Lately, I've had some doubts about the level of discourse here on Metafilter. To remedy the situation, here is that great American essayist and thinker, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe,
on diddling.
[more inside]
posted by Nomyte
on Jun 18, 2013 -
31 comments
Daguerreotype portraits were made by the model posing (often with head fixed in place with a clamp to keep it still the few minutes required) before an exposed light-sensitive silvered copper plate, which was then developed by mercury fumes and fixed with salts. This fixing however was far from permanent – like the people they captured the images too were subject to change and decay. They were extremely sensitive to scratches, dust, hair, etc, and particularly the rubbing of the glass cover if the glue holding it in place deteriorated. As well as rubbing, the glass itself can also deteriorate and bubbles of solvent explode upon the image.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Jan 8, 2013 -
17 comments
British Marxist historian and lover of jazz, Eric Hobsbawm is dead:
Guardian obit.
His key works: Industry and Empire (1968); and the "Age of" series, which he began with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, first published in 1962. Followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. And in 1987, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91, was published in 1994.
He also found time to be castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (5 March 1995). Other than the music, his choice of book was a collection of Neruda's poems and his "luxury item" was a pair of binoculars.
stream or download
posted by Mister Bijou
on Oct 1, 2012 -
53 comments
Platt Rogers Spencer was born in 1800 near the Hudson River. His family was too poor to afford paper so Spencer practiced on whatever was handy – leaves, bark, snow and sand – everything was a canvas for handwriting.
[more inside]
posted by Sara C.
on Jul 20, 2010 -
7 comments
Helen (Hunt) Jackson was an
author and an activist.
Her mom died when Helen was 14, her dad 3 years later. Helen's first child died at 11 months, her second at 10 years old. In 1879 she was
inspired after hearing Chief Standing Bear describe how the U.S. government took Native Americans' land.
She began to publish in support of Native American rights. 1881 brought her book
A Century of Dishonor [pdf], branded with the words "Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations".
In 1883, she published her most famous work,
Ramona, a novel about racial discrimination set in California.
If that's too much to take in, and now you need some kitties, she's still got you covered.
Letters from a Cat (1879) is being featured at
Archive.org today.
[more inside]
posted by cashman
on Aug 25, 2008 -
7 comments
Women Explorers and Travellers of Asia and the Middle East - In an age where women struggled for basic human rights, these individuals were literal trailblazers. Leaving their homelands for varying motivations (but often due to dissatisfaction with their social lot in life), they devoted their lives to "explore these
antique lands before they are irretrievably caught up in the cacaphonic whirl of the modern world."
[more inside]
posted by ikahime
on Aug 1, 2008 -
10 comments
Photographs of the dancers, actresses, cafe-life figures and prostitutes who were the subjects of Toulouse Lautrec's paintings, including such luminaries as
Sarah Bernhardt, "
La Goulue" (Louise Weber;
remember this?), and
Jane Avril, who was the model for
this last, iconic, Lautrec poster. View pages of the art matched up with photos,
here,
here, and
here, and
go to this page to rummage around in even more collections that include photos of Lautrec, his friends and family, street and location scenes, and lots of other tidbits.
[Spanish language site; NUDITY]
posted by taz
on Jul 5, 2007 -
10 comments
The Third View project is a fascinating presentation of "rephotographs" of over 100 historic landscape sites in the American West that presents original 19th-century survey photographs, photographed again in the 1970s, then once again in the '90s - from the original vantage points, under similar lighting conditions, at (roughly) the same time of day and year.
[Flash, and you'll probably need to allow pop-ups; a little more info inside...]
posted by taz
on Jun 15, 2007 -
13 comments
To witness the decline of the Enlightenment in American culture, one could do worse than to begin by examining the case of Jane C. Rider, the "Springfield Somnambulist."
With the decline of the Enlightenment rose the
pseudo-science of
mesmerism, both as a way to cure the mentally ill and as a stage attraction. Given the submissive nature of mesmerism, it occasionally led to abuses, both
real and
imagined. [more inside]
posted by strikhedonia
on Jul 22, 2005 -
4 comments
Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary Containing over 3000 pages the Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary was billed as
A description of tools, instruments, machines, processes and engineering; history of inventions; general technological vocabulary. Published in 1876 it is a great resource for those trying to figure out how things were done in the time of our great (great?) grand parents. Ilustrations,
upwards of 5000 engravings, include a ride inside
monocycle,
trestle bridges,
compound microscope,
clod crushers,
washing machines,
spoke driver,
hydraulic wagon-tipper, and a
farmers tool-house. Warning: the book has been scanned in and all the item links are to 100-150K images.
posted by Mitheral
on Jan 12, 2005 -
10 comments
Arctic Blue Books Online - 'a searchable, World-Wide Web version of Andrew Taylor's unique index to the 19th Century British Parliamentary Papers concerned with the Canadian Arctic. '
posted by plep
on Dec 28, 2004 -
2 comments
