Hapax

The Freedom Archives contains over 10,000 hours of audio and video tapes. These recordings date from the late-60s to the mid-90s and chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international solidarity movements. The collection includes weekly news/ poetry/ music programs broadcast on several educational radio stations; in-depth interviews and reports on social and cultural issues; diverse activist voices; original and recorded music, poetry, original sound collages; and an extensive La Raza collection.

These materials constitute a compelling record of 40 years of recorded sound, images and cultural diversity. The music/poetry mixes, production techniques, and sound collages represent an innovative contribution to the art of radio and the cultural ambiance of "the 60s" and subsequent decades. . . .

There is an overwhelming need for the young people of today to have access to non-filtered, non-biased educational resources that allow them to learn more about our recent history. Young people need to know about and understand the aims, events, accomplishments and setbacks of those influential times. The archives and projects growing from the collection can help satisfy a growing interest by youth of many cultures in these social and cultural currents, and can assist them in unearthing lessons of the recent past even as they raise new concerns of their own. Educational programs utilizing multifaceted audio resources can convey recent history to high school and college students in dramatic ways that cut through the stereotypical depictions of textbooks, the mainstream media, and commercialized mass culture.

We live in the Global Location Age. "Where am I?" is being replaced by, "Where am I in relation to everything else?"

The Geospatial Revolution Project is an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

Mission

The mission of the Geospatial Revolution Project is to expand public knowledge about the history, applications, related privacy and legal issues, and the potential future of location-based technologies.

Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community. We count on these technologies to:

fight climate change
map populations across continents, countries, and communities
track disease
strengthen bonds between cultures
assist first responders in protecting safety
enable democracy
navigate our personal lives

. . . I have been in San Quentin (and on death row) for almost 28 years, and for most of this time I have had George Jackson's books in my cell. I ordered them through the prison Special Purchase Order (SPO). My cell has been searched hundreds if not thousands of times and never, not once, were George Jackson's books taken. Why now? And why the link to gang activity when it is well known that George Jackson was a member of the Black Panther Party and a political revolutionary? It is only by exposing the insidious and inscrutable use of politically charged books to label prisoners gang members, thereby criminalizing critical literacy, that we can arrive at answers. Both prisoners and prison activists need to understand how the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is using political and historical texts to repress prisoners. . . .

"When I first came to London, I was fascinated to see whole streets devoted to a specific trade; there was Fleet Street with its news offices and printing shops; in another street, Hatton Gardens, the jewellers had their shops. Charing Cross Road was full of bookshops. Each shop also offered books, mostly second-hand fare, outside, and there were always passers-by browsing through the tomes. That gave me the idea of making a book about the street and the neighbouring nightlife district of Soho."



A bookshop with a claim to fame is Marks & Co, at number 84, outside which Suschitzky set up his camera in 1937. Years later, the booksellers there were to carry on a correspondence with a New York client, Helene Hanff, which was published as a book, play and film; incidentally, the photographer recalls, the famous London fog could not be attributed to the British climate but was caused by heating private homes.



Neither does Suschitzky fail to see what goes on in the streets and alleys away from the urban bustle. He photographs children playing in a dreary backyard, road-menders, a milkman pushing his cart through the rain or collecting money from his customers, and a knife grinder in his open-air workplace. "Many years after I had taken this picture, I had a letter from Canada. The writer had seen this picture in my little book Charing Cross Road in the Thirties and had recognized the knife sharpener as her father. She requested a print, which I sent with pleasure." The photograph of a girl jumping over a puddle reflecting the lights of the street at night has become the most famous of the series.

Research from the Institute of Solid State Physics in Russia shows that structure at the nanometre scale can look strikingly like feathers, trees and bone. Galina Strukova and colleagues used a technique called electroplating to build up the stunning structures, such as these "feathers" of lead and indium.

The perfectly preserved remains of five chariots and 12 horses

The equine bones, found in the Chinese city of Luoyang, have remained undisturbed since the early Western Zhou dynasty. Archaeologists believe the 12 horses lying on their sides show the animals were slaughtered before burial, not buried alive. As well as the horses and five chariots, bronzes and ceramics have escaped the clutches of history's grave robbers.

Archaeologists are convinced that the perfectly preserved tomb belongs to an official or a scholar of standing, given the pottery, metal weaponry and inscriptions. The tomb, a vertical earthen pit, has excited historians since it was discovered during the construction of a hospital. It gives an unprecedented insight into the funeral customs in the early Western Zhou dynasty.

When I embarked on the task of writing a biography of Clarence Darrow a few years back, I looked forward to passing on a story about the death of Richard Loeb. Along with his gay lover, Nathan Leopold, Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924 for the thrill of it. The public clamored for the death penalty, but with an eloquent plea for mercy, Darrow saved the two teen-aged killers from the gallows.

The "boys," as Darrow called them, were geniuses from wealthy Chicago families. Loeb was, at the time, the youngest student to ever graduate from the University of Michigan.

Leopold lived to a ripe old age in prison, and won parole. But Loeb died one day in 1936. Folks who spent time in the newspaper racket in the late 20th century, as I did, heard how Edwin Lahey of the Chicago Daily News had hammered out, on deadline that afternoon, what must have been the greatest lead ever written.

In the late-night newsrooms or newspaper row bars, grizzled veterans liked to tell how Loeb approached the wrong man for sex in a prison shower room and was subsequently knifed to death. Then, reverently, grinning, they would recite Lahey's lead from memory: Richard Loeb, a brilliant college student and master of the English language, today ended a sentence with a proposition. . . .