Anatomy of a Zoom background

So now that I am teaching again and appearing on a lot of podcasts with video components, I have had a lot of questions about the room (my home office) that I sit in when I am in front of my computer’s camera. I will have to admit that I thought about buying one of those room dividers or a green screen, but in the end I decided to clean up the space and decorate my bookshelves with some of my favorite things. A few notable items in the background:

Two of my favorite typewriters on top of the bookshelves: my 1930s Urania QWETZ typewriter from Dresden on the right and my 1950s Model T Groma typewriter (from the former GDR) on the left. There is a bust of David on the floor (who will beat the Goliath of capitalism eventually), hiding some storage boxes hidden between the corners of the bookshelves. There is a framed and signed photo of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, given to me by the late Elena Lagadinova, as well as an unframed photo of Alexandra Kollontai. I still have my original Rubik’s Cube from the 1980s (designed by a Hungarian architect during the Cold War) and a variety of books on various utopian movements and ideologies. On my walls are a poster of the Acropolis in Athens and the Oxford Cartographers World History Timeline that I have often lectured and written about. The big plant behind me is a fake one that adds a little depth to the room.

It’s not the most exciting background, but I feel like it is at least visually more interesting than a paper screen.

Oxford Cartographers World History Timeline Map

I wrote about this map in my book and I often use it as a teaching tool in my classrooms. It is hanging in my office and today I was meditating on it as I did yoga, thinking about the inevitability of change. I am always fascinated by the sheer size of the Roman Empire (the height represents the geographic territory it covered and the width represents the years of its existence). When I look at this I always imagine what it must have been like to be alive in the year that it collapsed. And then I look at the USA, a little purple rectangle in the lower right hand corner of the map. How small our history and influence is in comparison. And I wonder if we too will just end one day like so many other empires in human history. Having spent most of my adult life studying the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 20th century, this seems more like a real possibility to me than to most other Americans who too often take our nation and its institutions for granted.

The full World History Timeline from Oxford Cartographers hanging on my office wall

A detail of the Roman Empire, the large orange shape that dominates the whole map. It existed for centuries and then it just fell.

Here in the lower right had corner is a little purple rectangle for the USA. On this map it seems so insignificant.