SUMMARY: Spectacular giant statues evoke history and mystery on Easter Island, a place that has symbolized what humans can achieve and then destroy. Now everywhere you look on the island, home to about 6,000 residents, there are signs of coastal erosion and dangers of climate change. As part of our series Culture at Risk, Jeffrey Brown reports on efforts to document and preserve their heritage.
SUMMARY: Protests in South Africa over a statue of a 19th century diamond magnate and colonial conqueror set off a national debate two years ago about the remnants of apartheid? As part of his ongoing series, Culture at Risk, Jeffrey Brown reports on the symbols and monuments in South Africa's past that are still being fought over today.
SUMMARY: What's online doesn't necessarily last forever. Content on the Internet is revised and deleted all the time. Hyperlinks “rot,” and with them goes history, lost in space. With that in mind, Brewster Kahle set out to develop the Internet Archive, a digital library with the mission of preserving all the information on the World Wide Web, for all who wish to explore. Jeffrey Brown reports.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): We're increasingly cataloging our lives online, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, seemingly endless YouTube videos. It's a digital-first and often digital-only world.
The advantages of this unlimited digital storage seem obvious, but how permanent are some of those records? How do we preserve digital history?
Jeffrey Brown has the story, part of our ongoing series Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): So, this is like an ancient temple come to life in a modern age.
BREWSTER KAHLE, Founder, Internet Archive: In a modern day. It's a Greek-style building, which we loved, because the whole idea is the Library of Alexandria reborn now.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's an ancient idea, to gather and preserve the world's knowledge. But now that library will look like this.
These stacks of servers, Brewster Kahle told me recently, represent a 20-year and running effort to build a kind of digital library, and to essentially back up the ever-expanding World Wide Web.
BREWSTER KAHLE: In one of these would be 100 years of a channel of television. Or this much is all of the words in the Library of Congress.
We need to be able to preserve our digital history.
JEFFREY BROWN: Kahle was an early Internet entrepreneur who in 1996 founded the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that operates out of an old Christian Science church in San Francisco.
It was designed to address a fundamental flaw in the original creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
BREWSTER KAHLE: The wonder of it is, it's very, very simple. Anybody could go and set up a web server on their computer and make it available to the world.
Unfortunately, it's too simple. It's fragile, that if something happens to that piece of equipment, that Web site just, blink, is gone.
JEFFREY BROWN: If it's online, it lives forever, right? Well, no.
Kahle says the average lifespan of a Web page is just 92 days. Information is altered and deleted all the time for all kinds of reasons.
A 2013 Harvard study, for example, found that half the hyperlinks in Supreme Court cases, today's equivalent of footnotes, are broken, a phenomena known as link rot. Government agencies remove documents, and companies fail, and with them the sites they host. Think of GeoCities, Yahoo! Video, and, more recently, the news site Gawker.
ABBY SMITH RUMSEY, Author, “When We Are No More”: People mistake the fact that the Internet is ubiquitous with the fact that it's permanent.
JEFFREY BROWN: Abby Smith Rumsey is the author of “When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.”
She began her scholarly career studying how information was purposely deleted in the totalitarian Soviet system. These days, she thinks, we have a new kind of storage and retrieval problem.
ABBY SMITH RUMSEY: It isn't permanent at all. And, in fact, the thing about digital technology is, you can inscribe something onto a computer, but you can't put it on a shelf and expect to pick it out at random at 50, let alone 500, years, and be able to read it.
In fact, you won't have the hardware or the software to do that. So, it's very fragile, indeed.
SUMMARY: Downtown Nashville has been a backbone of the nation's music industry for more than six decades, giving the nation stars such as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. But the increasing demand for new apartments and office buildings is threatening its historic music spaces. Jeffrey Brown reports on the city's struggle to find a balance between preserving history and making room for the future.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Nashville often likes to refer to itself as Music City. And given its history and heritage, that seems just right.
But as real estate development explodes in one of the nation's fastest growing cities, some of the very studios, locations and neighborhoods that were so important to country music, and the industry as a whole, are now threatened.
Jeffrey Brown reports. It's part of his ongoing series on Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Inside an unassuming house on Nashville's 16th Avenue South, guitarist Philip Shouse is laying down a track at the recording studio 'House of David.' Meanwhile, just up the road, the punk rock group Paramore is recording percussion in 'RCA Studio A' for the group's forthcoming album.
It's just another day on Music Row, the collection of recording studios, publishing houses and offices two miles southwest of downtown Nashville and its famous honky-tonks, and the place collectively responsible for an important part of the nation's music industry.
TAYLOR YORK, Paramore: From, like, the early days even to present, there's been such an amazing group of people that have recorded here, you know, and when you walk into a room, you really can feel an energy and an inspiration.
JEFFREY BROWN: It all began in the 1950s, with Owen and Harold Bradley, brothers who opened a recording studio in a converted home in this part of town.
Other studios, like Capitol, Decca, and RCA Victor followed; and in 1957, RCA victor's Nashville division, headed by Chet Atkins, opened 'Studio B,' where Elvis Presley would record many of his most famous hits.
A few years later, in 1963, 'Studio A' was built next door. And between the two, the likes of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton, and many more recorded hit records.
With the studios came the musicians, the publishers, the lawyers and others, a clustering that created a music industry.
CAROLYN BRACKETT, National Trust for Historic Preservation: All of those are still here. And so you still have that sense of community.
JEFFREY BROWN: Carolyn Bracket is a Nashville native with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
CAROLYN BRACKETT: It's something that we have maybe taken for granted, because you can walk by these buildings or drive by a lot of them and not realize that this incredible music was made in that old house or in this small building.
And so a lot of the work that we have done in the last couple of years has been to document the history of Music Row all the way up to the present, what's happening here today.
SUMMARY: Four years ago, 16 holy tombs in Timbuktu, dating back to the 14th century, were demolished in an attack by Islamic militants. In the first-ever war crimes trial for cultural destruction, one of the men involved admitted his guilt and voiced regret at the International Criminal Court. Jeffrey Brown talks with DePaul University's Patty Gerstenblith for more on the challenges of prosecuting these crimes.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It's a first for the International Criminal Court at The Hague, a trial dealing with the destruction of cultural heritage.
It's over the deliberate wrecking in 2012 of historic earthen buildings and religious shrines in the West African nation of Mali.
Jeffrey Brown has the story. It's part of our ongoing series Culture at Risk.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Sixty holy tombs dating back to the 14th century, all reduced to rubble in a wave of violence unleashed on Timbuktu by Islamist militants four years ago.
Today, one of those responsible stood in front of the International Criminal Court and admitted his guilt.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI, Former Islamist militant (through translator): I regret all the damage that my actions have caused. I regret what I have caused to my family, my community in Timbuktu, what I have caused my home nation, Mali.
JEFFREY BROWN: Prosecutors say Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi directed the destruction of nine mausoleums and damage to a mosque. He'd been recruited to lead a vice squad by a group of Islamist rebels, affiliated with al-Qaida, who seized control of Northern Mali in 2012.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI (through translator): I was influenced by a group of deviant people from al-Qaida, and they were able to influence me, to carry me in their evil wave, through actions that affected the whole population.
JEFFREY BROWN: The rebels were eventually driven out by French troops in 2013. The heaps of rubble they left behind have since mostly been rebuilt with help from UNESCO.
In recent years, cultural relics across Northern Africa and the Mideast have been targeted by militant groups, most dramatically by the Islamic State at sites including the ancient cities of Palmyra, Syria, and Nimrud in Iraq. Unlike Mali, those countries are not subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Mahdi, who, in the plea bargain faces 11 years in prison, today called for an end to such acts.
AHMAD AL-FAQI AL-MAHDI (through translator): I would like to give a piece of advice to Muslims all over the world, not to get involved in the same acts I got involved in, because they are not going to lead to any good to humanity.
SUMMARY: U.S. Route 66, running 2,400 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica, was once one of the most-traveled highways in the nation; John Steinbeck referred to it as the “Mother Road.” But the rise of the Interstate Highway System led to a loss of traffic, devastating communities that relied on the route's travelers. Now, Route 66 is making a comeback, thanks to its storied past. Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It was neither the country's oldest nor longest road. For Hollywood and everyone else, Route 66 came to symbolize America, a people on the move, a lifestyle that characterized it.
Some 2,400 miles of asphalt winding through eight states from Illinois, south through the heartland, then through the Southwest to California, it's a journey that millions once took, before the nation's economy and culture underwent vast changes.
It begins here in downtown Chicago, an older American story about the open road and connecting small rural communities to big cities, and a newer story about preserving some of that cultural past for economic gain today.
Route 66 got its official designation as a national highway in 1926. For John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath,” it was the mother road, a major artery for migration during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and later for travel and tourism. But by the '70s, the federal interstate highway system had begun to take over, bypassing towns, and devastating communities along the original route, in favor of speed.
MAYOR BOB RUSSELL, Pontiac, Illinois: That was it. The stores started closing one by one. The gas stations went out of business. The restaurants went out of business. And, boy, your town starts to look really bad in a hurry.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, says Mayor Bob Russell, Pontiac, Illinois, an agricultural community of 12,000 two hours southwest of Chicago, looks pretty good.
And it's a prime example of a rebirth of Route 66 that's occurring in various parts of the country. Town leaders here decided to use the history of the famous road to their advantage, 20 large murals, a museum of Route 66 collectibles, and much more, all bringing in tourists from around the world.
They have renovated historic buildings and encouraged new mom-and-pop stores to come in.
BOB RUSSELL: This building in a couple of months will be ready for sale or lease, and we will have another business move in here. Then that generates tax revenue and it keeps us from raising our real estate taxes.
JEFFREY BROWN: And when a collector of vintage Pontiac cars was looking for a place to build a museum, Pontiac, Illinois, not Michigan, provided just the right incentives.
BOB RUSSELL: And if you watch the old 66 movies, there's always a girl involved and there's always a fast car, the Corvette or Mustang.
