THE PEACE SIGN | The Upside-Down Truth: Goya, Holtom, and the Gesture That Would Not Die | Madrid 1808 | London 1958 | San Francisco 1967
About this audiobook
The true story of the peace sign. Three voices. Three centuries. One gesture that would not die.
You are the end point of an unbroken chain of survival. Everything that happened between humanity's beginning and this moment is the story of the making of you.
Madrid, 1808. London, 1958. San Francisco, 1967.
The peace sign is the most recognized symbol in human history. Almost no one knows it was drawn upside down.
What did the woman on that hill in Madrid see — and spend the rest of her life telling?
What does it cost to draw the honest version of despair and give it to the world?
When you turn the symbol upright — what changes?
Gerald Holtom designed it in 1958, in deep despair about nuclear weapons. He drew it in the manner of a Goya painting — The Third of May 1808. The man in the painting has his arms raised above his head. The symbol has the arms pointing toward the earth.
The form had been called the death of man for two thousand years. A generation wore it as a symbol of love. Both were true simultaneously.
For the rest of his life, Holtom drew only the upright version privately. He asked that it be on his tombstone. His wish was not honored.
They carried a gesture forward across 159 years without knowing it.
NARRATED BY:
Leoni Fergata — Act One: Madrid, 1808
Tessa Ferguson — Act Two: London, 1958
Kurt Sterling — Act Three: San Francisco, 1967
The Upside-Down Truth — part of the Beyond His Story We Stand series — a chronological journey through human history, told through the people official history forgot.
For homeschooling families, this series was written for you.
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About the author
Michael McGilbourne is a father, a traveller, and a believer that geography is history — that you cannot stand on ancient ground without feeling the past rise through the soles of your feet. He writes because storytelling is the oldest profession humanity has ever practised, and because his children deserve to know that the past was made by people exactly like them.
