy boot has continued to rise up in the nation’s culture like a Rorschach test, reflecting back to us ideas of what it means to be American. But though the cowboy boot is often used to suggest one version of Americanness, that of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, its history should remind us that the boots were made for everyone.

The iconic cowhide work boot was not destined to be affixed in the American popular imagination this way, just like the term “cowboy” itself was not originally associated with the ideas it now summons. A Revolutionary War-era holdover, cowboys first referred to British Tories using guerilla tactics against the rebel colonists. The boots that would become synonymous with them emerged as the term evolved a century later, as cowboys, of many and multiple races and ethnicities, began driving livestock on the cattle trails from Texas to Kansas railheads for transport to markets in the East. Some of the earliest working cowboys were Black, as Katie Nodjimbadem has noted in Smithsonian magazine. The reason there became so many Black cowboys (historians estimate that in Texas they made up as many as one in four) was because the job was one of the few dignified professions open to them after the Civil War.

Inspiration for the cowboy boot itself was global: It derived from the short-heeled square-toed English Wellington boot worn by cavalry and artillery drivers during the American Civil War, the German Hessian knee-high boot, and the Vaquero riding boot worn in Mexican ranchero culture. As the footwear evolved beyond its initial utilitarian function, it increasingly incorporated Native American designs, such as fringed buckskin.

This shared heritage is what led the design historian Sonya Abrego to characterize the cowboy boot as a reflection of “the material index of the diversity of the American West,” in her 2022 book Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture.

But it’s the parallel story around the cowboy boot, spun out of traveling Wild West vaudeville shows and Westerns, that’s proven more enduring.

Wild West shows were already mythologizing the cowboys and their boots by the time the railroad made its way to Texas, sunsetting the era of the widespread cattle drive that the footwear was created for. These productions increasingly linked them to the nation’s vanishing frontier (which was officially “closed” by the Bureau of the Census in 1890), and to a whitewashed narrative of America’s genocidal manifest destiny. The most popular, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, which began in 1883, ran for three decades in the U.S. and overseas, its story of the West often understood by its audiences to be fact not fiction. Native actors were cast as heels, while romanticized cowboys, increasingly portrayed by white actors on the stage, were held up as symbols of rugged individualism.

Mail-order catalogs of the day began to sell this narrative to consumers as the boots shifted beyond their solely utilitarian purpose (as early as the 1890s, ad copy began calling attention to not just their functionality but their “unique, showy appearance”). Hollywood did much of the rest.

With the rise of the Westerns, the footwear underwent a movie makeover in the ’40s and ’50s, emerging out of it with even more colors and artistry and a newly signature pointed toe. The revamped boot was popularized by Western stars like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the “King of Cowboys” and “Queen of the West,” who portrayed one idea of the cowboy. Viewers who saw their exploits on screen created a mass demand for the boots to emulate it. (The trend even inaugurated a new concept, the “sidewalk cattleman”—a name for people who wore cowboy boots but did not own cattle.)

Cowboy boot booms have come and gone since. Each time the cowboy boot returns in vogue, one can see their artisanry and craft, which continues to be reimagined and reinvented by successive waves of fashion. (Already in the 1950s, country stars were popularizing the rhinestone cowboy boot, now part and parcel of the Nashville bachelorette circuit.) But it can be hard to see the boot, and its style evolution, in a neutral way because it remains so saddled with the heavy load of representing the contested values of a nation.

That tangled history of the cowboy boot is why I’m still trying to figure out what I want to say with my own pair shelved in my closet.

I got them in the late 2000s when friends and I started going line dancing at the college night at Borderline Bar and Grill, a country western bar near my hometown in Ventura County, California. The boots were not just an aesthetic purchase; the heel, which once allowed cowboys to feel secure in stirrups, also allows for twisting, sliding, and stomping on the dance floor.

We loved the big ballads and achy heartbreak numbers the bar featured, dancing until we got tired and then playing the songs again on the car rides home, sweaty from trying to keep up with all the step work we’d put our shoes through.

But as much as I enjoyed going to the bar, I never felt comfortable laying a claim to the boots I wore there. I couldn’t see myself in their story, as modern country music often suggested one idea of who they were for. As I watched the genre continue to go in the direction the cowboy boot went in vaudeville, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to invite that association. More and more when I’d turn on a country radio station, I’d hear pandering songs that felt, at best, like a parody of the genre’s best songwriting traditions, and at worst, like dog whistles about who belonged in those small towns and dirt roads they sang about.

I can’t remember the last time I went to Borderline before a shooter opened fire there, killing 12 people, including himself, during a college night like the ones my friends and I used to go to. That was 2018. My local community fixture was suddenly part of the nation’s horrific, never-ending mass shooting nightmare.

Cowboy boots have been on my mind since, especially as they go through another trend cycle today.

I want to think that there’s a hopeful story in the boots that speaks to the diversity of the American West that the design historian Abrego wrote about. Not to mention the complicated story about life and myth in the U.S. that the boots can uniquely shed light on.

Though I haven’t been wearing my old pair again just yet, I know that I want to. For now, they sit at home, a story of America waiting for me, when I’m ready to put them on.

The post Cowboy Boots Were Made for Everyone appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

’Tis the season.

The season for television shows to chug too much eggnog, forget their earthly cares for an hour or so, and jump the proverbial yuletide shark.

The result, whether it’s treacly sweet, outrageously theatric, or capable of bringing an audience to tears, comes like clockwork each December, when—for good or bad—television cuts away from its regularly scheduled programming to tap into the spirit of the season.

I’m talking stars. I’m talking spectacle. I’m talking, more than likely, somebody dressing up as Santa.

I’m talking, if it’s not clear, about the holiday special.

I grew up with an appreciation for the scripted counterpart of this, the holiday episode—from dinosaurs and cavemen singing along to Christmas carols on The Flintstones to the cast of Community transforming into Claymation toys to the annual Doctor Who drop that had high-school me in an absolute chokehold: Tears (me, at the exit of David Tennant)! Dickens! The better-than-it-should-be Murray Gold novelty song!

But I came of age too late to fully appreciate the shmaltzy old-school celebrity Christmas variety shows of yore (you know the ones, packed with musical numbers, guest stars, dancing, and zany surprises). Over the last few years, though, I’ve found myself actively seeking out the latest generation of these specials. Tuning in to NBC’s “Christmas at Graceland” this year, the first live musical televised holiday special at Presley’s old estate, helped clarify what it was that draws me, and so many others, to them. As Lana Del Rey performed her rendition of the classic 1955 song “Unchained Melody,” an Elvis favorite, I realized that I was witnessing something timeless, something so many of us really do hunger for, especially in these uncertain times.

The holiday special first came on the scene in 1950, another year badly in need of comfort. The world, still recovering from the impact of World War II, was bracing for more conflict; the Korean War had broken out just months earlier, the first major proxy war in the Cold War, and the fighting foreshadowed the long, bloody years ahead. The early holiday special served as a balm of sorts, inviting families to gather together for some seasonal cheer.

Technically 1950 wasn’t the first year Christmas came to television. In America, early offerings, like a 1946 televised “North Pole Toyland” from Wanamaker’s DuMont Studio, showed children playing in “toy world,” carolers singing, and even a Santa workshop (who played Santa in that show is anyone’s guess—1946 was, notably, the first year that male Santas outnumbered female Santas again since before World War II). In 1948, “Surprise From Santa” featured noted stage and screen actor Whitford Kane playing that famous “snowy-bearded gentleman” on television, and debuted a new song, “Sleighbells,” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. And of course, long before television came around, radio had already set a precedent—was the “ur-Christmas special” really the Royal Christmas message, first delivered in a radio broadcast by George V in 1932?

But 1950 was different. Like the snow falling outside, Christmas blanketed programming. It was, truly, “Christmas on the airwaves” as a New York Times’ television programming guide proclaimed, announcing that “most regularly scheduled programs will abandon their usual formats to bring … viewers programs of a seasonal nature.”

Among the listed specials to be aired on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: “Herald of Goodwill,” which featured Christmas carols from different nations; “Nativity,” depicting images of Jesus’ birth by master painters; a televised church service; a candlelight mass from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.; and the first-ever TV adaptation of the Christmas-themed musical Babes in Toyland (which is sadly lost to time).

The biggest splash was “One Hour in Wonderland,” Walt Disney (and his company)’s first real venture into television.

“Fair warning to all mothers and grandmothers preparing dinner for Christmas Day,” wrote L.A. Times critic Walter Ames. “Don’t set your dinner table between the hours of 4 and 5 PM. If you do, the food is liable to get cold.” The reason? That “spectacular” Disney Christmas special he’d seen a preview of, hosted by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, his dummy Charlie McCarthy, and the actress Kathryn Beaumont. The special, sponsored by Coca-Cola, was set up like a Christmas party at the Disney studio. A magic mirror opened the portal into the fantasy of Disney, unlocking previews of Alice in Wonderland (which would hit theaters the following summer), giving airtime to a host of characters from Mickey Mouse to Donald Duck, and behind-the-scenes peeks at Walt Disney Productions.

Just a small percentage of U.S. households even owned a television in 1950 (a 13-inch set cost the equivalent of around $2,000 today). But for those who did tune in, maybe using a screen magnifier to make the tiny black-and-white picture appear a little larger, they were enraptured. The television special garnered an estimated 90% of viewers—and as Richard T. Stanley joked in The Eisenhower Years: A Social History of the 1950s, “possibly helped sell a gazillion Cokes.” The reviews were raves: “After seeing it, I know why television was born,” Hedda Hopper announced in her gossip column that week.

“One Hour in Wonderland” was such a hit that it became an annual tradition, rebranded as “The Walt Disney Christmas Show” the following year with a record television budget of $250,000.

Though the Disney special may have made the most visible impact in 1950, less remembered (perhaps because it aired on NBC a few weeks late) is arguably an even more seminal program that aired that season: the inaugural “Bob Hope Christmas Show.”

“We want you to just get back into the holiday spirit, and imagine you’re back around Christmas time,” joked Hope at the start of the special to set the scene. Guests included film actor Robert Cummings, opera singer Lily Pons, and tap dancer Betty Bruce. There were laughs—like one skit of four department store Santas commuting home on the subway—and there were poignant moments, notably the ending, when Hope brought Eleanor Roosevelt out on stage.

She started by thanking Hope for his recent tour to visit military bases in Korea, Japan, and Alaska.

“When you travel you get a chance to meet and talk to all kinds of people,” Hope commented. He paused a moment before adding, “These days you find many people are confused and more than a little afraid of the future.”

“That’s understandable in times as troubled as ours,” Roosevelt agreed.

It was the first of 44 Christmas shows Hope would film over his lifetime. Other celebrity hosts, from Bing Crosby to Dean Martin and more, followed his playbook to bring a dose of holiday spirit to the season. But by the turn of the century, when Hope’s final special aired in 1994 (the same year that fellow holiday stalwart Perry Como wrapped his last Christmas special), the future of the seasonal variety special seemed up in the air.

Rather than turn into a corny relic from TV’s past, a new wave of specials in the 2000s showed there was something more substantial to the formula. At first, celebrities returned with a bit of a satirical wink: Stephen Colbert for Comedy Central in 2008 or Bill Murray for Netflix in 2015. But in recent years, hosts have cast irony aside in favor of embracing what the holiday special first set out to do. From Lady Gaga and the Muppets to Kacey Musgraves to Mariah Carey (unofficial patron saint of Zócalo Public Square), celebrities are once again finding success by leaning into the shtick of it all.

Like in the earliest days of the holiday special, fewer may be watching now, in this age of streaming. But for those like me who are still tuning in, I suspect, whether or not they celebrate the season, they are watching in search of some age-old winter cheer to help warm up these long winter nights.

The post Why We Hunger for the Holiday Special appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Recreating Mabel Mora’s look for Halloween this year was simple. All it took was a mini skirt, a sweater, some gold hoops, and knitting needles—items I already had lying around my apartment.

Slipping into costume as the youngest member of Only Murders in the Building’s trio of amateur detectives—who, for three seasons now, have been nosing and podcasting their way through the suspicious deaths that conveniently keep occurring in their Upper West Side apartment building—is easy, I suspect, by design.

That’s because Mabel Mora (played on the Hulu show by Selena Gomez) is meant to personify a face in the crowd—one of countless creators responsible for the very real true crime boom we’re living through.

Only Murders, like the also-recently-renewed Peacock comedy Based on a True Story, is a self-referential take on a current explosion of amateur sleuths. Nine years ago, journalist Sarah Koenig’s acclaimed investigative podcast Serial helped launch this era of everyday people attempting to solve hot and cold cases, sharing their findings along the way to an eager public through documentaries, docuseries, podcasts, and more.

That we’ve become so enmeshed in true crime, however, should give us pause.

As much as I’m a fan of Only Murders, the rise of this new meta-commentary subgenre is more proof of how ubiquitous the genre has become. And for all its promise, a significant amount of true crime remains focused on propagating stories that exploit pain for entertainment and warp narratives around crime and justice.

How we got here dates back, in part, to victims’ rights efforts that began in the 1970s. In Savage Appetites, the writer Rachel Monroe traces our modern taste for true crime to a tangled Frankensteining of feminist rhetoric and tough-on-crime policy. Though the victims’ rights movement identified serious failures of the justice system to protect crime victims, in the decades that followed, it went on to push legislation that disproportionally and devastatingly impacted people of color, from mandatory minimum sentencing to “three strikes” laws.

To understand our current moment, though, it’s also instructive to look further back, to 1800s England, when the first true crime boom launched the popular culture conception of the amateur detective.

These early sleuths emerged out of a climate similar to the one we’re living in today, with a rise of ascendent technologies and media mixed with fear and anxiety around crime, policing, and punishment.

The 1800s saw radical changes in British society, as industrialization dramatically shifted population centers from rural areas to urban cores. With rising urbanization came the modernization of law enforcement; the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created a standardized police system to replace the existing patchwork network of parish constables and town watchmen. The development of “the new police” was greeted with wariness: Would a centralized system prevent and detect crime, or assert more government control over working-class Londonites?

Alongside the new police force came new ways of gathering evidence. Although ancient forensic practices date as far back as China circa 425 BCE, the 19th century ushered in scientific approaches such as blood analysis, photographic documentation, fingerprint identification, and more. Modern forensics became a point of fascination among the public. They “demanded to know what methods were being used to solve crimes and took an avid interest in how such methods were applied,” scholar Sharon J. Kobritz wrote in her research exploring detective fiction as a natural outgrowth of the Victorian period.

A booming press reported on all of this. But the tenor of what was printed varied widely. Some of it was critical, like Charles Dickens’ early nonfiction work around incarceration. In 1836’s “A Visit to Newgate,” he documented intolerable conditions inside the notorious London prison, which would help inform later fictional works of social criticism like Little Dorrit.

Then there were the endless sensationalist takes emphasizing the gruesome and horrific.

The 1830s invention of the penny press fueled this tabloid-like coverage, which helped advance the unfounded belief that London was experiencing an explosion in violent crime and murder. (Crime rates actually dropped between the 1840s and the 1870s.) In “Common Misperceptions: The Press and Victorian Views of Crime,” historian Christopher A. Casey argued that such perceptions had chilling real-world consequences. From the 1820s into the middle of the century, early crime reformers had standardized the system and made it less harsh. But fear-mongering in the press provoked a sharp reversal of course, leading “directly to a re-evaluation of contemporary criminal policy,” Casey wrote. Notably, sensationalistic reports helped sink a movement to completely abolish capital punishment, which had previously been gaining steam. (One 1850 petition in favor of ending the death penalty, for instance, received over a million signatures.)

It was the coverage of the police in the press that appears to have birthed the fictional amateur detective as we know it today. Crime fiction scholar Samuel Sanders has made the case that poor perception of the police in the periodical press in the latter half of the century “led to the rise of private detectives in periodical detective fiction.” Principal among them: Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic character Sherlock Holmes, who made his debut in Strand Magazine in 1891. The introduction of the first amateur sleuths at a moment when public trust in the system was low is notable. These characters may have offered a kind of fan fiction for readers disillusioned with the system: a glimpse of alternative paths to justice.

Looking back at the earliest true crime boom is a reminder that from the start the genre has existed in this uneasy paradigm of propaganda and promise. Just as stories shed light on a justice system badly in need of reform, they also played into the fears and anger that propped up that same system of power. That the invention of the fictional crime sleuth rose out of this moment feels like one of the most hopeful takeaways for today.

Like many, I started watching Only Murders not for the murders but for the chemistry between Mabel and her fellow true-crime enthusiasts—co-conspirators Oliver Putnam (the soft-eyed, washed-up Broadway producer played by Martin Short) and Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin’s unlucky-in-love actor). But now I’m also watching to see how the show, and others like it, navigate and reckon with our true crime moment.

With one in three Americans reporting that they consume true crime content once a week, the genre isn’t in any danger of losing steam. However, more true crime programming that pushes back against its worst tropes could point a way forward and even help rehabilitate it.

Because for all the bad, this early history reminds us that true crime has the potential to serve as a vessel for change—that maybe, as the trio in Only Murders suggest, by being engaged citizens, and championing observation, communication, and critical thinking, each of us in the crowd can play a role in agitating for a better world.

The post Could True Crime Make the World a Better Place? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One of my best friends died recently.

It still doesn’t feel real. The last time I saw her was the day after the Fourth of July. Her smile always lit up the room, but that night, the joy seemed to seep out of her, so much so that even the person who took our order at dinner commented on it.

Life was coming together. She’d gone back to school to become a speech-language pathology assistant and was on track to complete her program in the fall. Unfailingly patient, positive, and compassionate, her teachers said she had everything it took to excel in the field. She’d just become an aunt for the first time, too, and made the four-hour drive from Ventura to San Diego whenever she could to get to know this three-month-old with a gummy smile and a pompadour, who was now a part of her. And she’d recently fallen in love, with a guy from Missouri, whose Hinge profile she’d shown me last Thanksgiving. They were talking about moving in together after she graduated. Our high school friend group had yet to meet him, but she promised we would soon.

We never got the chance before she left us. It was a prolonged sinus infection that progressed into fatal meningitis. A “perfect storm” of events, a nurse later said. Everything went so wrong so fast that she was still wearing the magnetic eyelashes she’d put on to see the Barbie movie when she was brought to the hospital.

Perhaps inescapably, because we met in the 2000s, when social media was just taking off and phones had become cameras (and vice versa), the grief has taken on a digital dimension. To stop myself from being consumed by the questions around her death, the hows and whys of what happened, I’ve been trying to focus on remembering her life through these memories preserved in pixelated resin.

There is an overwhelming number of them to choose from, but I can’t help but feel what is missing. The Facebook replies I can no longer access because I deleted my account. The texts and videos I never backed up on the cloud. Obsolete media whose formats are no longer supported today. Underlying this sense of absence, of course, is the knowledge that as much as there is, there won’t be more coming.

Much of the digital ephemera I’ve come across so far I remember, even if the memories of what we were doing or where we were when we made them are just glimmers. But going through our old texts the other day, I found a few unopened voice messages I must have forgotten to play. Because I’d waded through so much of the annals of our lives at that point, I thought I was prepared for anything. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those recordings yet.

I think it’s because the medium feels like it picks up a conversation in real time. It’s the message in the bottle of the digital age. You share a thought without knowing when, where, or in what time zone it will find its recipient. In that way, voice messages feel alive in a way that video or a photo—where a haircut, a t-shirt, or a setting betrays its time stamp—does not.

Voice messages are relatively new. WeChat, the Chinese instant message and social media app, introduced them in 2011, and they have been available on Apple’s iMessage since June 2014. Over the past decade, the technology, which allows you to send voice recordings over messenger apps, has rapidly gained popularity. According to a recent YouGov poll for Vox, 62% of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message (or voice memo or voice note), and around 30% communicate this way “weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.”

But the basic idea behind the technology has arguably been with us since the mid-1800s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first machine to document sound. This soon gave way to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed people to record and playback sound on cylinders, opening up the commercial possibilities of the audio medium.

It doesn’t surprise me that once people could get their hands on the phonograph, they instantly saw its potential for preserving the voices of loved ones beyond the grave.

“The phonograph was linked with death from the very beginning,” according to Jonathan Scott’s Into the Groove: The Story of Sound From Tin Foil to Vinyl, which notes that the “idea of the preservation of a voice after death was a common trope in the phonograph’s advertising copy.” Most famously, the iconic trademark and logo of Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, seemingly depicts a dog listening to a recording of his late owner.

Nipper, the dog gazing at the brass horn of a phonograph in English artist Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” was the real-life companion of the artist’s recently departed brother, Mark Henry. While it’s been debunked that Nipper was actually listening to Mark’s recorded voice in Francis’ original rendering, recording the “last words” of dying individuals was a real trend, as detailed in newspaper accounts, like this 1889 piece in the San Francisco Examiner about a family who took a phonograph to the hospital to “cheer their mother on during her long illness and also to preserve the tones of her voice to comfort them after her death.”

It makes sense that Victorians embraced a technology for preserving the voices of the departed. The culture was steeped in death due to high mortality rates, and from funerals to fashion, Victorians came up with a dizzying number of ways to commemorate those who had passed (what historian James Steven Curl has characterized as a “celebration of death”).

Rapid scientific advancement during the era, which comingled with a burgeoning spiritualist movement, seemingly made the Great Beyond more tangible to mourners. The invention of X-ray machines made the invisible visible. Modern camera techniques like double exposure allowed for “spirit photographs,” which hinted at a world beyond this one. The phonograph presented just another way to thin the veil between the living and the dead, to help those grieving find new ways to connect with those who were gone.

Historian of sound John M. Picker has also made the case that because the phonograph was the first technology that let people record sound at home, its embrace by Victorians was “inherently more personal and interactive” than consumer responses to audio technology that followed (such as the gramophone, which allowed playback only).

We’ve come a long way from that initial liberation of the voice from the constraints of time and space. But holding my iPhone in 2023, the distance to these earliest phonographic recordings feels closer.

Like the Victorians, and many, many people since, I share that same human want that drove us to record sound from the beginning: to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost and miss.

The post Her Voice Memos and My Grief appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The year was 1997.

“Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton dominated the radio waves. Wallet chains and JNCO jeans were red-carpet staples. And plastic? It was fantastic.

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie wasn’t just made of plastic, she was the first ever doll to come with her very own piece of it. She came with a cash register, bar code scanner, credit card reader, and two credit cards—a life-sized cardboard Mastercard for you, and a doll-sized plastic one for her.

In a year where a record 1.35 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy, and the director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America was warning Americans in the red to “consider spending only what they can afford to pay off in a month or two”—or better yet, “make purchases by cash, check, or debit card”—Mattel, the toy company behind Barbie, used her to sell consumers on the fantasy of limitless shopping. Push a button, and the doll could say the magic words: “credit approved.”

“It’s so a child can really pretend,” said a spokesperson for Mattel at the time, in defense of its partnership with Mastercard International. “We thought it would be fun for her to run the card through the scanner.”

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie had a short run, which now makes her, among a certain set, a collector’s item. But today, the doll best serves as a particularly blunt object in the long history of Mattel’s marketing strategy to sell not the doll itself, but the lifestyle she promises.

In the lead-up to the first-ever live-action Barbie movie, Mattel has drilled this message home again and again, partnering with over 100 brands to sell us everything from Barbie burgers to Barbie toothbrushes. Life, Mattel wants to remind us, is better in Barbie pink. But the biggest way Mattel is signaling this message is through the high-profile summer tentpole itself. The first of Mattel’s new film arm, which can be seen as a feature-length commercial for Barbie, is a big gamble for the toy company. But it’s one that it has made before. From the very beginning, Mattel has made its name, and Barbie an icon, by selling her lifestyle to us directly on the screen.

As the story goes, after World War II, husband-and-wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler and their friend Harold “Matt” Matson began building doll furniture, and then toys, from scraps of leftover wood from their picture frame business. Early on, the company, a fusion of Matt and Elliot’s names, gained a reputation for selling musical toys, like the Uke-A-Doodle, a plastic ukulele. But Mattel really took off in 1955, when it had the opportunity to buy advertising on a new national children’s program, Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club. No one had used a major campaign to speak right to kids before. There had been national ad pushes, with the Erector Set becoming the first to get a major newspaper treatment in 1913. But unlike today, where companies spend nearly $17 billion a year marketing to kids and young adults, postwar marketers were only just beginning to treat children themselves as consumers. Becoming a commercial sponsor for a year would cost Mattel $500,000 upfront, but it meant directly reaching kids all across the country. It was a pricy gamble, but one that paid off big. That October, children tuning into ABC to watch “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E” were hit with advertisements for Mattel’s new Thunder Burp toy machine gun. The frenzy that followed created an epoch shift.

As Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus put it in Toyland, their history of American toy companies, “Mattel’s decision to advertise toys to children on national television 52 weeks a year so revolutionized the industry that it is not an exaggeration to divide the history of the American toy business into two eras, before and after television.”

Were it not for The Micky Mouse Club, Barbie herself may never have become a phenomenon. Buyers had expressed little interest when Mattel brought its prototype to the 1959 American International Toy Fair. But the response was completely different when Mickey Mouse Club viewers got their first look at the 11-inch doll. As ad footage of Barbie and her accessories paraded across the screen, a woman’s voiceover said, “Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”

From the start, Barbie, in particular, was selling children not on a doll, but on an idea: You, yes you, could be Barbie. Kids demanded a Barbie of their very own to play out their fantasies, and Mattel sold more than 300,000 dolls that first year.

Mattel continued to find new ways to use television to reach its target demographic. In 1969, Bernard Loomis, a toy developer and marketer at the company, had the idea of looking beyond regular advertising and turning Mattel’s newest toy, Hot Wheels, into a Saturday morning cartoon. The strategy was an early attempt to channel what Loomis later famously referred to as “toyetics”—a media property’s power to create and sell toys.

Loomis understood that companies would one day sell toys through branded, popular entertainment, but he was ahead of the times. After the Federal Communications Commission received a complaint from a rival toy company against the Hot Wheels animated show, it concluded that it was a “program-length commercial,” under the rationale that the programming was woven “so closely with the commercial message that the entire program must be considered commercial.” The FCC required ABC to log parts of the show, including the theme song and audio and video references to the words “Hot Wheels,” as commercial advertising, and the program was soon canceled.

It took until the 1980s for toyetics to be fully unleashed when FCC deregulation opened the doors for what one member of Congress termed the “video equivalent of a ‘Toys-R-Us’ catalog” to hit TV screens. The term toyetics was, at this point, already in circulation. Loomis is said to have coined it while discussing merchandising rights for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d decided to pass because he said the film wasn’t “toyetic” enough. What was toyetic enough? George Lucas’ new space opera.

Extending the Star Wars experience out of the movie theater and into the toy store opened the door for intellectual property to march its way into Hollywood. And now, with the launch of Mattel Films, Mattel is hoping to use Barbie to try and write the next chapter of this history.

From the dizzying heights of ’90s Barbie mania (Cool Shoppin’ Barbie, incidentally, came out during the year Barbie sales were at their zenith), Barbie’s cultural capital sagged in the 21st century. Like with The Mickey Mouse Club gamble, Mattel is hoping the new Barbie film will directly reach, and sell, a new generation on her story. But this time around, the company is hoping not just kids, but also adults buy into the idea of Barbie. In the long list of promotional collaborations, Mattel has been going after older age groups, partnering with brands such as the dating app Bumble to expand its customer base. The movie, too, is being marketed for all ages. “Everybody can have their own experience, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s kind of for everyone,” Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, told Reuters, during the L.A. world premiere.

Early reports seem to suggest that Mattel’s bet will once again pay off. According to box office estimates, Barbie is on pace to take in at least $130 million over the weekend. Even in a moment when Americans are spending less, it seems Barbie is still able to sell us on the plastic life.

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In 2009, soon after the fourth Indiana Jones film came out, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) awarded Harrison Ford with the Bandelier Award for Public Service in Archaeology.

In his speech, Ford expresses his gratitude to the AIA and for the work archaeologists are doing today to “understand and interpret the past to learn from it and enjoy a better future.” But he added, “it is quite disarming to see that the Indiana Jones films have been an inspiration to archaeologists.”

I was thinking about this speech while watching the previews for the latest Indiana Jones film, where Ford takes his last bow as Dr. Jones, the archaeology professor-cum-international treasure hunter. Three decades since 1930s-era Nazis sought to take over the world in Radars of the Lost Ark, they’re back in this fifth installment, The Dial of Destiny, set in the late 1960s, which finds them once more in pursuit of a powerful artifact (this time, a time-traveling device they can use to change the past).

Who better than Indy to save the world again? But if our now-aging hero is deservedly beloved for his penchant for punching Nazis (and his “healthy respect” for snakes), his own exploits also further what Ford recognizes as the dangers of archaeology as a tool of empire.

The real-life Nazis were, of course, infamous for coopting archaeological practices in service of the state. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi-sponsored archaeological digs took place throughout Europe and North Africa to further the racist ideology of the Third Reich and destroy or suppress any material that did not support their imperial doctrine.

One of the Third Reich’s primary endeavors in these expeditions was to find any evidence that would support the myth of an ancient Aryan race, the pseudoscientific theory first popularized in the 18th century by French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, among others, and operated as a central ideology of the Third Reich.

Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth, the head of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, one of the Nazi Party organizations tasked to appropriate and loot cultural property, was explicit about such an agenda:

German archaeology is for me … indigenous, blood-bound Germanic and Indo-Germanic prehistory. Our spadework has the preeminent goal …of illuminating our hitherto neglected indigenous prehistory. Anyone who opposes this effort … is a pernicious threat to the German people and should be fought accordingly.

Such expeditions were also intended to justify the state’s territorial aggression and expansion. For instance, after Hitler invaded Poland in 1940, Wolfram Sievers, the managing director of Ahnenerbe, another SS organization that sought to find evidence to justify Nazi racial superiority, had the idea of sending a representative to Poland to seize any material that would retroactively establish the Nazis’ right to the land and endorse the annexation.

But while the crimes of Nazi archaeology were numerous, as archaeologist Bettina Arnold warns in her study of race and archaeology in Nazi Germany, what the Third Reich was doing was neither a “uniquely German phenomenon nor something we can safely relegate to the past.”

Modern archaeologists are forever disavowing how the Indiana Jones franchise equates Indy’s treasure hunting to serious academic archaeology to distance the fictitious looter from their field. (There’s a great McSweeney’s list that jokes about the many… many reasons Dr. Jones would have been denied tenure as a professor in mid-20th century America.) But Indy’s wont of looting priceless artifacts is also part and parcel of the history of Western colonial plunder conducted under the auspices of archaeological research.

Even Jones’s creator, George Lucas, first described Indy as “a grave robber,” hired by museums “to steal things out of tombs and stuff.” And despite in-movie quips by Indy’s museum director friend in Radars of the Los Arc about how he’s sure that everything Dr. Jones acquired for his museum conformed to the fictional “International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities,” the museum was always more than happy to take the stolen goods Indy procured for it.

This story remains true to the real-life history of acquisitions, even following the landmark 1970 UNESCO convention that pioneered international return and restitution of cultural property.

“When I first entered the world of curators, it was the Wild West, ‘1970’ notwithstanding,” as Gary Vikan, a curator who came up in the 1980s, told the New York Times last year in an essay suggesting that the “Indiana Jones Era Is Over” for U.S. museums. “Curators and museum directors wanted to get important works,” Vikan continued. “You wanted to be the one that gets that icon, that sculpture, that bronze.”

While the repatriation movement to decolonize museums has continued to gain steam leading to the introduction of more legal protections for cultural property, from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects in 1995, countless national treasures—from the Benin Bronzes to the Elgin Marbles—remain separated from their countries of origin. As human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out in his 2019 book, Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure, “mighty ‘encyclopedic’ museums, like the Met and the British Museum” continue to “lock up their precious legacy of other lands, stolen from their people by wars of aggression, theft, and duplicity.”

The latest Indiana Jones movie, interestingly, takes place in 1969, just one year before the watershed 1970 UNESCO convention. But the ethics of looting were already established before Indy came up in the field, as evinced by British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s condemnation of the seizing of treasures from Maqdala in Northern Ethiopia in 1868. Addressing the House of Commons, he said he “deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army.” Going back all the way to 70 CE, Roman magistrate Gaius Verres was already being put on trial for plundering Greek temples during his reign as governor of Sicily.

Indiana Jones’ favorite lament—“That belongs in a museum!”—should ring hollow today. But though the Indy era may be ending at the box office, whether the “Indiana Jones Era” of museum practices is truly over, as the Times crowed, has yet to be seen. That same Times article also included musings by critics who bemoaned the loss of “treasures that showcase a country’s artistic brilliance from an international capital like Washington, where they are much seen, and send them to remote, uncertain settings.” (Whether they mean the metropolises of cities like Cairo, Lagos, and Santiago is unclear.)

It suggests there’s a ways to go before the chapter of pillage and plunder glorified by the Indiana Jones franchise fully closes. But with the new release debuting this holiday weekend, at least we can still enjoy Ford, now 80 years old, continuing to do what he does best: dodge snakes and perform the important public service act of punching Nazis.

The post Is the <i>Indiana Jones</i> Era Really Over? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shell-adorned bikini tops. Fishtail skirts. Starfish accessories. Seafoam green eyeshadow. Expect to see all of this and more riding the waves of Disney’s latest live-action blockbuster, The Little Mermaid.

In other words, “mermaidcore”—the personification of aquatic glamor and physical beauty—is back.

Since antiquity, mermaids have embodied our fantasies of the briny deep. Inscrutable, various, and generally scantily clad, these half-fish, half-woman mythological creatures are shapeshifting female figures known the world over, from the sirens of the Aegean, to the jiaoxiao of the South China Sea, to Africa’s Mami Wata, often traced to the coast of Guinea. Historical accounts of mermaid sightings continued to flourish on through the 1800s. While none ever produced a real mermaid, hoaxes like P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid”—a Frankenstein-ed monkey head sewn onto a fish’s tail—were plentiful, capturing the public’s attention and coin.

But as the industrial revolution’s rising tide traded wonder for rationality, “real” reports from the ocean began to quiet. Rather than disappear into myth, mermaids performed their next act of transformation: moving from the water to the stage and silent screen. The early 1900s productions that resulted popularized what I’d argue to be the first mermaidcore. And the skimpier and transgressive fashions inspired by them played a tangible role in helping girls and women traverse societal barriers in style and sport.

Of all the early mermaid tales, it was Neptune’s Daughter that might have captured the public imagination the most. Staged in the Hippodrome, the famed New York theater that boasted a stage 12 times larger than its Broadway counterparts, the show was an instant hit when it debuted in late 1906. Audiences flocked to see the actresses playing mermaids dive into an 8,000-gallon clear tank filled with water. People were astounded by how they were able to stay underwater for so long. While the “day of miracles and the belief in miracles is past,” as one reporter commented, the theatrical effect in Neptune’s Daughter kept the illusion intact. To maintain the fantasy, rehearsals were conducted with utmost secrecy, with management threatening to fire anyone who gave away the gimmick (submarine chambers) that allowed actresses to linger below the surface. Such precautions paid off. “No spectacular invention or innovation of recent years has aroused such popular interest or awakened such widespread curiosity as the mermaid scene,” observed the New York Times.

A silent film production of Neptune’s Daughter followed in 1914, shot on location in Bermuda, and starring champion swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman, “the Australian Mermaid.”

Swimming, long considered a “masculine domain,” had opened up to women relatively early in Kellerman’s home nation. Around the 1830s, middle-class women swam recreationally, and by the time a young Kellerman entered the pool at 9 years old, a burgeoning competitive scene had started up. Because Kellerman was bowlegged, her parents had put her in swimming lessons as a form of physical therapy. While she was weak on land, in the water, she found she was athletic and graceful. She began winning swimming and diving titles against girls and boys. By the time she made her way to the U.S., in 1906, she had already attempted to swim across the English Channel and was well on her way to achieving international fame.

But when Kellerman arrived in America, she found women’s swimming culture was stuck in Victorian times. Because there was no long-distance swimming to be had, she first made money doing water stunts in vaudeville performances. She also began campaigning to change American swimwear. As she reasoned, if women wanted to enter the pool, they first needed the freedom to abandon the cumbersome bathing costume of wool skirts, blouses, stockings, and swim shoes that was literally weighing them down.

The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

That excerpt comes from the 1907 article “Swimming Hints,” one of many editorials Kellerman authored to encourage more women and girls to lose their bulky swim costumes and adopt a modern one-piece swimsuit.

But perhaps nothing did more to change the conversation than her mermaid motion pictures.

Kellerman made her U.S. film debut in 1911, starring in two Vitagraph shorts, The Mermaid and Siren of the Sea, which catapulted her to stardom. Because the fantasy scenes she starred in filtered her form-fitting swimwear “through a fictional layer,” as author Christine Schmidt put it in her 2013 book The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk, Kellerman was able to transcend the norms of the day. Through her mermaid persona, the star could help neutralize “any suggestion of indecency” that her outfits might have otherwise engendered had she appeared in them on screen.

The public watched with fascination. Kellerman was heralded by the press at the time as being “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” And an audience hungry to be just like her followed her every move, eager to copy everything about her, including, in time, the trademark “Annette Kellerman suit.”

By 1914, the very same year Kellerman starred in Neptune’s Daughter, America’s premier amateur sporting league, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), officially permitted “mermaids,” as they called competitive female swimmers, to participate in sanctioned competitions. And by the time Kellerman’s film career wound down a decade later, most women were starting to wear the same one-piece “Kellerman suits” the star first championed at the turn of the century.

Mermaidcore, of course, wasn’t alone in opening up the waters for women, but it undeniably lent its sparkle to the cause, paving the way for them to transform their reality on land.

Today, this glamor can continue to offer us a way to shapeshift through fantasy. After all, as Kellerman herself once put it, to become a mermaid is to simply “see a woman make a fish out of herself.”

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