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https://anneofcarversville.com/daily/2023/9/28/arab-goddesses-and-metamorphosis-t6t6x

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Metamorphosis and Goddess Beauty Transformation in Harper’s Bazaar Qatar Fall 2023 — Anne of Carversville

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Harper’s Bazaar Qatar Autumn 2023 writes about these exquisite images by Dubai-based photographer Mattia Holm [ IG ] that the power of makeup is transformative. Model Moon Choi is styled by Nata Bocha in a series of mythical, resplendent underwater-creatures images that extend far beyond b

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1. What need a modern reader know of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung) - arguably the most famous, also greatest, short story in the history of literary fiction?

2. Of its stature, for example, Elias Canetti wrote that the story was something Kafka "could never surpass, because there is nothing which Metamorphosis could be surpassed by". As endorsements go, the bar could not be set higher.

3. Kafka's place in the literary pantheon has been assured for some time, most pleasingly expressed by George Steiner 's suggestion that he is the only author of whom it may be said that he made his own a letter of the alphabet - K.

4. Here, though, is a little novelty: in 2015, Metamorphosis is 100 years old. At least, 1915 is when the story was published, which is to say "finished"; and Kafka, famously, didn't finish very much.

5. Kafka worked on Metamorphosis through the autumn of 1912 and completed a version on 7 December that year. But negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances - the first world war, among other things - intervened.

6. Finally Metamorphosis was set before readers in October 1915, in the avant-garde monthly Die Weissen Blätter, then put between covers that December.

7. A century on, why does Metamorphosis still attract readers? One reason is that it's a horror story of sorts. Its premise - a man awakens in the body of an insect - exerts a ghastly fascination beyond anything in even the consummate short works of Chekhov or Joyce or Alice Munro.

8. Another is that it is, amid its pathos, awfully funny. Gregor Samsa wakes to discover he has six legs and a shell, yet for some pages he thinks that what ails him might just be the kind of throat complaint that is "the occupational malady of travellers". What can you do but laugh?

9. And there's more. As Gregor struggles to crawl off his bed, a clerk from his company calls at the Samsa apartment. As Vladimir Nabokov commented: "This grim speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad dream." But it is also farce: a personal embarrassment raised to a debacle by multiple easily shocked persons arriving on the scene to witness it.

10. Metamorphosis exemplifies the world Kafka invented on paper - recognisable but not quite real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike.

11. We call this world "Kafkaesque", of course, while keeping mindful of Italo Calvino 's lament that one hears that term "every quarter of an hour, applied indiscriminately".

12. I'll venture we mean "Kafkaesque" to denote a sense of suddenly inhabiting a world in which one's customary habits of thought and behaviour are confounded and made hopeless.

13. To dig a little deeper, the term evokes an individual's sense of finding himself victimised by large impersonal forces, feeling after a while that he can't but take it personally - and feeling haunted, too, by the sense that maybe, after all, he deserves it.

14. If you grant the preceding, then Metamorphosis is perhaps the quintessential Kafka story.

15. Given how well the story has aged, it is telling that Kafka at first didn't wholly delight in his handiwork. Even as he inspected the proofs he was unpersuaded. ("Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow.")

16. But the very fact that Metamorphosis was read, chuckled over and frowned on while Kafka was alive may bear repeating; for the myth rather persists that Kafka was unknown and unpublished in his lifetime.

17. Though his great fame was posthumous, he did have a reputation to speak of while he was alive. If a minor figure, he nonetheless had a better class of admirer (eg, Robert Musil).

18. In 1915 the dramatist Carl Sternheim, winner of the prestigious Theodor Fontane prize, bestowed his prize money on Kafka as a mark of writer-to-writer respect.

19. (Can you imagine the Man Booker prizewinner of 2015 declaring from the dais that s/he plans to hand over the £50,000 to a rival novelist whose stuff s/he considers so much better?)

20. Legendarily, though, Kafka had no bigger fan than his university friend Max Brod, who decided early on that Kafka was a genius, and duly ended up saving his works from incineration.

Max Brod, c1940. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

21. Kafka's famous literary death wish, delivered to Brod, was: "Dearest Max, my final request: Everything I leave behind in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters, from others and my own, sketches, and so forth, to be burned completely and unread ... "

22. Brod disobeyed Kafka, claiming that his friend had intimated his wish some years earlier, whereupon Brod had made it clear he would do no such thing. In other words, we may infer that Kafka was playing hard to get.

23. Kafka did, however, stipulate that a few works were to be spared: " The Judgment, , Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and the short story "A Hunger Artist" ... since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them." Certainly these are stories one would call keepers.

24. Let's look again, then, at the setup of Metamorphosis: Gregor Samsa is a travelling salesman in cloth, who works to support his family - mother, father, younger sister - and lives with them in a flat in an apartment house, though frequent business trips mean he is rarely there.

25. Why does Gregor work so hard? Five years ago his father lost a lot of money and Gregor took a job with one of the creditors. His sister Grete was too young to work, his mother too poorly with asthma, his father rather a broken man. Gregor, then, is the man of the house: his wages keep the family. As the story begins he has, for a change, slept overnight in the flat. And then he awakens.

26. Horror, humour, the trappings of the workaday, the surrealism of dreams - all are present from the first sentence, which in German goes like this: " Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."

Kafka's great writings may be seen as a sort of imaginative rehearsal for the end of all things

27. No English translation disputes that Gregor wakes from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed. But into what, precisely?

28. The adjective ungeheuren means "huge", the noun Ungeziefer some form of "creepy-crawly" but also "vermin" - obviously more suggestive of rodents than insects, yet applicable to both, the shared characteristic being pestilent, repugnant qualities.

29. "Some kind of monstrous vermin" is how it was rendered by the story's first English translator, AL Lloyd. "A gigantic insect" was the reading of Edwin and Willa Muir. "A monstrous cockroach" is how Michael Hofmann phrased it more recently.

30. Nabokov, who taught Kafka's work with great ardour at Cornell University, was a passionate lepidopterist and put some care into classifying Kafka's Ungeziefer, noting its "numerous little legs", brown colouring and convexity of belly and back.

31. In a deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Nabokov also observed that the creature's use of "strong mandibles" for the purpose of turning a key in a lock while on its hind legs "gives us the length of his body, which is about three feet". But this is mere dressing on Nabokov's conclusion: namely that Gregor becomes "a big beetle".

32. Both Kafka and Brod when discussing the story spoke freely of the "bug" ( wanze). But Kafka wished for readers to approach his creation with rather more tact. In his 1915 correspondence with Kurt Wolff he expressed alarm ("Not that, please not that!") at the thought that the book's cover might bear a drawing of an insect.

33. It's not a great stretch to propose that in his concern for how Ungeziefer Gregor was perceived, Kafka was revealing an identification with his protagonist - quite a thing, when you think about it.

34. Metamorphosis is a story in which a man suffers a terrible and inexplicable misfortune, is reduced to an abject and alien state, then is made to suffer doubly by the attitude of his ostensible loved ones, who make clear they would be better off without him - a verdict that he, with a passivity that seems culpable, accepts.

35. Not for nothing did Saul Friedländer entitle his 2013 study Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt.

36. Neurotic misery informed Kafka's work just as it is the making of many a writer, but in his case the degree to which the pain appears willed - that he felt it could be no other way and probably ought to be so - makes for a significant variation.

37. There's something a little chilling in the way he could step aside from himself, perceive his own plight, then twist it with finesse into fictional shapes that had the force of parables.

38. To live the writing life, Kafka decided early on, was to be in "the service of the Devil". He struck this Faustian pact, knowing it was not in his favour (it never is), but that it would suffice. Writing was everything, though it couldn't be enough, and in consequence he would cut himself off from real intimacy with any other person.

39. Certainly Kafka had what we nowadays call commitment issues with women. The degree to which he was interested in them as sexual partners is the riddle of the sphinx, one we must leave to his biographers, who don't entirely agree.

40. It's noteworthy, then, that Metamorphosis has a kinship with other titles in that elite group saved from the flames, Kafka having composed them during an inspired period of months in 1912 when, undoubtedly, a woman was involved.

41. By day, Kafka was an insurance man specialising in workers' injury claims. If he saw this job as a writer's wage slavery, nonetheless he did it for years, conscientiously.

42. By 1911 he was working - unfruitfully, he felt - on a novel with an American theme entitled The Man Who Disappeared / Der Verschollene. (It became .)

43. Worse, during 1911 he was much beset by having agreed to help his father with an interest in an asbestos factory - an investment Kafka had encouraged him to make, resulting in hassles and unhappiness.

44. But in August 1912, at Brod's place in Prague, Kafka met Felice Bauer. Felice was 24, a cousin of Brod's brother-in-law, and visiting from Berlin where she worked as a secretary for a firm making Dictaphones. Kafka was instantly drawn to her and began to woo her with a daily torrent of letters.

45. There is, of course, an obvious distancing effect in epistolary courtship, and Kafka could be promiscuous even with those disembodied affections.

46. Hanif Kureishi has observed wryly that Kafka "became very good at maddening, denying and provoking women. He also went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied."

47. Kafka saw Felice as "a happy, healthy, self-confident girl". She was perhaps cheerier than our now standard image of aKafka fan. In fact, she wasn't madly keen on his writing. But she did seem to have an invigorating effect on his productivity.

48. During the early months of their romance he wrote The Judgment and Metamorphosis. The former was dedicated to Felice.

49. On 17 November 1912 he wrote to Felice, confiding that he had been bedridden with misery over the fitful progess of Der Verschollene when suddenly another story idea occurred to him ("and oppressed me with inmost intensity").

50. Work soon gathered pace. On 23 November he advised Felice with a strange but typical air of tease that his new story was "a little bit dreadful".

Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka, c1900. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

51. The following day, a Sunday, he read the first part of his Die Verwandlung aloud to his friends and they laughed keenly. He must have known then that he had something.

52. Though Kafka further told Felice the piece was "extremely repulsive" and "nauseating", he professed himself "not unhappy with it". He even assured her his creative process was a boon to their relationship - "perhaps as much as I write and free myself, purer and worthier of you I will become."

53. Reviewing this correspondence, it seems that some part of Kafka desired to make a show of his stigmata; and not - whatever his protestations - because that effort was so very self-abnegating but, rather, because he took an artist's pride in the distinguished originality of his wounds.

54. Kafka's friend Franz Werfel recommended Die Verwandlung to Wolff in March 1913. Wolff recommended it in turn to Franz Blei, literary editor of Die Weissen Blätter. Musil wanted to see it for his magazine Die Neue Rundschau but that came to naught.

55. The year 1913 was nonetheless a good one for Kafka's output: The Judgment and The Stoker (the first chapter of what had become Amerika) were published.

56. Kafka became engaged to Felice in April 1914, but broke it off in July. The bonds of marriage appealed to him only in theory.

57. Then came the war. Kafka was spared military service as an "indispensable worker". But his brother-in-law fought, and what he told Kafka of trench warfare possibly inspired In the Penal Colony, which got Kafka back into a productive groove. , too, was drafted largely in 1914-15.

58. From this promising point in his authorial career, did Kafka power forward? He did not. By 1916 the writing had gone adrift. He took leave from his insurance job, to no great avail. He and Felice reconciled and were engaged again in July 1917.

59. At 4am on 11 August 1917 Kafka woke abruptly and started coughing blood. On 4 September doctors diagnosed tuberculosis.

60. Kafka observed his predicament carefully and to a friend he declared it to be fate: "... it is a just blow, which, incidentally, I do not feel at all as a blow, but as something quite sweet in comparison with the average course of the past years ... "

61. The diagnosis was by no means the end of Kafka's writing, yet from this moment until the end he carried a burden, like a hard shell on his back. Tuberculosis was a project to which he was condemned, and this confinement he experienced as being, somehow, set free.

62. In December 1917 he broke with Felice for the second and decisive time. She got over it, and married another man a year later.

63. Sickness and solitude could easily break a writer, but then Kafka didn't write for common-coin reasons: not to delight himself, or to make a living, or impress the opposite sex.

64. Why did he write? In the famous "Letter to his Father" - gouged out of himself during a supposed vacation in the mountain village of Schelesen in November 1919, but never sent - he dedicated his entire oeuvre to the man who sired him: "My writing was about you; in it, I merely lamented what I was unable to lament at your breast."

Horror, humour, the trappings of the workaday, the surrealism of dreams - all are present from the first sentence

65. Hermann Kafka, ex-serviceman and purveyor of fancy goods, was the strapping son of a butcher. Hermann and his wife Julie conceived five further children after Franz was born in 1883, though two died young, leaving Franz as the sole boy with three sisters. Hermann did no obvious wrong to anyone, and yet literary history holds a strong image of him as the great oppressor in Franz's life.

66. As Alan Bennett, author of the play Kafka's Dick, notes: "Hermann Kafka has had such a consistently bad press that it's hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy for him as for all the Parents of Art. They never get it right."

67. Kureishi, meanwhile, has ranked the "character" of Hermann as "probably one of [Kafka's] best literary creations or fictions".

68. The "Letter" is a flabbergasting list of grievances regarding the many and various "orbits of influence" Franz believed Hermann to have exerted against him, and his own "struggle" to resist.

69. And yet the "Letter" is also replete with notes of trapped, thwarted regard. Franz professes to have felt himself "a miserable specimen" next to his dad - "not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things".

70. The harder recriminatory strain, though, leads to invective: "You have put it into your head to live entirely off me. And there is the combat of vermin, which not only sting but, on top of it, suck your blood in order to sustain their own life. That's what the real professional soldier is; and that's what you are. You are unfit for life ... "

71. With the charge of parasitical behaviour, and the wince-making evocation of "vermin", we are carried back into the world of Metamorphosis.

72. In the story, Gregor, having gradually accepted his insect state as irreversible, then attempts to adapt the good efforts he customarily makes on behalf of his family, and - while he succumbs to a degree of self-pity - is rather ashamed of himself.

73. How do the Samsa family members adapt themselves to Gregor? The film-maker David Cronenberg, in his introduction to Susan Bernofsky's 2012 translation, puts it eloquently: "It never occurs to them that, for example, a giant beetle has eaten Gregor; they don't have the imagination." Rather, in a thoroughly bourgeois manner, the Samsas see Gregor's plight as "an unfortunate natural family occurrence with which one must reluctantly contend".

74. A great and terrible moment comes when Gregor's sister argues vehemently that the "monster" in Gregor's room cannot possibly be Gregor - that its pestilent presence in the Samsa home is proof of its inhumanity. Gregor remains sufficiently human to hear those words and to feel them, and his response provides the story's climax.

75. Some of the most distinguished writers to have written on Kafka have taken the view that Gregor is a suffering saint, and his family a collection of monsters.

76. "Gregor", Nabokov told his students with maximum moral punch, "is a human being in an insect's disguise; his family are insects disguised as people".

77. In the essay on Kafka in his Illuminations, Walter Benjamin observes how "the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites".

78. During the Marxist analysis of the "Notes on Kafka" in , Theodor Adorno comments feelingly on how often in this writer's work "the parasitic moment is displaced. Gregor Samsa, not his father, becomes the bug".

79. What Adorno doesn't address is the degree to which Kafka was displacing through fiction a sense of parasitism that he saw in his own reflection, the "miserable specimen" in the mirror.

80. The dating of the never-sent "Letter to his Father" is noteworthy, too - ie not long after Kafka had conducted another of his hopeless courtships, with a dressmaker from Prague named Julie Wohryzek. Kafka proposed to her in the summer of 1919. Hermann thought the match ill-advised, half-baked, beneath his son's station. Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn't happen, ostensibly because the couple couldn't find a place to live.

Statue of Franz Kafka in Prague. Photograph: Alamy

81. But the reason Kafka gives to Hermann is that he is "mentally incapable of marrying", marriage being "your [Hermann's] very own domain". In other words, Kafka felt Hermann had already deformed him irreparably in the sexual-romantic department.

82. There were two further notable romances in Kafka's life: a largely epistolary affair with the gifted translator Milena Jesenská-Pollak, who was unhappily married and therefore unattainable - unless, that is, both she and Kafka had been prepared to do something about it.

83. Then came Dora Diamant, 19 years old when Kafka met her at the seaside resort of Müritz in 1923. Within a few weeks the two were planning a future, contemplating a fresh start in Berlin, or Tel Aviv. In fact, the unassuming Dora became Kafka's companion unto death.

84. Philip Roth, who taught Kafka's works at the University of Pennsylvania (and who published The Breast in homage to Metamorphosis) once wrote a part-essay/part-imagining called "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting', or, Looking at Kafka" - in which a pretend-Kafka survives TB and moves to settle in Newark as a Hebrew schoolteacher (where he instructs a young "Philip Roth".) But if that was Roth's dream, it doesn't approximate to anything Kafka appeared to fancy for himself.

85. In a letter of July 1922, Kafka told Brod that he feared death in part because he had never lived, but that there was both an upside to that and a down: "What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be all the more terrible."

86. Kafka "toyed" with death to the extent that his great writings may be seen as a sort of highly imaginative rehearsal for the end of all things: little suicides, if you like. Metamorphosis is the most vivid - the saddest, most ghastly and unforgettable - of them all.

87. By the middle of 1924 his health was so poor he had to move back in with Hermann and Julie. He was suffering from agonising tubercular lesions, and the pain of swallowing left him ever more parched and starved. At noon on 3 June 1924, he died. He was 40.

88. The Scottish poet-translator Edwin Muir and his wife Willa gave English readers the Kafka they knew and loved for decades. Metamorphosis, though, was first rendered in English by Eugene Jolas across three issues of the journal Transitions from 1936 to 1938.

89. However, the first single-volume English translation dates from 1937 and was by AL Lloyd, the folk musicologist, singer, arranger and author.

90. Lately, through newer translations, English readers have got to know Kafka over again. It is widely felt that the Muirs were over-fussy, distorting what Stanley Corngold has called the "luminous plainness in Kafka's prose".

91. Great books are, of course, often translated into dramas, even though a literary masterpiece has, by definition, already found its perfect form. Steven Berkoff's movement-centred staging of Metamorphosis allowed a succession of gifted performers to contort their bodies into the mutated shape of Gregor Samsa: first, Berkoff himself in 1969, later, Brad Davis (1982), Tim Roth (1986), Roman Polanski (1988), and, on Broadway in 1989, Mikhail Baryshnikov.

92. One might wonder how Cronenberg would adapt Metamorphosis for cinema, except that his (1986) gives a decent idea. That film's protagonist does not wake to find himself an insect but, rather, mutates into a hybrid form over a period of weeks, during which - just as Nabokov says of Gregor - "his human impressions still mingle with his new insect instincts".

93. Kafka composed a notable number of stories from the perspective of creatures: "Investigations of a Dog", "A Report to an Academy", "Josephine the Singer", "The Burrow". It's as if he were saying: "You're in the body you're in, it makes the problems it makes, the soul cries out regardless."

94. My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents and Giant Bugs (2013) is a book for children in which Matthue Roth retells Metamorphosis, with drawings by Rohan Daniel Eason. It's a fine idea, playing to the seemingly irreducible anthropomorphic bent of literature aimed at kids.

95. But that's not to say Kafka's original can't work for younger readers. Last summer I had my old Penguin Kafka with me by the pool during a shared family holiday, and at one point a nine-year-old friend of my daughter picked up the book and began to question me about it. The next time I looked, the book was gone.

Kafka 'went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied'

Hanif Kureishi

96. Could there ever be another Kafka? If he were living today in our age of instant publishing, neglected book mountains and 24-hour multimedia (self-)promotion, do you suppose he could get a start in the writing game?

97. One would hope so, but it's not a business for overly retiring types, not ideal for one who reviewed his life's work and concluded that the bulk of it ought to be consumed by fire.

98. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine Kafka on Twitter, yet undeniably he had a gift for aphorism. "In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world" - that's 62 characters right there.

99. Social media could have fitted Kafka like a glove, or a skin, or a hard shell. His reticence and enigma might have made him, counterintuitively, a deeply marketable author.

100. Can we imagine, then, in 2015, that the greatest fabulist of our times might be a resolutely single if not "undateable" solitary, glumly tied to the parental home, trapped doing unglamorous office work, and tapping away after dark at literary efforts that he cannot ever quite complete or sign off? It doesn't seem quite plausible, or desirable, perhaps. But that, more or less, is the story of Kafka, and why we are able to treasure what is indeed the most famous, also greatest, short story in the history of literary fiction.

This is an edited version of Richard T Kelly's preface to the 2015 edition of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (translated by AL Lloyd), published by Faber Finds.

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Kafka's Metamorphosis: 100 thoughts for 100 years

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Kafka's tale of a man who wakes to find he has changed into a giant insect still has the power to shock and delight a century after it was first published. Many regard it as the greatest short story in all literary fiction

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150307-butterflies-caterpillars-colors-predators-prey-animals-science

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Why Do Butterflies Have Such Vibrant Colors and Patterns?

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Whether shiny gold or iridescent blue, colors help butterflies camouflage and communicate.

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All About Butterflies - Butterflies Facts & Information

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About Butterflies Butterflies have a four-stage life cycle, which includes egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa (chrysalis), and adult. The adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis after a metamorphosis process and is ready to mate and reproduce. Butterflies play a vital role in pollination and are essential for the surviv

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20210915-butterflies-the-ultimate-icon-of-our-fragility

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Butterflies: The ultimate icon of our fragility

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The butterfly has symbolised ephemerality – and rebirth – for millennia, writes Matthew Wilson.

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One morning Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself changed. To those around him he is dangerous, untouchable vermin. Worse than that, he is a burden. A word said, an action out of place, the opening of old wounds, none of which can be undone. Until now Gregor has woken every morning, quietly left to take the same train, and worked to pay off the family debt. But that world explodes on this morning of brutal metamorphosis.
In their first new commission since 2019, Frantic Assembly and Lemn Sissay OBE collaborate on this thrilling new adaptation of Metamorphosis. Combining the fluidity and lyricism of Lemn Sissay's adaptation and Frantic's uncompromising physicality, this promises to be an unmissable retelling of Franz Kafka's shocking tale of cruelty and kindness; a visceral and vital depiction of humans struggling within a system that crushes them under its heel.

Commissioned and Produced by Frantic Assembly, in a co-production with Theatre Royal Plymouth, Curve, MAST Mayflower Studios and Lyric Hammersmith Theatre.

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One morning Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself changed. To those around him he is dangerous, untouchable vermin. Worse than that, he is a burden. A word s

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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/metamorphosis

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The remarkable metamorphoses that affected what went in and out of these channels did little t o stabilize the debate.

What are the qualifying conditions governing these changes, these metamorphoses?

Even if it could do that, with extraordinary metamorphoses of staff and objectives, there is no evidence whatever that any local education authority would be prepared to absorb it.

There has been a series of metamorphoses.

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

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METAMORPHOSIS definition: 1. a complete change: 2. the process by which the young form of insects and some animals, such as.... Learn more.

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Learn how to recognize and describe the stages of a butterfly life cycle.
Butterfly Life Cycle Activity Instructions
Ages: 5-8 years
Time Required: 20-30 minutes

Materials

Activity Sheet (print or trace)

Scissors

Crayons and/or markers

Try This!

Step 1: Trace the shape and patterns from the activity sheet on a piece of paper or print the activity sheet.

Step 2: Cut out the traced shape, and flip it over to the blank side. Draw a butterfly pattern on this side (you can see an example on the activity sheet).

Step 3: Fold the butterfly in half along the long end to reveal the caterpillar and egg on one side, and the chrysalis on the other. You can color the caterpillar and then flip it and color the chrysalis.

Step 4: On the caterpillar side, if you fold the paper in half again on the short end, you will reveal the egg.

Step 5: When you unfold the paper, on the opposite side you will have the adult stage butterfly.

What's Going On?

Metamorphosis is a series of major changes in an animal's body form as it moves through its life cycle. Butterflies and moths undergo a complete metamorphosis, which means there are four separate stages in the life cycle (egg, larva, pupa, and adult). Each stage looks completely different and serves a different purpose in the life of the insect.

Egg Stage: Female Lepidoptera (the group butterflies and moths belong in) often require specific plants, called host plants, on which to lay eggs. A butterfly usually lays 200-500 eggs which vary in shape and size depending on the species. Most species hatch in four to five days, while others may take as long as three weeks.

Larva Stage: When the eggs hatch, tiny caterpillars begin feeding and growing. Its first meal is usually the eggshell, which provides it with important nutrients. Then it will begin eating the host plant. Almost all caterpillars eat leaves but some eat stems, roots, fruits, seeds, seed pods or flowers. They will eat only the host plant and will not move to any adjacent plant of a different species - even if it runs out of food. As they eat and their bodies expand, their skin (an exoskeleton with a limited stretching capacity) becomes tight and eventually splits and sheds, revealing new skin beneath. This is called molting and occurs several times as the larva grows.

Pupa Stage: When the caterpillar has grown enough, it finds a protected spot, molts for the last time, and forms an encasement in which they metamorphose. During this stage, most moth caterpillars spin a silken cocoon while most butterfly caterpillars form a chrysalis. The pupa undergoes tremendous change. The caterpillar releases digestive juices that break down most of its body into a "tissue cell soup" from which it develops four wings, new legs, new eyes, new mouthparts, and genitalia. When the insect emerges, its metamorphosis is complete.

Adult Stage: The fully developed adult splits the pupal case open, crawls out and hangs upside down to facilitate stretching and drying its wings. Its wings are inflated by pumping fluid into the wing veins. At this stage, the wings are very soft and wet and the butterfly/moth must remain suspended while waiting up to two hours for its wings to dry. Once the wings are stretched and dried, the adult flies off to feed, find a mate and begin the cycle again. The average adult lifespan is two weeks but ranges from several days to as long as 11 months.

Extension Activity

The best way to observe any of the butterfly life cycle stages in the wild is to find a host plant. Learn what are the host plants of some of the species of butterflies you can find around your home. You can visit iNaturalist.org to see what butterflies you might have nearby and the host plants. Try planting some of these host plant species in your yard or go out to a park and find them to try to find a butterfly in any of the life cycle stages. If you are lucky you might find some eggs hidden underneath leaves, or caterpillars eating leaves, or a butterfly feeding or laying its eggs.

Additional Resources

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Learn how to recognize and describe the stages of a butterfly life cycle. Butterfly Life Cycle Activity Instructions Ages: 5-8 years Time Required: 20-30 minutes Materials Activity Sheet (print or trace) Scissors Crayons and/or markers Try This! Step 1: Trace the shape and patte

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Butterflies are perhaps most famous for the process by which a plump little caterpillar transforms into a winged work of art. But they're not unique in going through this drastic life change, called complete metamorphosis, or holometabolism.

A whopping 75 percent of known insects-among them bees, beetles, flies, and moths-develop in four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Most striking about complete metamorphosis is how different the larva looks and behaves from the adult. ( Watch a time-lapse video of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.)

Other species, such as grasshoppers and dragonflies, experience incomplete, or simple, metamorphosis, which involves three life stages-egg, larva or nymph, and adult or imago. The nymphs look like tiny adults, eating and shedding their skins until they reach adulthood.

Eggs and larvae

Nearly all insects start out as eggs and then hatch into larvae. Caterpillars are a type of larvae that many people are familiar with, but others resemble worms or tiny insects, as occurs in ladybugs (aka ladybirds).

A larva's main job is to grow and molt, a process triggered by hormones. Each stage of molting is called an instar, and some insects molt up to five times before moving onto the next stage. ( Read about a venomous caterpillar with a toxic "toupee.")

Larvae eat as if there's no tomorrow because, in a way, there isn't. Metamorphosis changes almost everything.

In insects that undergo incomplete metamorphosis, the larvae are called nymphs. Many, such as grasshoppers, look and behave much like tiny versions of the adult insects. Others, such as leafhoppers, look a bit different from adults, with small wing buds. But these insects eat the same things as adults and move the same way, going through multiple molts until they mature. Cicadas can take 17 years to metamorphose into adulthood, spending most of that time underground.

Pupation

After shedding their final instar, insects that experience complete metamorphosis become pupae. In some cases, pupae enclose themselves inside a hard cocoon, or chrysalis, which butterflies and moths make from their own silk. Once complete, they'll hang upside down from a perch on a silken thread.

Others deploy different techniques. After a worm-like larval stage of nearly two years, Hercules beetles of the American tropics store up enough feces to form sturdy cocoons.

It's odd that these giant beetles make a cocoon at all, explains Richard Jones, an author and entomologist in the U.K not affiliated with a university or organization.

"Most beetles do not make a pupal chamber or cocoon," Jones says. "They simply shimmy out of their last larval skin and pupate. Ladybirds do this attached to a leaf"-no sleeping bag required.

Other beetles, such as the eastern firefly of the United States, nestle in soil.

Some caddisflies build cases out of rocks and shells from their native rivers and streams and pupate inside after sealing them up. Honeybee larvae resemble white grubs, pupating inside sealed cells within the honeycomb.

Adulthood

After emerging from its chrysalis, a newly minted butterfly may look wilted-its wings are wet and need a couple of hours to expand before taking flight. Hercules beetles emerge with their spectacular horns, and caddisflies cut their way out of their found creations and swim to the surface for one final molt before flying off.

Generally, adult insects don't live long-dragonflies, for example, live only about a month, but before that, they're in their larval state for around three years.

Many insects-such as fireflies and crane flies-don't eat at all during their short adulthood, spending their precious time looking for mates. The luna moth doesn't even have a mouth or digestive system.

That doesn't mean adult insects are mere shadows of their former selves. In 2008, researchers from Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., taught caterpillars of the tobacco hornworm moth to dislike-and avoid-a particular scent. As butterflies, they avoided the odor as well-suggesting that the adults can remember experiences from their time as caterpillars.

Why such an elaborate life cycle?

Metamorphosis is ultimately a successful strategy because juveniles and adults eat different things. Caterpillars munch nutrient-rich leaves to enable all that developmental change, and butterflies just need to sip nectar (essentially sugary water).

For species with such different developmental forms, "you've suddenly created a competitive-free space," says Katy Prudic, an entomologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Parents and offspring aren't competing for resources, allowing both life stages to develop independently. ( Read about a butterfly that can fly 2,500 miles.)

"It's this wonderful process of really reinventing yourself," Prudic adds. "When insects metamorphose, they're able to explore and go places that they couldn't as maggots, caterpillars, and grubs."

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Butterflies are perhaps most famous for the process by which a plump little caterpillar transforms into a winged work of art. But they're not unique in going through this drastic life change, called complete metamorphosis, or holometabolism. A whopping 75 percent of known insects-among them bees, beetles, flies, and moths-develop in four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

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transformation definition: 1. a complete change in the appearance or character of something or someone, especially so that.... Learn more.

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In sports and action photography, sometimes freezing the action isn't the best way to capture it. When we think of sports photography, the first thing priority seems to be: Stop the action. Fast shutter speeds are action photography settings freeze subjects in mid-motion, but they're not always the best way to capture the feel of the action. In fact, you may want to add motion blur to your photography to enhance the action.

You can add a dynamic element to your fast-moving subject matter by using slow shutter speeds and moving the camera with the subject. It's called panning. It's tricky but with practice can be a great way to capture the flavor of the action. Here's how it works.

Photo by lalo Hernandez on Unsplash

What is Motion Blur?

Motion blur is a photographic technique that involves using a slow shutter speed to allow moving subjects to blur through the frame. You can blur motion significantly with a faster-moving subject and a slower shutter speed, or just slightly with a small amount of movement during a slightly faster shutter speed.

Motion blur intentionally captures blurred images to convey motion. It mimics how the human eye registers fast movement as an unfocused, quickly passing object. It is so appealing and eye-catching that it has developed into a separate photography genre (i.e., motion blur photography).

To achieve the motion blur effect, either the camera or the subject needs to be in motion while taking the picture. If the camera is stationary and the subject is moving (e.g., a cyclist), the motion blur effect will appear on the subject. But if the camera follows the moving subject (i.e., panning), the motion blur effect will appear in the background. You can also achieve this effect by taking photographs from a moving vehicle, in which case the motion blur will be in the foreground.

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Tips for Capturing Motion Blur in Photography

Photographers can capture motion blur in a variety of ways. You can create blur with the motion of the subject or with the motion of the camera. Each method creates a different look and has its own specific uses. With either technique, keep track of the exposure of your image, and make adjustments to ISO or aperture to keep from overexposing your image with too much light.

Adjust Shutter Speed

When creating motion blur by slowing the shutter speed, you will need to adjust the speed depending on how fast your subject is moving. Photographers may find it helps to shoot in shutter priority mode for making setting adjustments easily.

Fast-Moving Subject

For example, a faster moving subject, like an action or sports photography subject, will appear as a blur at a much faster shutter speed. When your subject moves quickly enough, you can get a blur at shutter speeds like 1/200, 1/125, 1/100, or 1/60.

Slower Subject

If your subject is moving much slower, like a person walking or a slow-moving stream, you'll need a much slower shutter speed to capture the motion as a blur. In that case, you'll want slow shutter speeds closer to half a second, a full second, or even longer.

Move the Camera

You can also create motion blur photography by moving the camera when the shutter is open. For example, you can add a motion blur effect by zooming in or out while the shutter is open. With this technique, the camera causes the blur rather than the subject. Make sure to use a tripod to help avoid camera shake.

Panning

Another option to capture motion blur is a technique called panning, which works when the photographer moves the camera from one side to the other with the shutter open. Panning generally results in a still subject and a background blur.

Photo by Kinson Leung on Unsplash

How do Execute Panning Photography?

To execute this technique, move your camera as fluidly and steadily as possible, parallel with the movement of your subject. In layman's terms: Follow your subject like a steady hawk.

Using a tripod with a panning head helps achieve this effect, but is not entirely necessary. An example of an appropriate tripod for panning would be the Benro BV10 Video Tripod.

Camera Settings

Your camera should be set to shutter priority or manual mode with a shutter speed between 1/15 and 1/60 sec, depending upon the speed of your subject. You may need to shoot a few test shots to determine your shutter speed. Using a slower shutter speed will increase blur; while a faster shutter speed will reduce blur. The key is to find the shutter setting that allows your subject to appear sharp, but the background to appear blurred.

If your shutter speed is too slow, too much of your image will be blurred.

If you're shutter speed is too fast, not enough of your background will be blurred.

Find what works best for your situation and remember to keep your movement as parallel to the action as possible. This is where a tripod comes in handy!

Autofocus should be set to continuous (Nikon) or Al-Servo (Canon) in order to maintain proper focus of your moving target; your center autofocus point should be selected. This allows your camera to focus quickly on your moving subject. Continuous shooting mode (or burst mode) should also be selected to ensure you have at least one shot where your subject is perpendicular to your camera-that's usually the sweet spot for these types of images.

Lenses

Using a telephoto lens may require a faster shutter speed since camera shake is the main culprit of out-of-focus panned images. A wide-angle lens creates less camera shake and allows longer shutter speeds, but will require more movement from the photographer in order to achieve the look of a panned image.

Technique

If you are not using a tripod, you basically become the tripod. Keep your feet firmly planted on the ground, being sure to only twist your torso in the same direction as the moment, while following your subject in the viewfinder. Hold down the shutter release button to fire a rapid succession of shots. Follow through after you have completed shooting to ensure smooth lines of action.

Don't be discouraged if you have to shoot 10 or more shots before one decent image arises. Once you become comfortable panning under natural light conditions, you can add fill flash to create different effects. Flash is also necessary for action shots taken in low-low conditions or at night.

Panning does not work if your subject is moving toward or away from you. Your subject has to be moving across your field of view in order to show any kind of movement.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

How to Create Blur in Post-Production?

If you are curious about motion blur photography, you can start by creating motion blur in post-production and observe the effect. Most photo editors provide tools for adding different types of blur, including motion blur. You can apply blur on the entire image, a selection, or a designated area.

Motion blur filters are non-destructive and allow you to select the part of the image where you want to apply the effect. They are designed to simulate the movement of the subject. Therefore, you should select the subject as accurately as possible. You also control the direction of the motion and the intensity of the effect.

When working on small areas, you can use blur brushes. They are fully customizable and let you adjust just a few pixels at a time.

What's the Best Shutter Speed for Motion Blur Photography?

The best shutter speed for motion blur photography depends on how fast the camera or subject moves. For example, if you photograph a river, you need a shutter speed of 1 second to capture motion blur. But if you photograph a person walking by, a shutter speed of 1/200 th of a second will be enough. The hummingbird's wings may appear blurred even at the shutter speed of 1/500 th of a second.

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How to Capture Motion Blur in Photography - 42West

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In sports and action photography, sometimes freezing the action isn't the best way to capture it. When we think of sports photography, the first thing priority seems to be: Stop the action. Fast shutter speeds are action photography settings freeze subjects in mid-motion, but they're not always the best way to capture the feel of the action.

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If you've ever taken a look at our microscopic images of seeds, you already know just how breathtaking tiny parts of nature can be. Especially when they're placed under a microscope. Chris Perani has used his photography skills to create microscopic images of butterfly wings that are absolutely stunning.

To create these works of art, Chris has an almost scientific approach to the process. First, he photographs the wings using a 10x microscope objective attached to 200mm lens. Next, he uses a focus rail to achieve a focused image on the wings, which can be as small as 8 millimeters. He collects 350 exposures and then composites them together. This process is repeated six times to creates six different "puzzle pieces" that are then combined to create the final result.

Though this process is complex, it creates an image that is simply incredible.

Chris mentions that he never thought that he'd find himself in the position of running around with a net, desperately trying to catch butterflies and dragonflies. But that was exactly how this whole project came about two years ago at a local golf course.

Living north of San Francisco, often times he takes landscape photographs of waterfalls, giant redwoods, and green hillsides. However, when fall rolls around, Chris finds himself on the lookout for new, vibrant subjects.

One summer, Chris decided to challenge himself and invest in a macro lens. This purchase ended up spurring into a whole new hobby: extreme macro photography. He started to see the beauty in even the tiniest pieces of nature and loved the process of discovering all the little textural details of water, leaves, and spider webs. What came next was the purchase of the butterfly net.

He realized that if he was able to capture small insects and place them in studio lighting, he'd be able to get highly focused, well-lit images, as compared to photographing nature that was constantly moving.

When he was researching a process for photographing his tiny subjects, Chris came across Levon Biss' Microsculpture videos for shooting insects with microscopic objectives. He quickly came up with a similar setup and got to work.

After dealing with the frustration of out-of-focus images, Chris developed his own technique, the one initially described at the introduction of this article.

Related Post: Sand Magnified

Now that he has his own process, Chris has really taken a dedication to this type of photography, calling this latest project "Butterfly Wings".

Check out more of Chris' work below!

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Microscopic Images Of Butterfly Wings * Insteading

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If you've ever taken a look at our microscopic images of seeds, you already know just how breathtaking tiny parts of nature can be. Especially when they're placed under a microscope. Chris Perani has used his photography skills to create microscopic images of butterfly wings that are absolutely stunning.

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https://medium.com/book-bites/what-butterflies-teach-us-about-personal-change-1a6e15b3121

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What Butterflies Teach Us about Personal Change

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The following is adapted from The Empowerment Paradox, by Ben Woodward.

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https://archive.dpa-etsam.com/projects/metamorphosis

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The nostalgia of the rural world invades us by evoking its memory, however the resources offered by the reality of this environment are incompatible with the demographic concentration that the current way of life requires.
La Fregeneda, west of the province of Salamanca, is one of these forgotten territories, where the demographic decline has left just 300 inhabitants. The average age of the population amounts to 60 years, derived from the lack of means, among others, training and employment that allows the rural repopulation of new generations. Even for the inhabitants of the municipality itself, La Fregeneda falls short of a quality urban scene, with few neighborhood congregation spaces interrupted by the CL-517 highway. ‘Metamorphosis’ was born under the concept of educating the people and creating a cultural attraction with the purpose of reactivating the municipality. The teaching and work environment have shown that the possibilities provided by technology make face-to-face work a largely dispensable notion. This change of perspective in the training field turns the center’s program into a catalog of didactic and productive spaces through telematic means. The architectural object is based on an accumulation of strata that respond to different variables. The insertion in the terrain begins with the transfer of the connection highway from the municipality to a peripheral road, thus freeing the central core. This fact allows the vegetation to perforate the main road and originate an operation of ground carving that sews up the urban voids, fading the existing terrain unevenness and creating a concatenation of green public spaces. The pedestrian route culminates in the project, which poses a light metal structure where a series of cellular polycarbonate capsules that harbor the program are attached, connected by tramex platforms, along with opaque elements intended for vertical connections and installations of the center. The system of capsules and mobile platforms originates a way of understanding space as a necessarily mutable concept, where needs are transformed according to the moment and the elements that make up the project adapt to this changing nature. The building skin expands outside the limits of the construction, allowing vegetation to colonize the interior and be part of the architectural space. The envelope is formed by a transparent efte membrane stretched by means of a metal mesh attached to a metal support structure. Pneumatic elements are adhered to this plastic material, which expand or contract in relation to the solar radiation of each area, thus continuing with the changing condition of the system used. A permeability is also achieved through accesses in the free ground floor and through light platforms that extend to the outside of the membrane. The outcome is a living organism that questions the perpetual character of architecture, but reactivates the permanent condition for which the town was created, transforming rural memory into a viable reality.

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Have you ever wondered how butterflies actually fly?

Well, wonder no more because a new study has given us the answer.

Due to butterflies wings being so big and their bodies so small, it has been a bit confusing for researchers to previously understand how the insects they can fly so well.

But a new study has shown that a butterfly cups and claps its wings together to make enough power to lift off.

Butterflies have developed this method of flying to protect themselves from predators, so they can fly away quicker.

Christoffer Johansson

Scientists in Sweden used a wind tunnel and high-speed cameras recording slow-motion movements of butterflies to see how their wings work.

The research showed that the insects form a pocket shape and then clap. The air pocket between the wings creates more power when the wings collapse.

When this happens it creates a sort of jet which makes the power behind the wings stronger.

The team also created mechanical clappers that mirrored butterfly wings. This basically means they made their own wings!

One set was stiff and the other more flexible.

They tested the clappers in the wind tunnel and found that the more flexible wings made more power from the clap.

The researchers believe the findings show that the cupped, clapping action is something that the butterflies have evolved to stay alive!

Per Henningsson

Dr. Henningsson, who was part of the research team, also said that butterflies don't flap their wings to fly. They do however flap their wings together before they fly to create power.

Researchers think that what is now known about butterfly flight could help in other areas.

Some drones and underwater vehicles already work in a way that is like butterfly wings but the researchers think this can now be improved.

Dr Henningsson added: "We're suggesting that the people that are working on these designs, they should look into this cup-shape behaviour, since there are lots of efficiency and effectiveness to be gained from it. It's certainly something that would be worthwhile looking into."

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Butterflies: Scientists explain how they fly! - CBBC Newsround

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Have you ever wondered how butterflies actually fly? Well, wonder no more because a new study has given us the answer. Due to butterflies wings being so big and their bodies so small, it has been a bit confusing for researchers to previously understand how the insects they can fly so well.

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Sir David Attenborough backs world’s biggest butterfly count

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Nature offers “precious breathing space”, he says, as he launches the world’s biggest butterfly survey.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-nnc6dWUJg

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Monarch Butterfly - Wonders of Life - Episode 5 Preview - BBC

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Verify you are human by completing the action below.

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David Attenborough: Butterfly's "Extraordinary Metamorphosis" | Micro Monsters | Nature Bites

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Butterfly wings come in an amazing assortment of colors and patterns. Aside from being beautiful, they also serve a purpose. They can help butterflies find a mate, blend in with their surroundings, or absorb heat. In toxic species, bright colors warn predators to stay away. Read on to learn what makes these colors and what genes have to do with it.

Butterfly wings are covered in tiny scales, each with a specific shape and color.

The colors in butterfly wings can come from either colored pigments or structural color. Or even a combination of the two.

Colored pigments work the way you're probably used to thinking about. Like the pigments in crayons or colored pencils, the molecules themselves have a certain color. Or rather they absorb most colors of light but reflect others, and we perceive the reflected light as color. The table below lists some of the common pigment types that butterflies make. In varying amounts or densities, each of these pigment types can make colors that are more or less intense.

Blues come from structural pigments. The molecules themselves are black, not blue. But their shape at the microscopic level makes them reflect blue light. This gives them an iridescent or metallic quality. Depending on the angle and intensity of the light, they can look black or bright blue. White is another structural color in butterflies. Usually it comes from microscopic air bubbles that reflect light. Structural color is also common in bird feathers.

All these pigments and structures are built by proteins. Groups of proteins work like assembly lines, turning raw materials into richly colored molecules. The instructions for making the proteins are coded in genes. Differences in genes can cause differences in proteins. And these differences can affect the qualities of a pigment that the protein helps to build, like its color or intensity.

Common Pigment Types in Butterfly Wings

Pigment Type

Color(s)

More Information

Melanin

grey, black, brown

These pigments are common in many animals, where they color hair, fur, feathers, and skin. In butterflies, they can help absorb heat from sunlight.

Ommachrome

red, orange, tan

These pigments are common in insects. Outside of butterflies, they usually color eyes.

Papiliochrome

yellow, creme

Some of these pigments also make patterns in the ultraviolet light range. These patterns are visible to butterflies but not to humans.

Pterin

orange

Butterflies in the Pierid family use these pigments, rather than ommachromes, to make oranges.

Some genes act like sort of paintbrushes to apply colors to different parts of the wing.

Within each butterfly family (there are 3 major ones), all the species use the same basic set of genes to build pigments. Another set of genes controls where these pigment-making assembly lines (or pathways) are active. They can switch entire pathways on or off. Different alleles of these "control genes" can cause pigments to be made in different places on the wing.

Small changes to when and where these control genes are active can produce dramatic differences. In fact, the broad diversity in butterfly wing colors and patterns comes from differences in a surprisingly small number of genes.

Variations in just a handful of genes can produce varied wing patterns, like the ones in these butterflies from the Heliconius genus. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Source: Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341

A Few Genes With Big Effects

The Nymphalid butterfly family is known for its bright colors and diverse patterns. Scientists studying these species have found that much of their diversity comes from differences in just four genes.

Optix is known for producing large spots of colors and long, thin ray patterns. This gene works like a control switch to affect multiple pigment production pathways at once. In places where optix is active, ommachrome (red, orange, and tan) production is switched on and melanin production (black and grey) is switched off. In some species, optix is also involved in structural blue color, which is built from black melanin pigments.

Cortex affects black pigment patterns in some species, and white and yellow in others. It may work by affecting how quickly the cells that make scales mature. Black scales usually mature more slowly than others.

Aristaless affects switching between yellow and white patterns. It often produces bands on the forewings and hindwings, or spots on the bottom edge of the hindwing.

WntA fine-tunes the size and shape of spots and stripes that are laid down by optix and cortex.

Some butterfly species are known for their brilliant eyespots. These colorful targets can either scare predators or draw their attention away from vital organs. Two genes, spalt and distalless, are active in the centers of many eyespots.

Other butterfly families use different sets of control genes-but in a similar way. Genes like the ones described here allow for great flexibility and rapid shifts within species. For its patterns to shift, a population doesn't need new color-building or pattern-making genes to arise from scratch. Instead, small changes to existing genes can make new patterns with nearly endless variations.

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Butterfly wings come in an amazing assortment of colors and patterns. Aside from being beautiful, they also serve a purpose. They can help butterflies find a mate, blend in with their surroundings, or absorb heat. In toxic species, bright colors warn predators to stay away.

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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) ⭐ 8.0 | Biography, Drama

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The Diving bell and the Butterfly - fantasy sequence

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The Diving bell and the Butterfly - fantasy sequence

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k8j3DO7L_E

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Random Movie Scenes - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)

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This fabric helps you stay warm when it's cold and stay cool when it's warm

Faye Levine, University of Maryland

We're used to piling on the layers to warm ourselves up, but what about wearing clothes to cool us down? A temperature sensitive fabric adjusts to how hot, cold or sweaty the wearer is to help them reach the perfect temperature.

The textile is made from heat-sensitive yarn with fibres that expand or contract in response to heat and humidity. When the yarn is hot or wet, it collapses into a tight bundle, effectively opening gaps in the cloth to enable heat loss. The opposite effect occurs when the textile is cold or dry: the fibres expand, reducing gaps to prevent heat escaping.

This acts as a heat regulating-switch, which automatically turns on or off depending on your level of thermal discomfort, says YuHuang Wang at the University of Maryland.

One of the ways the human body absorbs and loses heat is by infrared radiation. At room temperature, around 40 per cent of heat transfer happens this way.

Most fabrics trap infrared radiation to keep us warm, but can't vary by how much they do so. This is also true of moisture-wicking fabrics that are often used by people when they exercise to help regulate their temperature. Wang's team's fabric can vary the amount of infrared radiated by 35 per cent as the humidity of the underlying skin changes.

It can be knitted, dyed and washed like other sportswear fabrics. Wang hopes that in the near future his team can partner with a manufacturer to produce clothing using the fabric.

Topics:

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Heat-sensitive fabric cools you on hot days and warms you in the cold

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A temperature sensitive fabric adjusts to how hot, cold or sweaty the wearer is to help them reach the perfect temperature

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Metamorphosis and the Butterfly Effect

This concept explores how metamorphosis and the butterfly effect can shape powerful fashion through textiles and garment construction. Metamorphosis is the process of transformation: butterflies evolve four times from an egg to a larva (caterpillar) before turning into a chrysalis and finally a Butterfly. This radical evolution from a simple form to a beautifully intricate one could be applied to fashion through pattern-making to silhouettes and textiles. Metamorphosis can be a motif to reflect how society, culture and creative designers are constantly growing and changing.

I aim to collaborate with conservationists to research biodegradable fabrics, promoting sustainability and protecting natural habitats. My vision includes creating bio-textiles that reflect the intricate structure of butterfly wings, free from synthetic dyes, to reduce toxic pollution from textile production.

Transformative garment construction

To showcase the abrupt shift from a caterpillar to a Cocoon and then a butterfly I will explore simple, collapsible silhouettes and different types of fastenings with layered pieces that unfold into something complex and beautiful to reveal this sense of growth. The progressive anatomy of the butterfly will inform this experimentation of structure to a garment and create functionality for the wearer by analysing its flight mechanisms such as, air pockets between the wings aiding their flight.

Textile Exploration

Zooming in, I will investigate the kaleidoscopic structure of a butterfly’s wing through textiles.  Butterflies’ wings are transparent and are covered with tiny scales that reflect light in radiant colours. These complex colourful patterns are used to attract but contrastingly also to deflect predators. This multicoloured composition will inspire my textile design through dye, print, stitch and manipulation.  These methods will not only allow the wearer to blend with their environment and stand out from it but also communicate their identity through colour and pattern.

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187734352100052X

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The migration-sustainability paradox: transformations in mobile worlds

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Migration represents a major transformation of the lives of those involved and has been transformative of societies and economies globally. Yet models...

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collapse of societies

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Adapt, Die, or Migrate: Five Lessons on Personal Adaptation | Department of Applied Mathematics | University of Washington

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9QOcVt1Hc

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During the 1930s, many measures were undertaken to relieve the direct impacts of droughts and to reduce the region's vulnerability to the dry conditions. Many of these measures were initiated by the federal government, a relatively new practice. Before the 1930s drought, federal aid had generally been withheld in emergency situations in favor of individual and self-reliant approaches. This began to change with the development of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and the 1933 inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The depression helped "soften deep-rooted, hard-line attitudes of free enterprise, individualism, and the passive role of the government", thus paving the way for Roosevelt's New Deal programs, which in turn provided a framework for drought relief programs for the Great Plains (Warrick, 1980).

Warrick et al. (1975) describe these drought relief programs, which are credited with saving many livelihoods throughout the drought periods. The programs had a variety of goals, all of which were aimed at the reduction of drought impacts and vulnerability:

Providing emergency supplies, cash, and livestock feed and transport to maintain the basic functioning of livelihoods and farms/ranches.

Establishing health care facilities and supplies to meet emergency medical needs.

Establishing government-based markets for farm goods, higher tariffs, and loan funds for farm market maintenance and business rehabilitation.

Providing the supplies, technology, and technical advice necessary to research, implement, and promote appropriate land management strategies.

Removing dead trees and planting new trees to alleviate psychological stress and create shelter belts.

President Roosevelt visiting a farmer who received a drought relief grant, Mandan, North Dakota, 1936. Photo by Arthur Rothstein.(Image: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa8b28231 DLC)

As important as these programs may have been, the survival of a majority of the families and enterprises undoubtedly rested solely with their perseverance and integrity. Whether they stayed or moved into the drought regions or migrated to other areas in hopes of a better life, families encountered new hardships and obstacles that would require ingenuity, resilience, and humility.

Those who remained in the drought regions were forced to endure severe dust storms and their health effects, diminished incomes, animal infestations, and the physical and emotional stress over their uncertain futures. Humor helped; tales about birds flying backward to keep from getting sand in their eyes, housewives scouring pots and pans by holding them up to keyholes for a sandblasting, and children who had never seen rain were among the favorite stories of Dust Bowl inhabitants. In the end, it was a combination of willpower, stamina, humor, pride, and, above all, optimism that enabled many to survive the Dust Bowl. These qualities are succinctly expressed in the comments of one contemporary Kansan: "We have faith in the future. We are here to stay" (quoted in Hurt, 1981).

The 1930s drought and its associated impacts finally began to abate during spring 1938. By 1941, most areas of the country were receiving near-normal rainfalls. These rains, along with the outbreak of World War II, alleviated many of the domestic economic problems associated with the 1930s. In fact, the new production demands and positive climatic conditions brought the United States into a rapid economic boom.

Even though short-term conditions seemed to be relatively stable, this production growth had some drawbacks. One drawback (described by Hurt, 1981) was that the start of World War II shifted remaining funds and priorities away from drought-related programs. Men were taken off work programs to enter the armed forces and to produce for the war effort. Moreover, items such as gasoline and replacement parts were redirected from federal drought and conservation programs to the war efforts. This meant that conservation programs and research were significantly reduced during this period. Another drawback was that with the return of the rains, many people soon forgot about conservation programs and measures implemented during the 1930s droughts. This led to a return to some of the inappropriate farming and grazing practices that made many regions so vulnerable to drought in the 1930s.

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The Dust Bowl | National Drought Mitigation Center

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During the 1930s, many measures were undertaken to relieve the direct impacts of droughts and to reduce the region's vulnerability to the dry conditions. Many of these measures were initiated by the federal government, a relatively new practice. Before the 1930s drought, federal aid had generally been withheld in emergency situations in favor of individual and self-reliant approaches.

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Flour Sack Clothes - Wessels Living History Farm

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We like to have a lot of fun the farm. During Wessels’ events you can be sure there are activities for the whole family surrounding the featured activities of the event. Occasionally we hold an adults-only event during evening hours. Event listings are updated here, on our FB page and often found in Nebraska Life & Nebraska Traveler magazines, York Chamber Chats, YCDC Community Calendar and local news sources.

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Make Do: Feed-Sack Fashion in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

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In the early twentieth century, staples, such as flour and livestock feed, were sold in cloth bags. As American families entered the 1930s, reusing these fabrics became more popular, and bags became more colorful.

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https://helensclosetpatterns.com/blogs/helens-closet/fashion-history-feed-sack-fashion

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Fashion History: The Flour Sack Dress %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

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Fashion history and sewing are very closely related, and often overlap in very interesting ways. Today is all about the flour sack dress.

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Common Threads: How Depression-Era Women Turned Feed Sacks into Fashion | The Saturday Evening Post

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When fabrics and cash were scarce, rural housewives used flour and grain sacks to make everything from curtains to dresses.

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https://study.com/academy/lesson/textile-strike-of-1934.html#:~:text=By%20the%20time%20of%20the,work%20harder%20and%20longer%20hours.

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Bonnie and Clyde: Infamous Outlaws and Their Enduring Legend

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Discover who Bonnie and Clyde were, their infamous relationship, and why the romanticized outlaws gained fans after the Great Depression.

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A Fashion Collection Featuring Furniture That Converts Into Clothing

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“Afterwords” is the autumn/winter 2000 womenswear collection by fashion designer Hussein Chalayan. Pieces of furniture onstage during a fashion show

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As part of the "six weeks of style" celebration to recognize the Foundation for the National Archives' partnership with DC Fashion Week, we are showcasing fashion-related records from our holdings. This week's fashion theme is Women and the War: 1940s Fashion.

During World War II, the United States experienced a drastic-albeit temporary- transformation in gender roles. Nearly one in every three American men left home to serve in the military between 1941 and 1945, so women increasingly began to take up civilian jobs to carry on the work of their male counterparts.

These women not only continued to manage the households, but they also worked in factories, laboratories, power plants, government organizations, and military auxiliaries. The war completely changed the responsibility of women in the workforce during these years-and subsequently transformed how they dressed.

The general style adopted by women in the 1940s greatly resembled U.S. military uniforms. The cut and color of clothes worn on the home front often mirrored what was worn by soldiers fighting in the European and Pacific theaters. Blouses and jackets became increasingly militarized and masculine with shoulder pads, and hats were also styled similarly to the U.S. Army berets.

Fun fact: the company that produced this advertisement,Higgins Industries, is most famous for its production of the Higgins boat, an amphibious landing craft that was used extensively in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Because women were now taking on more labor-intensive tasks like driving trucks, flying military aircraft, and working in shipyards, safety and practicality took precedence over glamour and femininity. The popularization of "Rosie the Riveter" meant that slacks and headscarves were considered stylish.

Working women traded in their high-heeled shoes and silk pants for khaki jackets and blue jeans. They also began wearing wraparound dresses with fewer adornments and pinned their hair back to avoid getting it caught in the machinery.

Pragmatism aside, women's clothing also needed to adapt to the rationing of certain materials for military purposes. Wool and silk were in high demand for uniforms and parachutes; most civilians wore clothes made from rayon or viscose instead.

To conserve fabric, dressmakers and manufacturers began designing shorter skirts and slimmer silhouettes. Nylon was only available for civilian use in restricted quantities, so stockings soon disappeared and women went barelegged.

By the end of the war, over 6 million American women had joined the workforce, and nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home. Although many were ultimately replaced by men once they returned from war, it is remarkable what women accomplished on a national scale in just four short years.

These women demonstrated patriotism, skill, and determination, making an undeniable impact on the workplace-and the fashion world.

Examine more "signature styles" and history-making signatures in our current exhibition, "Making Their Mark: Stories Through Signatures," in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.

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Shorter Skirts and Shoulder Pads: How World War II Changed Women's Fashion

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Today's post comes from Marisa Hawley, intern in the National Archives Strategy and Communications office. As part of the "six weeks of style" celebration to recognize the Foundation fo...

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The Mexican Repatriation was the repatriation, deportation, and expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the United States during the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939.[1][2][3] Estimates of how many were repatriated, deported, or expelled range from 300,000 to 2 million (of which 40–60% were citizens of the United States, overwhelmingly children).[4]: fn 20 [5][6]: 330 [7][8]: xiii [6]: 150

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Archive footage of Mexico City in the 1940s, Mexico home movie film

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From 1968 to 1982, more than 1,200 people disappeared without a trace during Mexico's "Dirty War." Outside the country, the conflict remains less well known than the Cold War repression seen elsewhere in Latin America. But Mexico's conflict was equally brutal, with the army fighting left-wing insurgents in rural areas, while the forces of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party sought to subdue dissent in the cities through arrests, torture, and killings.

Today, the Dirty War remains a contested part of Mexico's recent history that some would prefer to forget-given the continued influence of the Mexican armed forces, and of a new generation of Institutional Revolutionary Party leaders. But now a ruling from the country's Supreme Court of Justice has given an important boost to those who want a proper accounting for the conflict, and its violence.

As elsewhere in Latin America, this effort has included victims' families, who have tried to find out what happened to their loved ones. In Mexico, they have largely been met with denials; these denials have been made easier by the fact that there were at the time of the crimes systematic attempts to erase any record that the disappeared person ever existed, by destroying official records such as birth certificates and school certificates.

During the years of the conflict, some local prosecutors did launch some investigations into reported disappearances. But all ended without any charges being filed, and with the investigative files and even the names of the victims being kept secret by the federal prosecutor's office, the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR).

As part of this effort, a request was filed under Mexico's progressive access to information law, seeking the most basic data-the names of all those listed as disappeared by the government. This effort was initially blocked by the PGR, which refused to release the relevant 135 files, a decision that was then supported by the National Institute of Access to Information and Persona Data, which oversees the application of the access to information law.

The Open Society Justice Initiative, along with Litiga OLE, a local legal group focused on human rights litigation, then filed a constitutional challenge to this decision with the Supreme Court (an amparo) on the grounds that the access to information law, which came into force in 2003, includes a "human rights override," which says government agencies cannot withhold information related to investigations of human rights abuses or crimes against humanity. The amparo also cited the collective aspect of the right to truth, the right to the recognition of legal personality, and the right to a name for the victims, which must be proportionally weighed in cases on forced disappearances.

The result was a ruling of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice on February 1 that granted the petitioners' right to gain access to the names, on the grounds that the information requested cannot be kept classified when it refers to crimes constituting grave human rights violations, which include forced disappearances. This court ordered the National Institute of Access to Information and Persona Data to issue a new resolution and to order the PGR to disclose the requested information to the claimant, and allowed the claimant to make those names public.

The decision was immediately welcomed by the Mexican chapter of HIJOS, a group which campaigns for the victims of forced disappearances across Latin America, and which hailed this important step forwards in the effort to ensure that what happened during the Dirty War is never forgotten.

But this ruling has implications that go beyond Mexico. Other countries in Latin America have similarly fraught political struggles over the question of accountability for grave crimes. Some also have similar but as yet untested "human rights override" provisions in relatively new access to information laws (most were passed in response to earlier government failures to investigate abuses committed in the name of national security in the 1970s and '80s).

The ruling from Mexico's Supreme Court has now established an important marker, setting out arguments that others can now use when seeking information on grave crimes and human rights abuses from their national governments. It also marks another step forwards for the right to truth, an area of developing human rights law where Latin America-because of its troubled history-has been in the vanguard.

The right to truth is defined by the UN Human Rights Council as the right of victims of crimes and abuses, their families, and society "to know the truth regarding such violations to the fullest extent practicable, in particular the identity of the perpetrators, the causes and facts of such violations, and the circumstances under which they occurred." And why? Because knowing the truth about our past hopefully means that we will not repeat its mistakes.

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A Victory for the Truth about Mexico's Dirty War

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From 1968 to 1982, more than 1,200 people disappeared without a trace during Mexico's "Dirty War." Outside the country, the conflict remains less well known than the Cold War repression seen elsewhere in Latin America.

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Mexico, a country of extraordinary cultural richness, is a place where ancestral roots intertwine with the present in a unique way. I remember a childhood where even the names of streets evoked history and tradition. In Guadalajara, the neighborhood of Ciudad del Sol was defined by avenues with names like Axayactl or Moctezuma, evoking Tlatoanis or Aztec Emperors. Walking these streets was like strolling through an open-air museum, an experience that immersed me in my country's history. And while these names may seem difficult to pronounce, even for locals, let alone foreigners, they were already the Hispanized version of more complex names that spoke of a legacy, a history, and roots that the Mexican people recognize as their own. Mexico itself comes from Nahuatl, meaning "the bellybutton of the moon," offering the most resounding homage to the indigenous origin of this nation.

And not only in language do we maintain this legacy, but also in our palate. This country, which hosts over 67 indigenous languages, is also renowned for the aromas and flavors of its local cuisine. Mexican food is a universe of flavors and scents that awaken the senses. Dishes like mole, corn tortillas, and chili became inseparable companions in my life from childhood. Each bite was a connection to centuries of culinary tradition that had been passed down from generation to generation. Sharing a feast with family and friends was a celebration of our roots, where each dish had a story to tell.

In my circle of friends, who mostly came from middle-class families, names like Xochitl, Tlacaelel, or Cuauhtémoc were not the most common, but they were occasionally heard, evoking a deep connection to the history and identity of Mexico. These names paid tribute to a history that encompasses the close connection of indigenous cultures with the Western life we live today. Tlacaelel, the intellectual author of what is recognized as the most important religious, ideological, and historical reform in the history of the Mexicas. Or Xochitl, a name often chosen for pre-Hispanic noble princesses, meaning "flower" in Nahuatl. Each friend with an indigenous name somehow embodied the resistance and pride of our indigenous cultures and acknowledged a legacy that continues to be present in Mexico.

Every corner, every name, every aroma or flavor of Mexico is a constant reminder of our cultural roots. This is why I find it interesting to recall this as a prelude to understanding the cause of equity for indigenous or native communities, a cause that has gained global relevance for many years now.
Understanding the Indigenous Perspective in Mexico
To truly understand the complexities of achieving equity for indigenous actors, it is essential to immerse oneself in their unique perspective. Indigenous peoples in Latin America have an unbreakable connection to their ancestral lands, a connection that was severed and marked by colonization but also by centuries after it. Land confiscation, cultural erosion, and the loss of self-determination are some of the enduring scars. However, at the heart of the quest for equity is the imperative to recognize this deep connection and amplify indigenous voices.

In the heart of Mexico, numerous indigenous communities still play a part in the country's rich culture, often recognized in emblematic states like Chiapas and Oaxaca, but also present in the other 30 states of the country. These communities continue to witness and confront an ongoing struggle for equity within their own communities, as well as for recognition among the mestizo and white majorities. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography in Mexico (INEGI), the indigenous population in Mexico exceeded 11.8 million people, accounting for 9.4% of the country's total population. These people represent a melting pot of diverse indigenous groups, each with their own cultural richness and heritage. Many of them continue to influence the cultural wealth of the country with colors, dishes, lexicons, and many other inalienable features of Mexican culture.

Indigenous communities possess a treasure trove of traditional knowledge spanning a multitude of fields, from sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation to the complexities of traditional healing practices. Recognizing and integrating indigenous knowledge systems into decision-making processes can lead to more equitable and sustainable outcomes.
Challenges for Equity in Indigenous Communities
Despite the growing momentum for equity, significant challenges persist not only in the region but worldwide. Resistance from governments, corporations, and non-indigenous populations often stands in the way of indigenous communities seeking to reconnect with their ancestral lands. Government policies prioritizing economic development and corporate interests frequently clash with indigenous demands for land rights recognition. This tension remains a testament to the ongoing struggle for equity and justice, both in Mexico and in any other colonized territory or country. In Chiapas, the San Andrés Accords negotiated between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas several decades ago marked a crucial moment in recognizing indigenous autonomy and land rights. However, the full realization of these agreements remains a work in progress, underscoring the ongoing battle for equity in Chiapas, which has not reached the level of country recognition seen in other nations.

Systemic racism and discrimination represent additional barriers, casting shadows over indigenous communities' access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Addressing implicit bias and dismantling stereotypes are crucial steps in dismantling these deeply rooted systems of oppression. Oaxaca, another Mexican state steeped in indigenous heritage, hosts a constant and resilient struggle for equity. A key battleground has been in the realm of education, where indigenous communities have passionately advocated for bilingual education that respects their languages and culture, enabling the preservation of their unique identities. Initiatives like the establishment of indigenous community radio stations have empowered communities to share stories and narratives, celebrate their cultures, and engage in self-determination. However, the path to equitable access to education and resources remains elusive for many of these groups.
Navigating Diversity in a Global Corporate Setting: A Personal View
Despite the recognition of indigenous influence and roots in Mexico, I cannot speak of it firsthand, as I do not find a direct link to any indigenous community. In my quest to understand how to address this issue firsthand, I sought to speak with Iván Quintana, a young professional with Mazahua roots who studied psychology and works for a major American animal health company in Mexico. Quintana shared his experience of blending his cultural heritage with his professional life, addressing issues of identity, challenges, and his commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

Quintana, who lives in Mexico City, identifies as the son of parents who migrated from the State of Mexico and feels a strong connection to Mazahua culture. He told me that he is in constant reflection on diversity issues, particularly regarding indigenous peoples, racism, and inequality.

When I asked how he feels about representing his community in a global company, Quintana acknowledged that, although he shares cultural roots with his community, his personal experience has diverged from his origins due to his parents' migration. He regrets that some traditions and dialects of his culture were not passed on to him. Nevertheless, he is becoming aware of his cultural heritage and is committed to reconnecting with his roots.

Quintana also spoke about the challenges and opportunities he has encountered when integrating his cultural heritage with his work. He highlighted that while opportunities are equal for everyone, attitudes and expectations can vary depending on family background. Iván mentioned the stereotype he sometimes faces and how, over time, he has learned to avoid discussing his origins to prevent biases.

He told me that he is actively working on promoting diversity and inclusion in the company he works for. He is part of the company's diversity committee and strives to bring up topics related to indigenous culture in discussions. He recognizes the importance of education and awareness as the first steps toward promoting diversity.

Quintana also shared some advice for other young indigenous people aspiring to work in global corporate environments. He emphasized the importance of mentorship and learning from more experienced individuals. He also stressed the need to maintain and value cultural roots as a foundation for passing them on with pride.

For me, Quintana's experience illustrates the challenges and opportunities that young indigenous people face when entering global corporate environments. His story reflects the importance of maintaining a connection with cultural roots and a commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace. It also unfortunately reveals how biases and discrimination are still issues to be addressed in many instances.
Reflections and Stories of a Nation in Evolution
In my quest to understand and address diversity and equity in Mexico, I have found that my nation is a melting pot of cultures and traditions, a place where the past intertwines with the present in a unique and inseparable way. As I reflect on my roots, I recognize the importance of listening to and amplifying the voices of indigenous communities, whose connection to the land and cultural heritage remains fundamental. The deeper I delve, the prouder I am to be Mexican.

In my conversations, I have learned that each individual's personal history is unique, and the connection to cultural roots can vary. Despite the challenges he has faced when integrating his cultural heritage with his professional life, Iván demonstrates a profound commitment to diversity and inclusion in the corporate world. His story teaches us that promoting diversity and inclusion is not only essential but also an opportunity to enrich our society and our businesses.

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Navigating the Diversity of Indigenous Cultures in Mexico: A Personal View

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Mexico, a country of extraordinary cultural richness, is a place where ancestral roots intertwine with the present in a unique way. I remember a childhood where even the names of streets evoked history and tradition.

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, broken foot and a dislocated shoulder. She began to focus heavily on painting while recovering in a body cast. In her lifetime, she had 30 operations.

Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's approximately 200 paintings, sketches and drawings. Her physical and emotional pain are depicted starkly on canvases, as is her turbulent relationship with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she married twice. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits.

The devastation to her body from the bus accident is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column. Kahlo is depicted nearly naked, split down the middle, with her spine presented as a broken decorative column. Her skin is dotted with nails. She is also fitted with a surgical brace.

Kahlo's first self-portrait was Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress in 1926. It was painted in the style of 19th Century Mexican portrait painters who themselves were greatly influenced by the European Renaissance masters. She also sometimes drew from the Mexican painters in her use of a background of tied-back drapes. Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1929), Portrait of a Woman in White (1930) and Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) all bear this background.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best." - Frida Kahlo

In her second-self portrait, "Time Flies," Kahlo uses a folk style and vibrant colors. She wears peasant clothing, and the red, white and green in the painting are the colors of the Mexican flag.

During her life, self portrait is a subject that Frida Kahlo always returns to, as artists have always returned to their beloved themes - Rembrandt his Self Portrait, Vincent van Gogh his Sunflowers, and Claude Monet his Water Lilies.

Frida and Diego: Love and Pain

Kahlo and Rivera had a tumultuous relationship, marked by multiple affairs on both sides. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo is depicted in a man's suit, holding a pair of scissors, with her fallen hair around the chair in which she sits. This represents the times she would cut the hair Rivera loved when he had affairs.

The 1937 painting Memory, the Heart, shows Kahlo's pain over her husband's affair with her younger sister Christina. A large broken heart at her feet shows the intensity of Kahlo's anguish. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, but reunited a year later and remarried. The Two Fridas (1939) depicts Kahlo twice, shortly after the divorce. One Frida wears a costume from the Tehuana region of Mexico, representing the Frida that Diego loved. The other Frida wears a European dress as the woman who Diego betrayed and rejected. Later, she is back in Tehuana dress in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) and Self Portrait (1948).

Pre-Columbian artifacts were common both in the Kahlo/Rivera home (Diego collected sculptures and idols, and Frida collected Jewelry) and in Kahlo's paintings. She wore jewelry from this period in Self-Portrait - Time Flies (1926), Self-Portrait With Monkey (1938) and Self-Portrait With Braid (1941), among others. Other Pre-Columbian artifacts are found in The Four Inhabitants of Mexico City (1938), Girl With Death Mask (1938) and Self-Portrait With Small Monkeys (1945).

My painting carries with it the message of pain." - Frida Kahlo

Surreal or Realist?

Frida Kahlo participated in the "International Exhibition of Surrealism" in 1940 at the Galeria de Arte, Mexicano. There, she exhibited her two largest paintings: The Two Fridas and The Wounded Table (1940). Surrealist Andrew Breton considered Kahlo a surrealistic, a label Kahlo rejected, saying she just painted her reality. However, In 1945, when Don Jose Domingo Lavin asked Frida Kahlo to read the book Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud - whose psychoanalysis works Surrealism is based on - and paint her understanding and interpretation of this book. Frida Kahlo painted Moses, and this painting was recognized as second prize at the annual art exhibition in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime, although she painted occasional portraits on commission. She had only one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, just a year before her death at the age of 47.

Today, her works sell for very high prices. In May 2006, Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Roots, was sold for $5.62 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York, sets a record as the most expensive Latin American work ever purchased at auction, and also makes Frida Kahlo one of the highest-selling woman in art.

Widely known for her Marxist leanings, Frida, along with Marxism Revolutionary Che Guevara and a small band of contemporary figures, has become a countercultural symbol of the 20th century, and created a legacy in art history that continues to inspire the imagination and mind. Born in 1907, dead at 47, Frida Kahlo achieved celebrity even in her brief lifetime that extended far beyond Mexico's borders, although nothing like the cult status that would eventually make her the mother of the selfie, her indelible image recognizable everywhere.

At the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, her personal belongings are on display throughout the house, as if she still lived there. Kahlo was born and grew up in this building, whose cobalt walls gave way to the nickname of the Blue House. She lived there with her husband for some years, and she died there. The facility is the most popular museum in the Coyoacan neighborhood and among the most visited in Mexico City.

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Frida Kahlo: 100 Paintings Analysis, Biography, Quotes, & Art

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Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form. Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130645/

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Día de muertos (Short 1960) ⭐ 6.3 | Documentary, Short

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Day of the Dead • Magnum Photos Magnum Photos

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The centuries-old Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos is a colourful celebration of the dead

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These Vivid Photos Show Texas During The Great Depression And Wartime

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During the Great Depression, photographers fanned out across the country to capture the United States. Some of them visited Texas, snapping thousands of…

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Photo Essay: Mexico and the Launch of the Green Revolution

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One foundation’s program in Mexico created the blueprint for ending hunger worldwide.

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Drifter gunman Joe (Clint Eastwood) arrives in the Mexican village of San Miguel at the border of the United States of America, and befriends the owner of the local bar, Silvanito. Joe discovers that the town is dominated by two gangster lords: John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy) and the cruel Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volontè). When Joe kills four men of Baxter's gang, he is hired by Ramón's brother Esteban Rojo (Sieghardt Rupp) to join their gang. However, Joe decides to work for both sides, playing one side against the other. - Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Drifter gunman Joe (Clint Eastwood) arrives in the Mexican village of San Miguel at the border of the United States of America, and befriends the owner of the local bar, Silvanito. Joe discovers that the town is dominated by two gangster lords: John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy) and the cruel Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volontè).

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The Art and History of Traditional Fashion in Mexico — Live Colorful

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A few days ago I went to a temporary exhibition in Mexico City with approximately 100 public and private collections of traditional Mexican clothing. I enjoyed seeing the more than 225 mannequins and 400 items from clothing, accessories, designs, painting and photographies. It’s the first time I enc

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The Great Depression and World War II bookended the 1930s, but fashion flourished anyway during this decade. Glamorous Hollywood screen stars inspired new looks for women, men, and even children. Inexpensive fabrics, affordable catalog clothing, and homespun ingenuity let anyone copy styles previously worn by the wealthy. Here's a quick look at 1930s fashion.

1930s Fashion for Women

The young, boyish silhouette of 1920s women evolved into a conservative, sophisticated shape in the 1930s. The ideal, popular profile was tall and thin, with strong shoulders and slim hips.

Women's Dresses

At home or in public, women most commonly wore dresses with wide shoulders; puffy sleeves; modest necklines; higher, belted waistlines; and mid-calf flared hemlines. Frilly bows, ruffles, buttons, and other details often decorated dresses.

Housewives wore practical house dresses at home, often homemade from colorful printed cotton (including flour and feed sack fabric). A clever version was the " Hooverette" house dress, a reversible wrap style. Day dresses for wearing in public were more tailored and elegant, often made from silk or rayon crepe. Some women wore blouses with skirts.

Formal dresses most dramatically displayed the decade's willowy, elegant silhouette. Evening gowns in fluid fabrics were cut on the bias to create flowing, figure-hugging lines that reached the floor. Popular fabrics included satin, rayon, and chiffon.

Women's Trousers and Active Wear

Hollywood screen stars Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich helped introduce women's trousers for sports and leisure. These trousers were wide-legged and high-waisted, often styled like sailors' pants. Women wore baggier, casual lounge pants on vacation and at the beach. The modern swimsuit came of age during the 1930s, as lighter-weight, rubberized fabrics replaced heavier wool suits.

Women's Hairstyles and Accessories

In the 1930s, women copied the hairstyles and accessories they saw on popular, glamorous film stars. Short, curly styles dominated, such as the sleek Marcel wave (first popularized in the 1920s). Toward the end of the decade, the more classic 1940s medium-length "middy" style started coming into fashion.

Women often accessorized with inexpensive costume jewelry, gloves, silk scarves, and furs. Smaller hats were popular, such as berets, Greta Garbo-style slouch hats, or knit caps. Turbans topped fancier looks. Two-tone oxford shoes and strappy dress shoes with high, chunky heels were the shoes of choice. It was common to match accessories such as shoes, handbag, and hat.

1930s Fashion for Men

The male silhouette had wide, padded shoulders, a broad chest, defined waist, and straight legs. The overall trend was looser and a little more casual.

Men's Suits

Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, was a famous 1930s fashion icon. He popularized the English drape suit, which became popular all over the world. In contrast to the rigid, militaristic cut of men's suits of his day, Edward wore jackets that were softer in the shoulder, with a vertical drape over a fuller chest. Other trendsetters included film stars Clark Gable and Gary Cooper.

Suits of the 1930s typically had high waists and slightly tapered, creased trousers with turned-up cuffs. Younger men preferred baggier trousers and longer jackets. Suits were darker blue, brown, or gray for cooler weather, with lighter tones for warm weather. Bold patterns included stripes, checks, and plaids.

A vest, pocket handkerchief, shorter tie, hat (such as a fedora or bowler), and dark or two-toned leather dress shoes completed the look.

Men's Work and Leisure Clothing

Daily wardrobes of laboring men paid little heed to fashion trends. They often wore bib overalls or coveralls of sturdy denim or duck cloth. Work shirts were loose-fitting and long-sleeved. Work uniforms often paired lighter-weight, colored shirts with matching trousers. Heavy leather work boots protected the feet.

Some men wore sports jackets for leisure; in the United States, men also wore them to work. Knitted sweaters, soft-collared shirts, and flannel trousers were also donned for sports and relaxation. Men typically wore one-piece wool swimsuits, but the 30s decade also saw the first men's swimming trunks.

What Did Children Wear in the 1930s?

Many children wore homemade clothing or items purchased from mail-order catalogs. During the Great Depression, mothers often remade children's clothing from other items, including flour and feed sacks. These items would have been unique and perhaps well-worn, but many were styled after prevailing trends.

The frilly dresses worn by young, popular film star Shirley Temple and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the United Kingdom set the tone for girls' clothing. Embellished, puffy-sleeved dresses sported rounded Peter Pan collars. Hemlines were high for younger girls and dropped below the knee for older girls. Dark "Mary Jane" dress shoes topped ankle-high white socks.

Boys' trouser hemlines also dropped as they got older. Younger boys donned sailor suits or " buster suits," which paired shorts with long-sleeve, button-down shirts. Older boys wore trousers or flannel suits with button-down shirts and ties, sometimes with a knitted sweater or sweater vest.

Fashion in Your Family History

What did your relatives wear in the 1930s? Look for photos of them in the free, crowdsourced collections of FamilySearch Memories. Or upload your own family photos to share memories of your loved ones-and of what they wore.

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1930s Fashion: Women's, Men's, and Children's Clothing * FamilySearch

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The legendary origin of the Aztec people has them migrating from a homeland called Aztlan to what would become modern-day Mexico. While it is not clear where Aztlan was, a number of scholars believe that the Mexica-as the Aztec referred to themselves-migrated south to central Mexico in the 13th century.

The Mexica founding of Tenochtitlan was under direction from their patron god Huitzilopochtli, according to legend. The legend recounts that Huitzilopochtli told them to found their settlement in the place where a giant eagle eating a snake was perched on a cactus. This settlement, in the region of Mesoamerica called Anáhuac located on a group of five connected lakes, became Tenochtitlan. Archaeologists date the founding of Tenochtitlan to 1325 C.E.

At first, the Mexica in Tenochtitlan were one of a number of small city-states in the region. They were subject to the Tepanec, whose capital was Azcapotzalco, and had to pay tribute to them. In 1428, the Mexica allied with two other cities-Texcoco and Tlacopan. They formed the Aztec Triple Alliance and were able to win the battle for regional control, collecting tribute from conquered states.

Key to the rise of Tenochtitlan was the agricultural system that made it possible to feed the population. Chinampas, small, artificial islands created above the waterline, were one feature of the system. Recordkeeping was important to tracking tributes. Two pictographic texts that survived Spanish destruction-the Matricula de tributos and Codex Mendoza- record the tributes paid to the Aztecs. The codices also recorded religious practices.

A 260-day ritual calendar was used by Aztec priests for divination, alongside a 365-day solar calendar. At their central temple in Tenochtitlan, Templo Mayor, the Aztecs practiced both bloodletting (offering one's own blood) and human sacrifice as part of their religious practices. The Spanish reaction to Aztec religious practices is believed to be partially responsible for the violence of the Spanish conquest.

The Spanish, led by conquistador Hernando Cortés, arrived in what is now Mexico in 1519. They were looking for gold, and the gifts from the Mexica ruler, Motecuhzoma, proved that gold was present. Upon arriving in Tenochtitlan, Cortés took Motecuhzoma prisoner and attempted to rule on his behalf, but this did not go well, and Cortés fled the city in June of 1520.

This was not the end of the interactions, however. The Spanish conquistadors laid siege to the Aztec capital from the middle of May of 1521 until they surrendered on August 13, 1521. They were aided by Texcoco, a former Triple Alliance member.A great deal of Tenochtitlan was destroyed in the fighting, or was looted, burned, or destroyed after the surrender. Cortés began to build what is now known as Mexico City, the capital of a Spanish colony of which he was named governor, atop the ruins.

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In just a century, the Aztec built an empire in the area now called central Mexico. The arrival of the Spanish conquistadors brought it to a sudden end.

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Of Mice and Men (1992) ⭐ 7.5 | Drama, Western

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The Art of the Great Depression - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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How did a decade of unprecedented financial strife, radical social upheaval, and technological innovation shape art and cultural identity in the United States?

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Don't miss the final weekend to see the story of 1930s America through the art of a nation in flux. Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century's most powerful art - brought together now in this once-in-a-generation show.

These 45 truly iconic works paint an electrifying portrait of this transformative period. These are works which have rarely been seen together, by artists ranging from Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper to Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Guston and more. Perhaps the most celebrated work of them all, Grant Wood's iconic American Gothic (1930), has never left North American shores before.

In the devastating wake of the Wall Street Crash, artists sought to capture the changes in urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration that pulsed across the country, resulting in one of the most vital periods for American artists in the 20th century. This was a decade like no other that saw them search for an elusive 'Americanness' through realism, populism and abstraction, rural and urban themes, the farm, the new, the traditional.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said: "Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples." So experience the life of 1930s America through the many masterpieces in this landmark show.
Exhibition organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Établissement public du musée d'Orsay et du musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.
All ticket prices include £2.50 for a printed gallery guide.

Monday - Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday - Saturday 10am - 10pm
Sunday 10am - 8pm

£13.50 (without donation £12). Concessions available. Friends of the RA, and under 16s when with a fee-paying adult, go free.

The Sackler Wing, Burlington House

Final weekend - visit late

Open until 10pm this Friday and Saturday, and til 8pm this Sunday

Spend an evening among iconic works by Grant Wood, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Philip Guston and many others.

Remember to take your own #AmericanGothPic after you visit, and share it with us on Instagram or Twitter!

Tours

Get more out of the exhibition

Exhibition tours

45-minute introductory tours, free with an exhibition ticket, no booking required.
Tuesdays at 2.30pm, Fridays at 7pm (until 19 May)

Meet in the first gallery of the exhibition.

See all events

Gift package

This limited-availability gift includes two tickets to our once-in-a-lifetime exhibition America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s and the accompanying softback catalogue.

America after the Fall brings together 45 iconic works by artists including Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper.

This wonderful exhibition catalogue provides context to these iconic pieces and explores the 1930s - a fascinating yet uncertain time for America, marked by rapid economic and social change. Fully illustrated with works from the show, it features 105 colour illustrations and 15 black-and-white images over 204 pages.

Buy now

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America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s | Exhibition | Royal Academy of Arts

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Don't miss the final weekend to see the story of 1930s America through the art of a nation in flux. Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century's most powerful art - brought together now in this once-in-a-generation show.

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Masterpiece in detail: American Gothic by Grant Wood | Rise Art

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American Gothic is a 1930s artwork that has inspired endless reinterpretations in pop culture and which continues to stand out for its modernity…

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Masterpiece in detail: American Gothic by Grant Wood | Rise Art

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American Gothic is a 1930s artwork that has inspired endless reinterpretations in pop culture and which continues to stand out for its modernity…

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Metamorphosis of Migration: The Butterfly Effect in Texas During the 1930s Great Depression and Mexico in the 1900s

In this project I will investigate the metamorphosis of migration in regards of my ancestral migration from Texas in the 1930s during the great depression to Mexico City. Just as a butterfly undergoes the transformative process from an egg to a caterpillar to a butterfly ever evolving and adapting to its environment. This transformation can be used as a motif for those who migrate and causing not only a physical shift but an evolution of identity by having to adapt to a new culture, society and environment.

I might explore how the economic hardship detrimentally impacted the textile industry leading to companies caring about the end life cycle of a material. During the Great Depression there was a lack of materials for garments to be made which led to farmers reworking flour sacks into garments for people to wear. Companies today should be facilitating the same care of production in the end life cycle of their materials. I aspire to investigate the second wave feminist movement through the film Bonnie and Clyde which is set in the Great Depression in Texas and analyse the anti-establishment clothing women wore through Bonnie Parker.

Next, I aspire to explore my ancestor’s migration to Mexico from Texas because of the Great Depression. This radical change of culture and social structures led to new adaptations in their identities like a butterfly. I might research into their beautiful traditions like ‘day of the dead which is a display of their vibrantly rich culture showcased through clothing and performance. Mexico’s folklore will also inform narrative into my designs Using the metaphor of metamorphosis through fashion I aim to convey how transformation of identity is forced by the hardship and resilience of migration for survival.

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What is transformation?

What is metamorphosis?

What is migration ?

How does a person adapt to an environment?

How can an environment change a person?

How does a person adapt to a society?

How can a society and its ideals change a person?

Can a place force someone to change their identity?

What is culture?

How can cultural values affect someone?

How can u reflect transformation through garments construction?

How can u reflect transformation through textiles?

What is the ugly side of transformation?

How can the metamorphosis of migration represent different life cycles of a person?

What is a life cycle?

How can clothing transform a person?

What is identity?

How can sustainability be applied to this concept of different life cycles?

What does migration look like in nature?

How can you represent metamorphosis in fashion?

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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: Surviving The Dust Bowl

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Encore Monday, April 22, 2024 at 11 p.m. on KPBS TV / Stream now with KPBS Passport! This is the remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease — even death — for nearly a decade. Less well-known than those who sought refuge in California, typified by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” the Dust Bowlers who stayed overcame an almost unbelievable series of calamities and disasters.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Dust Bowl, name for both the drought period in the Great Plains that lasted from 1930 to 1936 and the section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico.

The term Dust Bowl was suggested by conditions that struck the region in the early 1930s. The area's grasslands had supported mostly stock raising until World War I, when millions of acres were put under the plow in order to grow wheat. Following years of overcultivation and generally poor land management in the 1920s, the region-which receives an average rainfall of less than 20 inches (500 mm) in a typical year-suffered a severe drought in the early 1930s that lasted several years. The region's exposed topsoil, robbed of the anchoring water-retaining roots of its native grasses, was carried off by heavy spring winds. "Black blizzards" of windblown soil blocked out the sun and piled the dirt in drifts. Occasionally the dust storms swept completely across the country to the East Coast. Present-day studies estimate that some 1.2 billion tons (nearly 1.1 billion metric tons) of soil were lost across 100 million acres (about 156,000 square miles [405,000 square km]) of the Great Plains between 1934 and 1935, the drought's most severe period.

Thousands of families were forced to leave the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression in the early and mid-1930s. Many of these displaced people (frequently collectively labeled "Okies" regardless of whether they were Oklahomans) undertook the long trek to California. Their plight was characterized in songs such as "Dust Bowl Refugee" and "Do Re Mi" by folksinger Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The wind erosion was gradually halted with federal aid. Windbreaks known as shelterbelts-swaths of trees that protect soil and crops from wind-were planted, and much of the grassland was restored. By the early 1940s the area had largely recovered.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica John P. Rafferty.

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Dust Bowl | Definition, Duration, Map, & Facts

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Dust Bowl, both the drought period lasting from 1930 to 1936 in the U.S. Great Plains and the part of the Great Plains where overcultivation and drought resulted in the erosion of topsoil, which was carried off in windblown dust storms forcing thousands of families to leave the region during the Great Depression.

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Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother - Exibart Street

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The history behind photograph of the Migrant Mother has intrigued academics for decades. But a new book sheds fresh light on the portrait’s details.

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Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

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Exhibition: ‘Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing’ at Jeu de Paume, Concorde, ParisArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

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Exhibition dates: 16th October 2018 – 27th January 2019 Curators: Drew Heath Johnson, Oakland Museum of California, Alona Pardo and Jilke Golbach, Barbican Art Gallery, Pia Viewing, Jeu de Pa…

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Iconic photographer Dorothea Lange’s summers in the Texas Dust bowl

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Born in 1895, Dorothea Lange became one of the most iconic photographers during the Great…

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In the latter half of the 1930s the southern plains were devastated by drought, wind erosion, and great dust storms. Some of the storms rolled far eastward, darkening skies all the way to the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The areas most severely affected were western Texas, eastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma Panhandle, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. This ecological and economic disaster and the region where it happened came to be known as the Dust Bowl.

According to the federal Soil Conservation Service, the bowl covered 100 million acres in 1935. By 1940 the area had declined to twenty-two million acres. It disappeared in the forties. A prolonged drought, combined with unusually high temperatures and strong winds, caused the normally semiarid region to become for a while a veritable desert. During some growing seasons the soil was dry to a depth of three feet. Lack of rain plagued the northern plains states too, though less severely.

Droughts occur regularly on the plains; an extreme one comes roughly every twenty years, and milder ones every three or four. But in historic times there is no record of such wind erosion as accompanied the drought in the thirties. In 1932 there were 14 dust storms of regional extent; in 1933, thirty-eight; in 1934, twenty-two; in 1935, forty; in 1936, sixty-eight; in 1937, seventy-two; in 1938, sixty-one; in 1939, thirty; in 1940, seventeen; in 1941, seventeen. In Amarillo the worst year for storms was 1935, when they lasted a total of 908 hours. Seven times, from January to March, the visibility in Amarillo declined to zero; one of these complete blackouts lasted eleven hours. In another instance a single storm raged for 3½ days.

Some of the storms afflicting the plains were merely "sand blows," produced by the low sirocco-like winds that came from the Southwest and left the sandier soils drifted into dunes along fencerows and ditches. Less frequent but far more dramatic were the "black blizzards," which appeared with a sudden, violent turbulence, rising like a long wall of muddy water as high as 7,000 or 8,000 feet. The most notorious of these occurred on April 14, 1935. Like the winter blizzards to which they were compared, these storms were caused by the arrival of a polar continental air mass; the atmospheric electricity they generated lifted the dirt higher and higher in a cold boil, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning and at other times by an eerie silence. Such "dusters" were not only terrifying to observe but immensely destructive to the region's fine, dark soils.

Repeatedly in those years dirt and sand destroyed crops, property, and mental and physical health. The misery of the era was widely chronicled and eloquently captured in such books as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). People shoveled the dirt from their front yards and swept up bushel basketfuls inside their houses. Automobile and tractor engines were ruined by grit. The human costs were even harder to calculate and bear. Old people and babies were the most vulnerable to eye and lung damage, as were those with respiratory ailments like asthma. The medical remedies available to them were primitive and makeshift. The Red Cross furnished light gauze masks, and people stuffed rags around windows and door cracks. Domesticated and wild animals often suffocated or were blinded.

As the agricultural base of the region was buried under dust, extreme hardship loomed over the southern plains. In May 1934 dust fell from a massive storm on the Mall and the White House in Washington, D.C., and helped focus federal attention on the desperate situation. The Soil Erosion Service of the United States Department of Commerce established the Dalhart Wind Erosion Control Project in 1934 under the direction of Howard H. Finnell. That year $525 million was distributed to cattlemen for emergency feed loans and as payment for some of their starving stock; farmers were provided with public jobs such as building ponds and reservoirs or planting shelter-belts of trees. Seed loans were provided for new crops, and farmers were paid to plow lines of high ridges against the wind. In 1935 the Soil Conservation Service of the USDA replaced the Soil Erosion Service and opened the Region Six office in Amarillo. There Finnell supervised the conservation work for the entire Dust Bowl. With the cooperation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Work Projects Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, state extension services, and other agencies, the Soil Conservation Service made efforts to limit the worst effects of wind erosion. Also in 1935 the Texas legislature established conservation districts for wind-erosion control in nine Panhandle counties, where local authorities were given power to force farmers to institute measures to halt blowing dust. Between 1935 and 1937 over 34 percent of the farmers in the area left.

The Dust Bowl was not only the result of bad weather but also of human actions that exacerbated the drought. Immediately before the thirties men had entered the plains fired with enthusiasm to make them yield abundant wealth, and, in a few short years, they had destroyed much of the native grass holding the dirt in place ( see GRASSLANDS). Some of them had overstocked the land with cattle and reduced its ability to survive a time of severe drought. Others had come intent on transforming the area into row-crop agriculture. Both sorts of settler ignored the hard-won experience of their predecessors on the plains as well as available scientific data and thereby put at risk a vulnerable environment.

In the boom years of the twenties, from 1925 to 1930, the time of what one writer has called "the great plow-up," farmers tore up the vegetation on millions of acres in the southern plains, an area nearly seven times the size of Rhode Island. They introduced new gasoline tractors, which allowed them to plow faster than ever before. Some "suitcase farmers" had no more responsible plan than speculating on a quick crop or two. More grandiosely, the movie mogul Hickman Price arrived in Plainview, Texas, in 1929 to establish a factory farm covering over fifty-four square miles in Swisher, Castro, and Deaf Smith counties. To every part of the region came similar pacesetters who fervently believed in the twenties' creed of unlimited, laissez-faire economic expansion and who were convinced that modern methods of industrial capitalism, so apparently successful elsewhere in the economy, were what the plains needed. Even traditional conservative agriculturists were induced to follow these entrepreneurs' lead and try to cash in on a period of good weather and high market demand. Most of the freshly plowed ground went into wheat, so that during the twenties wheat production jumped 300 percent, creating a severe glut by 1931. When the black blizzards began to roll, one-third of the Dust Bowl region-thirty-three million acres-lay ungrassed and open to the winds.

The origin of the Dust Bowl was therefore related to the near-simultaneous collapse of the American economy. Both catastrophes revealed the darker side of entrepreneurialism, its tendency to risk long-term social and ecological damage in the pursuit of short-term, private gain. The New Deal was elaborated partly to prevent such disasters in the future. Some argue that plains agriculture was chastened by the Dust Bowl years and has, with government help, reformed itself adequately so that the thirties nightmare will not recur. Others, less sanguine, point to the dust storms of the mid-1950s and 1970s as evidence that the old Dust Bowl can be reborn, if and when weather and market forces collide again. See also WEATHER.

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The Handbook of Texas is your number one authoritative source for Texas history. Read this entry and thousands more like it on our site.

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Migrants car and tent, Edinburg, Texas - LOC’s Public Domain Archive Public Domain Search

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Download Image of Migrants car and tent, Edinburg, Texas. Free for commercial use, no attribution required. Public domain photograph - United States during 1930s Great Depression, free to use, no copyright restrictions image - Picryl description. Dated: 01.01.1939. Topics: texas, edinburg, migrant camps, nitrate negatives, edinburg tex, migrants, car, migrants car, tent, great depression, great depression photographs, united states history, library of congress

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The migration cycle of the eastern populations of monarchs are truly amazing trips. Breeding season begins around March, when the first generation leaves for the northern US. Click image to enlarge.
NPS graphic/ S. Sparhawk

A relay race like no other

At the start of the spring breeding season, Eastern populations of monarchs leave their winter habitat in the oyamel fir forests of Mexico to begin a northward journey that may take up to a month and a half to complete. En route, these tiny nomads mate, then lay their eggs on certain types of milkweed plants - leaving it to the next generation to continue another stage of the northbound expedition. During their journey, monarchs live for only two to six weeks. The last generation of a breeding season (which lives for as long as nine months) must then attempt to complete the entire journey in reverse and return to their winter habitat in Mexico.
Check out this journey in selfies!

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Continental Nomads: Monarch Butterflies - Pollinators (U.S. National Park Service)

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At the start of the spring breeding season, Eastern populations of monarchs leave their winter habitat in the oyamel fir forests of Mexico to begin a northward journey that may take up to a month and a half to complete.

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Endangered Species Conservation Biologist, Western Monarch Community Science

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A migrating monarch can travel over 100 miles in a single day! Learn more lesser-known yet fascinating facts about the annual North American monarch butterfly migration.

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Great Migration, in U.S. history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. At the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of black Americans lived in the Southern states. From 1916 to 1970, during this Great Migration, it is estimated that some six million black Southerners relocated to urban areas in the North and West.

The massive stream of European emigration to the United States, which had begun in the late 19th century and waned during World War I, slowed to a trickle with immigration reform in the 1920s. As a result, urban industries were faced with labour shortages. A huge internal population shift among African Americans addressed these shortfalls, particularly during the World Wars, when defense industries required more unskilled labour. Although the Great Migration slowed during the Great Depression, it surged again after World War II, when rates of migration were high for several decades.

The "push" factors for the exodus were poor economic conditions in the South-exacerbated by the limitations of sharecropping, farm failures, and crop damage from the boll weevil-as well as ongoing racial oppression in the form of Jim Crow laws. "Pull" factors included encouraging reports of good wages and living conditions that spread by word of mouth and that appeared in African American newspapers. With advertisements for housing and employment and firsthand stories of newfound success in the North, the Chicago Defender, for example, became one of the leading promoters of the Great Migration. In addition to Chicago, other cities that absorbed large numbers of migrants include Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; and New York City.

Seeking better civil and economic opportunities, many blacks were not wholly able to escape racism by migrating to the North, where African Americans were segregated into ghettos and urban life introduced new obstacles. Newly arriving migrants even encountered social challenges from the black establishment in the North, which tended to look down on the "country" manners of the newcomers.

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Great Migration | Definition, History, & Facts

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Great Migration, in U.S. history, the widespread migration of African Americans in the 20th century from rural communities in the South to large cities in the North and West. It is estimated that from 1916 to 1970 some six million black Southerners relocated as part of the Great Migration.

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On April 14, 1935, a severe dust storm hit parts of Oklahoma and Texas, causing tremendous damage not only to the landscape but to the residents and the economy. It has since been referred to as "Black Sunday," with respect to its ominous nature. Known as one of the worst dust storms in U.S. history, it ravaged a portion of what would be known as the "Dust Bowl," which referenced western Kansas, southeast Colorado, as well as the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, and it was estimated to have displaced topsoil measured at 300 million tons. Eyewitness accounts give the impression that it can only be likened to a land-based tsunami in today's weather terms.

Photo: Wikipedia

At the time, settlers of the area were already struggling through the Great Depression. Years of drought compounded the issue, and dust storms were relentless. This particular storm was considered so significant, its blackness was said to have turned a warm, sunny day into a cold, horrible absence of light said to be worse than the darkest night. With winds reaching 60 miles per hour, some said they lost the ability to even see their own hand in front of their faces. Famous songs were written of the event, capturing the detail and feeling of the time for audiences far and wide. On the day following the storm, the world would hear, for the first time, the term "The Dust Bowl," referring to the region identified above.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That fateful afternoon, residents of these parts were forced to take shelter from the dust storm which was looming. Also called a "black blizzard," the storm blew into Texas from the Oklahoma Panhandle, reaching Amarillo by approximately 7:20 p.m. p.m. Conditions were severe due to a combination of an eight-year drought, erosion, high winds, and bare soil. It gave rise to a dust cloud so intense that some who witnessed the event truly thought the world was coming to its end. The destruction which resulted from this, as well as its predecessors, caused hundreds of thousands to relocate, much of them flooding California. Details of this period in American history were captured poignantly in John Steinbeck's best seller, "The Grapes of Wrath." In response to the damage and relocation of large masses of people, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act. In turn, this spawned the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) in an attempt to assist landowners and users in soil preservation and conservation efforts, becoming a permanent U.S. Department of Agriculture agency. The reduction of soil erosion, improvement of field and forest land, and the development of natural resources were bi-products of the SCS.

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The Legendary Black Sunday Dust Storm that Hit Texas

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On April 14, 1935, a severe dust storm hit parts of Oklahoma and Texas, causing tremendous damage not only to the landscape but to the residents and the economy. It has since been referred to as "Black Sunday," with respect to its ominous nature.

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Fashion History: The Flour Sack Dress %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

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Fashion history and sewing are very closely related, and often overlap in very interesting ways. Today is all about the flour sack dress.

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Great Depression Food Sacks Became a Necessary (and Marketable) Fashion | The Vintage News

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When the Great Depression hit America, millions of people were forced to rely on their wits to survive. From the end of the “Roaring Twenties” through to

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1930s Fashion History The working classes -- mostly poor farmers, miners, factory men, carpenters, mechanics, railroad engineers, and shop keepers -- were the bread and butter 1930s men’s workwear, working class, blue collar clothing and casual clothing for all men in the 30s.

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1930s Fashion History The working classes -- mostly poor farmers, miners, factory men, carpenters, mechanics, railroad engineers, and shop keepers -- were the bread and butter 1930s men’s workwear, working class, blue collar clothing and casual clothing for all men in the 30s.

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Riding the Rails | Article

Jungle, Library of Congress

Some left to escape poverty or troubled families, others because it seemed a great adventure. At the height of the Great Depression, more than 250,000 teenagers were living on the road in America. Many criss-crossed the country by hopping freight trains, although it was both dangerous and illegal.

Riding the Rails presents the poignant and little-known story of teen hobos during the1930s, a time of desperation and bitter hardship. These young itinerant Americans were all searching for a better life; what they found was a mixture of freedom, camaraderie, misery, and loneliness.

Riding the Rails interweaves the evocative stories of ten men and women who left home in their youth. Producers Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell placed notices in national publications in search of individuals who rode the rails as teenagers. Three thousand people, now in their 70s and 80s, responded. Uys and Lovell selected a handful to tell their stories on camera.

"Some hadn't spoken of their experiences in sixty years. They poured their hearts out to us," says Uys. "They were just kids then and when they look back, it's with a blend of nostalgia and pain." Riding the Rails vividly combines the clear-eyed memories of witnesses with archival footage of teens riding atop speeding trains and newsreel interviews with lean-bodied kids full of bravado. The film features a rich soundtrack of American folk tunes of the time, including songs by Woody Guthrie, Elizabeth Cotten, Doc Watson, and Jimmie Rodgers.

Jim Mitchell left his Wisconsin home at the age of sixteen. Rene Champion was the same age when he left his home in Pennsylvania, as were John Fawcett from West Virginia and Bob "Guitar Whitey" Symmonds of Washington, who picked fruit in California to survive. In Louisiana, young Clarence Lee's father told him that there simply wasn't enough food to feed the family; the boy left home the next day. All began riding the rails.

Peggy DeHart ran away from home at fifteen, after her father struck her for cursing at a cow on the family farm. "There was this girl called Irene Willis and she wanted to go to Issaquah to see her parents," DeHart recalls. "She was going to hitchhike and she asked me to come along. And I thought that was a great idea."

DeHart sent letters to her family describing tight situations she and Irene encountered: "The police picked up Reen and I last night and put us in a cell. We sure made use of the cots. I hope they run us loose so that we can go again. This is the third time they've picked us up."

Teenagers who were new to the road had high hopes about where their journeys would lead them. Some tried to earn money and send it home. But work was scarce in a nation suffering from widespread unemployment. And young migrants were usually paid only a fraction of adult wages. "Once I worked for a man who wanted me to unload a coal car," recounts George Rhodes in letter. "I stood there and threw down the coal. I worked all day. He gave me two tomatoes."

Some yearned to ride the trains bound for the West, where they would become cowboys, or to big cities, where they could ship out and see the world. Seventeen-year-old James San Jule left Oklahoma for New York, but found no work. "I lived down in a subway kiosk for four months," he remembers, "and stole food from the Washington Market."

The road was an education about the ways of the world, full of harsh lessons: cold nights, brutal railroad detectives or "bulls," the humiliation of arrest, panhandling, social ostracism, days without food, and the dangers of losing a limb hopping trains.

Clarence Lee recalls the profound, almost unfathomable loneliness of this life at that time. "Some of it hurts now," he says, unable to hold back tears. "I don't think I was 20 miles down the road, riding in the blind of the car, and it was cold and miserable."

Jim Mitchell has similar memories: "Hell, I knew right then I had made a mistake. But you know, you're young and foolish and you don't say you made a mistake." San Jule recalls the bittersweet memory of receiving a package in the mail - a cake mailed by his mother for his 18th birthday-and eating it alone on a hillside, in tears.

The 1933 Warner Brothers film, Wild Boys of the Road, tried to scare young people away from life on the rails. In it, a boy falls onto the track and loses his leg to an oncoming train. The film didn't deter Bob "Guitar Whitey" Symmonds: seeing the movie actually inspired him to take to the rails.

"If you see the movie," he says, "that put the idea in your head, 'I could do that too, but I'm not gonna get my leg cut off like the kid in the movie.'" To this day, the sound of the train whistle is in Symmonds' blood. Now in his 70s, he still rides the rails, logging nearly 10,000 miles a year. During his absences, his wife tells those who inquire that he is on vacation, "traveling by train."

Riding the Rails is produced by Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys. Visit their website for more information about this award-winning film.

For more information about the book, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, by Errol Uys, visit his website.

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Riding the Rails | American Experience | PBS

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Some left to escape poverty or troubled families, others because it seemed a great adventure.

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A hobo is a traveling worker who has little and is homeless. Unlike a "tramp", who works only when forced to, and a "bum", who does not work at all. They carried their worldly goods in a bindle; this was their term for a bundle of bedding carried in a sack.

During the Great Depression, people went across the country in search of work. But without a job, they didn't have money to pay for transportation. The only way to get across the country, and potentially get the job, was riding the rails. This is how the hobos of the Great Depression lived from day-to-day.

The above image illustrates the panic and reality that men faced in trying to feed themselves on the road and their families at home.

Sometimes families traveled together and made-do with camping along creek banks for a water source. They carried what they had with them, and often children had an essential to carry along.

They had to think about food all the time. Finding it was a daily task, and they all knew it. Hobos developed a series of symbols in order to "talk" to each other, leaving messages so other hobos would get information. Friendly farms where they could find work and food were marked, as were the unfriendly farms where they would find neither.

John's aunt Jenny Belle, who I write about in Tales of a Cosmic Possum, ran a boarding house in Union, South Carolina. Because of her kindness and proximity to the railroad, sometimes hobos stopped at her home. She always made sure they left her house with something to eat, even if she couldn't help them any other way. If any farmers needed help, she would share that information with them, too.

In a list of thousands of men and women who rode the rails are names of many who later became famous -

Novelists Louis L'Amour, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and James Michener

Actor Clark Gable

TV host Art Linkletter

Oil billionaire H. L. Hunt

Journalist Eric Sevareid

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Teens struck out on their own for an adventurous life riding from one place to another.

Unbelievable, but true, many hoboes attended the 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis. The group constructed a strict ethical code for all hobos to follow. This is a partial listing of those rules.

1. YOU DO YOU.

"Decide your own life, don't let another person run or rule you."

2. SHOW SOME RESPECT.

"When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times."

3. DON'T BE AN OPPORTUNIST.

"Don't take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos."

4. GET A JOB.

"Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again."

5. BE A SELF-STARTER.

"When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts."

6. SET A GOOD EXAMPLE.

"Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals' treatment of other hobos."

7. BE MINDFUL OF OTHERS.

"When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you."

8. DON'T LITTER.

"Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling."

9. LEND A HAND.

"If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help."

10. PRACTICE GOOD HYGIENE.

"Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible."

11. BE COURTEOUS WHEN YOU'RE RIDING THE RAILS ...

"When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member."

12. ... AND WHEN YOU'RE NOT.

"Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard."

13. HELP OUT THE KIDS.

"Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home."

14. SAME GOES FOR HOBOS.

"Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday."

15. LEND YOUR VOICE.

"If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

The hobo culture was amazing. Starting after the Civil War as people were displaced and continuing on until after WW II, this way of life appealed to some men, but for others it was a necessary choice. Even the danger of jumping on and off those trains couldn't stop them from that leap.

I enjoyed finding out about hobos and their lives, but I know it would not have been one I would have chosen. But then Lulu, my grandmother, used to say "sometimes you do what you have to do."

"I grew up poor. I never had any money. I was a hobo, you know, ride the freights." Art Linkletter

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Riding the Rails During the Great Depression

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A hobo is a traveling worker who has little and is homeless. Unlike a "tramp", who works only when forced to, and a "bum", who does not work at all. They carried their worldly goods in a bindle; this was their term for a bundle of bedding carried in a sack.

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The hobo is familiar as a character from kitsch art and silent film and feels like a romantic caricature today. But these traveling hobos were real - and they honed surprisingly complex strategies for riding the rails.

There may have been a million hobos in 1915 ... and they needed to keep moving

The term "hobo" is a loose one used to define everything from happy-go-lucky train hoppers to large homeless communities (and sometimes derogatorily so). But in its most popular definition, itinerant workers traveling the country by train use the word to describe themselves and their unique and intentional lifestyle. There was and still is a proud tradition of self-identified hobos.

These hobos were most active from the 1890s through the 1930s. It's difficult to know how many there were (since part of their goal was to avoid detection), but one put their population at 1915 estimate
1 million. And their ranks swelled during the Great Depression as work became scarce.
They called it Hobohemia...
Hobos tended to have a particular character, too. Sociologist Nels Anderson wrote about them in his groundbreaking 1923 book The Hobo, and though he dealt with large homeless communities that were the opposite of carefree, he also identified a particular hobo group that followed "the American tradition of pioneering, wanderlust, [and] seasonal employment." This was the group that proudly called itself "Hobohemia."

Hobohemia was home to the peculiar dreamers, small-time criminals, and railroad experts we imagine when we hear "hobo" today. These itinerant workers were expert at hopping on and off trains, and they liked to brag about it, too, since it could be incredibly dangerous.

Hobos worked hard to evade brutal private police

When hobos were common, most believed the private police were a bigger threat than civil police forces.

That may be because the railroads had more reason to dislike hobos. In addition to riding the rails, hobos occasionally broke into boxcars and stores, which spoiled goods both on the train and in communities near train routes, endangering a railroad's operation through the town.

That meant civil police - the hobo-labeled "town clowns" - were usually more focused on kicking hobos out of town than on jailing them.
In 1920, 2,166 trespassers were killed.
But railroad police couldn't avoid the hobo problem. Called "bo chasers" and "car-seal hawks," they adopted extremely aggressive tactics. They took it as their job to terrorize those who rode the rails, often by any means necessary. In addition to bouncing out hobos on trains, they often threw stones at hobos or shot them. "He is a hunter," Anderson wrote of the railroad officer, "and the tramp is his prey."

All that led to a staggering death toll. In 1920, 2,166 trespassers were killed and 2,363 were injured on trains or in railroad yards. That led hobos to do whatever they could to avoid being spotted.

Hobos found many (dangerous) ways to ride a train without getting caught

Keeping the railroad police in mind, what was the best way to hop a train car?

1) Finding an empty car. This was ideal. It gave hobos space to stay without the threat of being crushed by shifting goods or injured during a bumpy ride. Occasionally, hobos even tore up the floors of these empty cars for firewood.

2) Hiding between cars. Most hobos also liked "riding the blinds" by swinging onto the front end of a baggage car. The location between cars helped them avoid being spotted by railroad police. Though there was a threat of being crushed between cars, the ability to avoid detection made it relatively safe.

3) Riding on top. To "deck" a car was extremely dangerous, since it was easy to be thrown off the top of the train. Author Jack London, who did his own time riding the rails, wrote about the practice in : "And let me say right here that only a young and vigorous tramp is able to deck a passenger train, and also, that the young and vigorous tramp must have his nerve with him as well."

If that didn't work, there was another heart-racing option.
4) Riding beneath the train:

Today, "riding the rails" is synonymous with any travel on a train. But in the past, it occasionally referred to the specific act of riding rails underneath train cars.

Older trains required support trusses for heavier cargo, and that gave a space for hobos to ride on under the train (those rods were abandoned with the advent of stronger steel cars around the 1930s). It was extremely dangerous, but there was an advantage: the conductor couldn't kick you out until the train stopped.

Unfortunately, the rods came with a lot of risk. As London described, a cruel brakeman could lower a pin on a rope underneath the train, where it would smack up and down against the bottom of the rods, battering hobos underneath until they were beaten or killed. And that wasn't the only dangerous option.

5) Riding in refrigerator cars. London spent a glorious night in a refrigerated car. He burned papers on the floor and slept like a baby through the night.
Refrigerated cars were death traps
Not only were these ice-cooled cars a break from hot temperatures, they carried food and could store hobos' food, too. But for many hobos, refrigerated cars were death traps.

Usually only hobos who didn't know any better would go inside the car. That's because railroad police were aware of the temptation and were known to lock hobos inside to freeze. Men froze to death in the refrigerator cars, as Maury "Steam Train" Graham recalled in Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the Hobos.

6) Trying everything else. There were other, more dangerous riding places too. As described in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, written by Godfrey Irwin in 1971, hobos could also ride as "blind baggage tourists" (pretending they had tickets), as "open-air navigators" (on top of open freight), or as "bumper riders" (standing on the couplers between cars).

But all those inventive, adrenaline-pumping tactics had an expiration date.

When Hobohemia left the tracks

By the end of the 1930s, the hobo rail-riding phenomenon had faded due to a variety of factors, including the improving economy. As the century continued, increasing freight train speed, more trucking, and new laws made hobos rarer. As trains got faster, it became harder to hop them, and hitchhiking probably took some of the population as well. Rail-riding hobos didn't disappear, but they became much less common.

Still, Hobohemia hasn't completely disappeared. A culture of hobos ensured that - which may be why there are still hobo conventions even today. And some of the attendees will probably take a nice train to get there.

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The best strategies for jumping on a train, from 1900s hobos

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The hobo is familiar as a character from kitsch art and silent film and feels like a romantic caricature today. But these traveling hobos were real - and they honed surprisingly complex strategies for riding the rails. The term "hobo" is a loose one used to define everything from happy-go-lucky train hoppers to large homeless communities (and sometimes derogatorily so).

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Berkeley N. Hackett, St. Petersburg, Florida

Berkeley Hackett made his first trip in 1929 at 13, riding with his stepfather from Flint, Michigan to Kalamazoo to get a summer job working in a coal yard at 25 cents an hour. A year later, Berkeley ran away from school and began to beat his way around the country in the Great Depression.

"Howard, my step-dad, came home one night in the summer of 1929, wide-eyed with excitement. 'I've gotten a job!' he announced.

" 'Where?' we asked, in chorus. 'Doin' what?'

" 'Working for Webb Coal Company in Kalamazoo, unloading coal cars.' Howard looked in my direction. 'I'm taking Bill with me.'

"Mama took all the clothes she could find and put them on me, layer after layer of shirts and an old wool sweater. I remember that sweater well. It was light brown and moth-eaten.

View from the Boxcari n Great Depression era"In the wee, misty hours after midnight, Howard and I made our way to the switch yard at Flint to find a train that would take us to that wonderful promise of employment.

"What an incredible adventure! I felt as if I were Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Swiss Family Robinson combined.

"We slipped furtively through the yard to avoid the railroad detectives. Howard found an empty boxcar in a train going in the right direction. He hoisted me up and clambered in himself. The inside of the car smelled of pine tar and creosote.

"We huddled together in a corner; afraid of being caught by a detective and thrown off or taken to jail.

"The switch engine shunted us this way and that. I could see the red and green lights of signal lanterns, but not the men who wielded them.

"Finally the train was ready. My heart beat fast and the adrenaline flowed. With a great spurt of steam, the locomotive got under way. Our boxcar creaked and groaned, shivered and shook and rattled and complained. - Catching that fast freight to Kalamazoo was the most exciting adventure of my life."

"I begged food from butchers, bakers and grocers. I learned where the soup lines and flop houses were, as well as who put out the best chow. In some cities, Sally's - The Salvation Army - was good; in other places, Volly's - Volunteers of America - dished out the best meals. The brothers of the road passed this information along the jungle grapevine.

"The jungle was generally a clearing in a clump of bushes not far from the tracks. Some jungles were nothing more than a place for a camp fire; some had improvised cooking arrangements, crates and boxes to sit on, even mattresses to flop down.

"One of our finest jungles was in Sandusky, Ohio, not far from the B&O (Baltimore and Ohio) tracks. Located beside a delightful brook with red and gold carp, this jungle was a mecca for road weary bums.

"The camp fire blazed high; the sparks shot up and became stars. Fireflies lit up the perimeter of the jungle. The stew pot was on; water from the brook was boiling. The hobos began to empty their pockets in preparation for a Mulligan stew. Do you know what goes into a Mulligan stew? I'll tell you what goes into a Mulligan stew! Whatever anybody has in his pocket, that's what you put into a Mulligan.

"One 'bo has an onion, he pinched from a fruit market; another has several potatoes and an ear of corn leased from a farmer's field. Edible greens are gathered and contributed to the pottage: Dandelions and sour dock; wild leeks and onions. Sometimes pigweed is found in abundance.

"Some bits and pieces of meat. A handful of navy beans carried in a pocket for a month. Cast every bean into the pot, along with a smattering of Bull Durham tobacco and lint.

"Dip in with your cans, men. Eat heartily and with bellies full take your ease and drowse.

"We sit around the glowing coals and swap tall tales of the road. Some of the 'bos drink bay rum or Sterno. Many talk of home and loved ones and the positions they held before the collapse of their world.

"As they leave the jungle to travel on, one fact they know for sure. Somewhere down the line another pot of Mulligan will be brewing, and tired, dirty, ragged and whiskered, they'll come to sit by the fire."

Leslie E. Paul, Seattle, Washington
Leslie E. Paul's vivid memories of leaving home in the summer of 1933 begin on the back porch of his house in Duluth. He was 18 years old, newly graduated from high school, the son and stepson of railroad men.

"I stepped off the porch and turned right. My eyes searched for the one-armed railroad dick, who'd threatened to arrest me the next time I trespassed on railroad property. I was relieved when I didn't see him.

"I stepped from tie to tie, past the cinder pit and around the turntable. High school had been out a week, but I recognized a string of boxcars that had been there for days. I walked past the last boxcar, one hundred yards on to a pile of switch ties that stood parallel to the tracks. Each day for two weeks, going to school and coming home, I'd wondered what was in the bundle lying on the pile.

"I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a blanket sewn together to make a sleeping bag. A hobo had dropped it there.

"I knew then what I must do. It was the Depression; there was no work. I was a burden to Mother and Gus, my step-father. I took the blanket and hurried home. I said nothing to Mother then, only that I was going down to Scott's to get a flat fifty box of cigarettes. Ordinarily I was reluctant to add to the delinquent account; today I found abundant courage. Besides the tin of cigarettes, I asked for two sacks of Golden Grain. 'Charge it,' I said. Scott looked taken aback but said nothing.

"I returned home and told Mother I was leaving. She didn't fight it, but she was sad. Mother owned no suitcase or tote. All she had was a black satin bag, the size of a pillow case. I jammed my new sleeping bag inside it, three or four pairs of socks, shorts, an old sweater, the cigarettes and sacks of Golden Grain.

"Mother made two sandwiches. She went to her purse and gave me all the money she had: 72 cents.

"I gave Mother a big kiss and a long, tight hug. She said nothing, but the tears streamed down her face. I turned and left, the black satin bag over my shoulder. Had I been brave enough, I would've been coward enough to go back.

"I stopped at the roundhouse and found Gus working on one of the engines. Gus hadn't really been a father, but I owed him a lot. I had a roof over my head and there was always something to eat. I shook his hand and said goodbye.

"The freight yard was a terminal for trains going to Canada. My best bet was to go to Carleton, 19 miles away. The easiest way to get there was to walk.

"I crossed the tracks, climbed the fence and started up the hill to the highway. I turned around at the top. The tears came then, and one sob. The second one I swallowed. Every boy becomes a man, some younger, some older. I was eighteen and one week. Was I leaving little for nothing?"

"D.L." Young, Youngtown, Arizona
"D.L." Young was the son of Texas sharecroppers, one of 11 children living on a 100-acre cotton farm near Fairlie, east Texas. In December 1934, when "D.L." was 18, six feet tall and all of 125 pounds, he hopped a train to Gainesville. At a New Year's Eve party, "D.L." met brown-eyed, brown-haired Thelma Jones, who was fourteen-and-a-half. Smitten at first sight, "D.L." began to hop the rails with a new purpose, courting Thelma all that winter and summer too.

"With the consent of our parents, Thelma and I married in April 1935. We had to borrow the money to get our license. We didn't know where our next meal would come from, but we really loved each other and had courage to believe we could make a living.

Our first job was with Hubert Hansly at Wolfe City, Texas. Thelma and I cut a rick of wood for 25 cents each. It took us all day. We lived on $3.00 a week.

"We'd ride the freights to visit Thelma's folks at Gainesviile. Thelma put on overalls, a boy's shirt and a cap. On one trip, we climbed into a boxcar with two hobos, who were drinking white lightning from a fruit jar. We went to the back of the car and sat near an old colored man. The hobos got a little loud with their cuss words. The colored guy spoke out, telling them there was a lady in the boxcar; they were to stop their bad words. They did.

"It was day-light, when we got to Tom Bean City. The conductor and brakeman told everybody to get out of the boxcar and leave the right of way. The old colored man motioned for Thelma and me to move into the corner. The brakeman was short and couldn't see us. When we jumped off at Sherman, you should've seen the faces of the conductor and brakeman.

"By June 1937, we had a baby boy. We were having a real hard time, cropping cotton for one dollar a day, and picking cotton for 50 cents a hundred pounds. We saved our first 50 dollars, which we put in the bank at Wolfe City.

"We didn't own a car. Everywhere we went; we walked, hitch-hiked or rode boxcars. When our baby was four months old, we took him on his first boxcar ride to see my parents at Fairlie. We lived north of Wolfe City, 20 miles away, our house a mile from the tracks.

"The engine pulled 20 cars on a small high grade, going about 7 miles an hour. Thelma climbed into a boxcar. I ran along the right of way with the baby and handed it to her. Then I hopped in with them.

"When we got to Fairlie, it began to rain. My parents' house was two to three miles away; because of the muddy roads and cold rain, we stayed at the depot. We found everything locked up. We took the baby into the outhouse. I tore apart some cardboard boxes and put them over the seats. It was cold and damp inside, but we kept dry.

"We stayed at the depot for about five hours, until the freight came back on its way to Sherman. We sure rejoiced when we saw the headlight of the train.

"Nearly 50 years later, my brown-eyed girl and I went back to see the places where we used to catch the boxcars. We found they'd torn up the rails and had built highway #11, from Commerce, TX to Sherman, TX."

What a Cruel Thing to do on Mother's Day

Claude Franklin, Kerrville, Texas
Wanderlust drove Claude Franklin, 13, his brother, Charles, 16, and their buddy, Robert Brookshire, also 13, to run away from their Fort Worth, Texas homes on Sunday, May 8, 1938.

"The Great Depression still plagued the entire United States. My family was having a hard time making ends meet, but I wasn't unhappy with my home life. I'd developed a wanderlust, hearing my two oldest brothers talk about riding freight trains to other states.

"The night before our departure, we put our extra clothes in paper sacks, sneaked them out of the house and buried them under bushes. We didn't want to carry a bundle or bag. That would be a dead giveaway.

"We set out after church on Sunday, and headed for the Texas and Pacific Railroad yards on the west side of Fort Worth.

"We knew our mothers would be worried sick, but we didn't leave a note. We didn't want them to stop us. What a cruel thing to do on Mother's Day!"

"My father had raised cotton in Mississippi. We decided we would go down to the Mississippi Delta, where we'd heard the cotton was tall and easy to pick. We saw ourselves making a pile of money. We took the Cotton Belt Line through East Texas and Arkansas. At Brinkley we switched to the Frisco Line and continued on to Memphis, Tennessee; then down to Mississippi.

"We got to Cleveland in the Mississippi Delta. Mama's younger brother, Tom, lived near the town of Pace, where people knew him as 'Bill Butler.' The law was after him for bootlegging. We had supper with Uncle Tom and his wife, Agnes. They knew we were just bumming around and didn't give us a warm reception. They weren't anxious to have three dirty boys, who'd been riding freight trains stay with them. We left as soon as we'd eaten dinner.

"We found a farm a few miles from Cleveland, where they needed cotton pickers. We asked for jobs and they said, 'OK, 75 cents a 100 pounds.' They'd a room where we could sleep and a lady who would feed us. We'd pay $10 a week, which would be taken out of our earnings.

"The next morning we went out to pick cotton. My back began to ache in 30 minutes. It didn't take much longer before my fingers became sore, with pricks and scratches from the cotton burrs.

"Cotton picking was hard work! When you get a good quantity of cotton in your bag, you take it down to the end of row where they have a scale and a wagon. You go back and start again. Your back gets stiff and sore. You have to stand up and stretch and all this time you aren't picking. If you aren't picking, you aren't making any money.

"A good picker would weigh up 40 or 50 pounds; my bag would be about 30 to 35 pounds. It took several weigh-ins for me to reach 100 pounds. At the end of the day, I had 150 or 160 pounds.

"Mid-morning on Friday, we'd had enough. We didn't know how many pounds we'd picked because we hadn't kept track ourselves. We thought that at noon we'd weigh up and ask them to pay us off. They paid on Saturday, but we figured that if we got them to give us our money on Friday, we'd take it and leave without paying for our room and board.

"They weren't dumb enough to let us get away with anything like that. When we told them we were quitting, the man said OK. He added up our weigh-ins and multiplied them by 75 cents per hundred. Then he hit us with a bombshell: 'Now, boys, we have to take out for your room and board.'

"Charles had 55 cents coming, I had 35 cents, and Robert was a nickel in the hole.

"We made our way back to Cleveland, Mississippi and caught a train for Memphis. By now it was late October, the nights were getting cold; we were growing weary of sleeping in boxcars, cotton gins and under bridges. We decided to head home."

Weaver Dial, Seattle, WashingtonWeaver Dial's first ride in 1929 took the 12-year-old over the Cascade Mountains. He left Seattle with his friend, Emmy, at 11 one night; the roving boys reached the Auburn yards at 2, and began the eight-hour haul over the mountains shortly afterwards.

"There were no 'empties' going east of the Cascades. My friend Emmy and I clambered aboard a cattle car that was carrying a load of wooden blocks. We set about arranging the blocks, making a reclining chair on top of the pile. This was to be our seat, our comforter, our bed, for the next eight hours.

"Other passengers had already clued us in on a long tunnel ahead. Built in 1888 (an easy date for me to remember, as my mother was born that year), the tunnel avoided the 20-feet snow banks on the higher elevations. It cut over five miles from the old switch-back grade.

Steam era freight locomotive roars down the rails"It took two steam engines to propel the long string of cars through the tunnel. The front engine was puffing black smoke for all it was worth, with pungent fumes and lots of fire.

"By the time we got our bandannas over our noses, Emmy and I needed no flashlight to tell us that hot cinders were setting our clothes on fire. We kept busy extinguishing the hot embers, and sweating something fierce on top of the woodpile, as close as we could get to the roof of the tunnel.

"Let me tell you, that was a long ride. When we finally pulled out of that dark hole, our clothes were scorched, our faces black and grimy. We breathed the fresh mountain air, and life looked better.

"The helper engine disconnected and we began the run down the mountains. I'd never been east of the Cascades. It was a real eye-opener. When the train made a stop, I picked my first apricot off a tree. It gave me the feeling that I was in Arabia!

"This was my first trip and a memorable one. For the next eight years, I spent my summers as a guest of the railroads. I was out to see America and what I could get out of it."

On his travels, Weaver Dial and his friends had repeated run-ins with gun-toting railroad bulls, who taught them lessons they never learned in school.

"In San Francisco, we rode the back of a passenger train right into the depot. We'd just stepped off the coal tender, when we heard a voice, 'Stop, or I'll shoot!'

"Two railroad bulls hauled my partner, and I into a sub-station, and went through our wallets. After some lengthy questioning, they fined us $10. We only had three bucks between the two of us. They told us to get the hell out of there!

"We thought the San Francisco bulls were shakedown artists, until we hopped a freight out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. As the train began to crawl out of the yards, we took note that 'bos were scrambling off the boxcars. A railroad bull was walking down the top of the boxcars, checking for passengers hiding between the cars. Another bull was on the right side, and one more covering the left. Nobody rode that one out of Cheyenne.

"A gloom set over the would-be riders, until some jungle professor got the word out that you could catch the next train nine miles up the road. The grade was steep and the train had to slow down at a bridge. All began the trek up the nine-mile hill. Some had large packs on their backs, with sleeping gear and cooking pots. A farmer let us drink our fill of water at his well, and we made the rendezvous at the bridge.

"Several hours went by. I passed the time doing some cartooning in charcoal under the bridge. 'Here she comes!' somebody yelled.

"All hands scrambled for a boarding position along the tracks. Uneasiness set in when we spotted the engine had a helper. Two engines! She roared past us in a cloud of dust, and nobody was fool enough to grab for the iron ladders. A fireman waved from the engine cab, and showed us a mouthful of teeth, giving us the old Wyoming horse laugh.

"Some of the 'bos threw rocks at the jeering comedian. I saved my energy for the nine-mile walk back downgrade to the Cheyenne railroad yards."

Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression

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web page creator software Berkeley N. Hackett, St. Petersburg, Florida Berkeley Hackett made his first trip in 1929 at 13, riding with his stepfather from Flint, Michigan to Kalamazoo to get a summer job working in a coal yard at 25 cents an hour.

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Hobo Code - FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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During the Great Depression jobs were hard to come by so many young people in their late teens and early 20s ‘took to the rails’ and traveled from town to town by hopping slow moving trains. Hobos were honest, hardworking young people who would do odd jobs – rake leaves, paint barns and houses, chop wood, pick fruit and so forth in exchange for a good meal and a safe place to sleep. Because they were always entering new and unfamiliar places with unknown dangers, Hobos developed their own special code to communicate and warn each other of dangers and opportunities.

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Christo, Renowned Environmental Artist, Dies at 84

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The legendary artist was known for surreal environmental works, completed with his late wife Jeanne-Claude, that inspired visitors to travel in droves.

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Van life and nomadic living: how to be comfortable without a building to call your own

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Nomadism is an ancient global practise, but with ‘wheel estate’ and ‘van life’ on the rise, we take a look at the modern nomads of today, and their reasons for adopting a non-conventional life on the move

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Just a few days ago, a humble herd of cattle roamed the open plains without a care in the world. But beneath the rumble and whir of I-35 traffic Saturday morning, the more than 100 longhorns selected for San Antonio's annual Western Heritage Parade and Cattle Drive realized they were about to be true city slickers.

Their hesitant clip and clop over Houston Street's unfamiliar concrete landscape quickly evened out into a dignified strut, as the speckled brown, white, and burnt-orange beasts tried to outdo each other in showing off their Texas pride.

They weren't alone. Between stage coaches and covered wagons, cowboys sported their finest chaps and escaramuzas draped their frilled dresses over well-groomed Palominos. Lasso girls and bagpipers entertained the morning crowds, while clowns bedazzled in stars and stripes provoked hearty chuckles. Near the end of the parade, horses the size of German Shepherds flourished their manes.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Sara Mahaffy of Laredo as Marine Corps servicemen on horseback passed.

In town to visit family, Mahaffy and her son were pleasantly surprised by the various portions of the parade.

In an annual crowd-pleaser, four industrious border collies kept a small flock of sheep in a tight cluster. Behind them, the crowd erupted in cheers as volunteers scooped fresh manure off the street.

"That's the first time I've ever seen so many longhorns coming out at once," said San Antonio native Jesse Ramirez, who brought his family to the parade for the first time. "... We'll definitely come out here next year to check it out."

Marking the beginning of the city's three-week Stock Show and Rodeo, the Western Heritage Parade and Cattle Drive has attracted thousands to Houston Street since it kicked off nine years ago.

Established in 1949, the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo has grown far beyond a showcase of Texas agricultural heritage. Its horse show, livestock show, and rodeo feature dozens of events each. The rodeo also includes a carnival and concerts by country favorites like Willie Nelson, John Fogerty, and Rascal Flatts.

According to the rodeo's website, the event attracts 2 million people to San Antonio each year.

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Texas Longhorns Tackle Downtown's Concrete Cattle Trail

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More than 100 longhorns selected for the annual Western Heritage Parade and Cattle Drive wove through downtown San Antonio Saturday morning.

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