Tag Archives: Olympics

January 1, 2024

2024: the Anniversary Year

By daseger

Happy New Year! I’m a firm believer in “anniversary history” and I like to start out the new year previewing (or guessing) what commemorations we might see. This past year was a busy one with the 400th anniversary of two major ports in our area, Gloucester and Portsmouth, as well as Rye and Dover, New Hampshire. I was really impressed with Gloucester’s year-long commemoration, especially its 400 Stories project, which will be a lasting legacy. Salem’s 400th is coming up in 2026, and I’ve been working on a book though all of last year and part of 2022 for that big anniversary: I’m handing it off to the publisher this month and eager to work on some other projects. 2024 looks a bit quiet in comparison with some other years but I’m sure there will be several Revolution 250 events. Salem was very much the center of the action in 1774 so I hope our city can rise to the occasion. Here’s where I think/know/hope we will see some reflective/commemorative activity:

Indigenous History: It seems to0 large a concurrence to me to have the 100th anniversary of Indian Citizenship Act occur in 1924 and the 200th anniversary of the establishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs not to have a major reflective moment, especially given the current and intensifying historiographical interest in Native American history. We certainly need one (or two or three or…….) moments of reflection. Again, NOT an American historian, so a bit shocked that unqualified citizenship was not granted to Native Americans until 1924 (actually, I don’t think I can use the word unqualified) and their voting rights were still challenged after that!

Essay on citizenship by a student at the Leech Lake Indian School, 1917-1920, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75. “the ones who steal or TELL LIES are not good citizens.” (capitalization mine)

Winter Olympics (on a much lighter note): the first Winter Olympics was held in 1924 in Chamonix, France, and in the following year the International Olympic Committee voted to make it a regular event every four years. Now of course the summer and winter Olympics are staggered, and as this summer’s games are in Paris I think there will be some kind of recognition of the centennial from a cultural and/or French perspective.

Courtesy Swann Auctions

Impressionism: Speaking of France, the first impressionist exhibition happened in Paris in 1874, and this cultural watershed will be marked with a major exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay that will travel to the US later in the year. 130 works will be featured, including paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley and Cézanne and some of their lesser-known contemporaries, as well as an “immersive expedition in virtual reality” entitled “Tonight with the Impressionists.” Looking over all the previews for this commemoration, I realize that I’ve never appreciate how radical the Impressionist movement was—looking forward to this spring.

Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (détail), 1872-1873, musée Marmottan Monet, Paris © RMN-Grand Palais

Lafayette’s American Tour: Moving back 50 years to another big French cultural moment, but an even bigger American one: Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824. I know that this bicentennial will be big, as there are several initiatives which have been in the planning stages for quite some time. A “Lafayette Trail”, signalled by red, blue and white markers erected in many of the towns and cities he visited—over 40 in New England alone—has been created, and Lafayette 200 has coordinated hundreds of events to commemorate the General’s tour. You can check out all the events here: the kick-off is in August, the month in which Lafayette arrived. He visited Salem, Beverly and Ipswich on August 31, and it looks like Historic Beverly will be sponsoring an event on that day.

Salem as center of pre-Revolutionary activity: 1774 was a big year for Salem in terms of Revolutionary activity. Royal Governor Thomas Gage moved the location of the Massachusetts General Court from Boston to Salem, where he hoped it would be “more inclined to comply with the King’s Expectations,” in June but compliance was not forthcoming. Not at all. The Salem assembly would not comply or even be disbanded after Gage’s order, instead resolving to endorse “a meeting of Committees, from the several Colonies on this Continent … to consult upon the present state of the Colo¬ nies, and the miseries, to which they are, and must be reduced, by the operation of certain Acts of Parliament respecting America ; and to deliberate and determine upon wise and proper measures to be by them recommended to all the Colonies, for the recovery and establishment of their just rights and liberties.” This “meeting of Committees” became known as the Continental Congress. Later in the summer, after Gage prohibited town meetings without his prior approval, Salem held one which drew over 3000 attendees, and in the fall a Salem “tea party” on October 3 was followed by a de facto declaration of independence. After yet another Gage cancellation, of a meeting of the Massachusetts General Court, its members met anyway on October 5 and voted “to resolve themselves into a Provincial Congress” which was not answerable to London.

6 Comments | tags: American Revolution, Anniversary History, Art, Comemoration, Exhibitions, Lafayette, Olympics, public history, Revolution 250 | posted in Culture

February 20, 2014

Soviet Scenery

By daseger

Despite all the unsettling things about the Sochi Olympics (“urban renewal”, intolerance, dead dogs, slushy snow), I’ve been trying to watch the events pretty consistently–especially skiing and speed skating, which I really enjoy. In general, I prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer (watching swimming is boring), but there are several things that are really bothering me about these particular games. Actually the first thing is more general than specific: NBC’s coverage, which always annoys me–and they have broadcast the Olympics for as long as I can remember. In prime time, there are far too many commercials, personal stories, and muttering commentators, and not enough consistent coverage of single events–except, of course, figure skating and ice dancing, which I’m not convinced is even a sport (if we have ice dancing in the Winter Olympics shouldn’t we have other types of dancing in the Summer games?) And by the time I tune in, I know much of what has already happened anyway–this strikes me as an odd way to broadcast a global event in this internet age. The second thing that troubles me about Sochi is its subtropical climate: I still don’t understand why (besides Putin’s will) we are having the Winter games in a city with an average winter temperature of 52 degrees. The mild temperatures and fog seem to have affected the events and the athletes in myriad ways, and obviously Russia has many more winter-appropriate locations.

But what troubles me most of all about these games is the increasing dissonance between the activities in Sochi and what is happening to the north–in the same general Black Sea region–in Ukraine. The juxtaposition between the ringing cattle bells in Sochi and blood in the streets of Kiev is striking, all the more so because of the relative physical proximity and recent historical context. I had been planning to feature some mid-century Winter Olympics posters here, but instead I’m going for posters issued by Intourist, the official Soviet travel agency, which beckoned tourists to Ukraine and its surrounding regions just a few years after (or even during?) the dreadful Soviet-induced Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33, which caused the death of over 6 million people (the estimates of mortality vary widely according to source). Such striking, cheerful graphic images: dissonance indeed.

Soviet Intourist posters from the 1930s from Radio Free Europe; the “See USSR” exhibit at the Gallery of Russian Arts and Design, London; and the Boston Public Library.

5 Comments | tags: Graphic Design, Olympics, Propaganda, Russia, Ukraine | posted in Culture, Current Events, History

July 28, 2012

Olympic Posters

By daseger

It was nice to see and hear the traditional ringing of the bells in Britain yesterday, signalling the beginning of the London Summer Olympics. Nearly all of the British institutions that I regularly “visit” have their own take on the Olympics this summer: the Museum of London has a general exhibit, while the British Museum focuses on medals and the British Library offers up Olympex 2012, an exhibition on collecting the Olympics. My favorite Olympic-themed presentation, thankfully very accessible on-line, is the Victoria & Albert Museum’s presentation, A Century of Olympic Posters . It’s so interesting to see how the posters reflected the times in which they were produced, while at the same time projected national images to the world which were carefully chosen by the host countries.

There was no official Olympics poster until the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but it seems appropriate to begin with the program(me) cover for the first London Olympics, held in 1908 at the newly-constructed White City Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush. This Olympiad was originally scheduled to be held in Rome, but the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius diverted it to London. It’s a nice nostalgic image, and you can see the White City in the background.

The first official Olympics poster, printed in 16 different languages and alternative formats, was the work of Swedish artist Olle Hjörtzberg,. The original design, featuring completely naked athletes in a reference to the ancient Olympics, was replaced by this version, with its strategically-placed streamers, but this was a bit controversial too.

After a long break due to World War One, the Olympics resumed in war-devastated Belgium for the 1920 Antwerp games. Maybe it’s just my own national bias, but that looks like a very prominent American flag on the poster: perhaps an expression of gratitude for the timely entry of the US into the war? The poster for the 1924 Paris Olympics by Jean Droit has become iconic, and we first see the five Olympic rings representing the continents of the world on the posters for both the 1928 Olympics: summer (Amsterdam) and winter (St. Moritz).

The poster for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, the first to be held outside of Europe, looks a bit odd to me: apparently the artist Julio Kilenyi sculpted the figure and then photographed it, and I’m not sure how the lettering was produced. There’s very little sense of place here; it does not read Los Angeles or America to me, but it’s interesting that “California” had to be added. I suppose that the City of Angels was not yet the international city that it would become.

Few images are as ominous as the official poster for the 1936 Berlin Olympics with its menacing Nazi symbolism and the Four Horsemen, which can only be seen as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in historical perspective. And then there are two very similar, one might say identical, posters from the canceled 1940 and 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Clearly Finland–and perhaps the world–decided to pick up where they left off.

There is some semblance of place in the Helsinki posters, but I think that emphasis becomes pronounced in the post-war era, beginning with the image of the second British Olympics, the so-called “Austerity Olympics” of 1948. Jumping forward to the early 1960s, the sense of place seems to overwhelm the sheer athleticism of the earlier posters in the images from the 1960 and 1964 Olympics in Rome and Tokyo.

Of course, the images get more abstract and symbolic in the later 1960s: the poster for the Mexico games represents the psychedelic age perfectly, as does one of the slightly-cynical images of the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

The posters for the more recent games just don’t seem as textured to me as those from the past, although I really like the official poster #1 from the 2000 Sydney games, “Peace Roo”, designed by David Lancashire. The trend seems to be for whole series of posters to be produced rather than just one, representing individual sports as opposed to the entire event. This was certainly the case for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, which was represented by over 50 posters, and the organizers of the third London games commissioned posters from 12 eminent British artists. Pictured below is “For the Unknown Runner” by Chris Ofili, who used the vase outline to reference the Greek origins of the games.