Devin Thomas O'Shea

The Turner Halls were started, I'm going to say a bunch, maybe some German stuff, and I'm not a German speaker, so please have mercy.

One of the funnier things in the archive from this is just how many early photographs of Turner Halls are of guys doing a big human pyramid in their white uniforms.

Just, like, showing off what me and the fellas can do, you know?

Thurnvater Jan is sort of like the founder, and that just means like turnfather.

He started the first turnplats as a reaction against Napoleon, as you do, you know?

There's a big fear, especially for Jan, that German culture is going to be extinguished, and so he starts these athletic gyms under the philosophy of gut heil, which means good health.

The whole object was to preserve German culture, get in shape, you know, use the pommel horse, however you're supposed to do that, and have a sort of strength that's going to, like, weather the storm of Napoleonic tyranny.

There's not only, get this, not only a pommel horse, there's not only the rings and the parallel bars, but there's also like a lecture hall.

Some of them, most of them had a bar in them to drink a bunch of beer after you were done working out.

As you should get a little rowdy with it.

And this is a community social technology for like centralizing a bunch of things a local community would need.

And that, in fact, turns out to breed revolutionary fervor.

As the 1848 revolutions are approaching...

The Turner Halls become these like revolutionary meeting halls.

And so a lot of the early communist and socialist Germans, this is socialism contemporary with Karl Marx, they start meeting and talking about how we got to get rid of this archduke.

The king is sort of an a**hole, you know, that kind of thing.

One of the most interesting things about the group is that they are abolitionists.

And the theory that set off the 48 revolutions is that you and I and everyone else are born equal.

And they were very pro the US Constitution and the idea of a democracy and universal suffrage.

This was very much a philosophical, moral struggle against the slave power in the United States.