Forty Thanksgivings ago Alcatraz Island was occupied by a number of Native American activists as a protest. The occupation lasted until June of 1971 The best place to learn about it is PBS's website for Alcatraz Is Not an Island, Jim Fortier's documentary about the Alcatraz Occupation. Besides an overview of the events it has video interviews with the people involved. [RealPlayer required] Here are photographs of the occupation, mostly from newspapers. For a flavor of how the local media covered the events, here's the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive's Occupation of Alcatraz Collection which has over 40 contemporary newsreports [MPEG4]
posted by Kattullus on Nov 26, 2009 - 10 comments

A treasure trove of gay and lesbian documentaries to watch online. Our course begins with a brief overview. (9m05s) [more inside]
posted by hippybear on Nov 23, 2009 - 38 comments

Dr. E.L. Skip Knox teaches history at Boise State University. His online courses have dedicated websites with his lectures and plenty of supporting material. There are five, History of Western Civilization, covering the wide sweep of European history from ancient Athens to Copernicus, The Crusades, Europe in the Late Middle Ages, focusing on the the Renaissance, and Europe in the Age of Reformation. You can also go on a Virtual Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in medieval times. Dr. Knox has written extensively about online teaching including a lecture called The Rewards of Teaching On-Line where he explains his methods and shares his experiences.
posted by Kattullus on Nov 23, 2009 - 7 comments

Thanksgiving is a difficult time for some people to celebrate. The holiday that Lincoln gave us has been saddled with a wonderful mythology. The real story is a bit more problematic, and involves a vicious, genocidal war. Is it possible to reclaim the beauty of this holiday, or is it too tainted by its history? [more inside]
posted by cubby on Nov 22, 2009 - 135 comments

The development blog for the original Prince of Persia from Jordan Mechner.
posted by loquacious on Nov 22, 2009 - 31 comments

The History of Economic Thought Website contains a wealth of information on the many schools of thought in the history of economics and the issues they grappled with.
posted by moorooka on Nov 18, 2009 - 13 comments

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee. 17 Things Worth Knowing About Your Cat. The MotherF**king Pterodactyl. These and various other amusements courtesy of The Oatmeal.
posted by brain_drain on Nov 18, 2009 - 30 comments

Envisioning Chinese Society in the Late Nineteenth Century: Words and Images from the Dianshizhai Pictorial Very nice online presentation of translated content from the famed nineteenth century Shanghai pictorial journal (China's first); Dianshizhai (点石斋画报) was modelled on Britain's Punch and produced as a supplement for Shen Bao subscribers. Flash is used so elements in the cartoons can be clicked for further information: a young woman repels a thief with martial derring-do; a customer bilks on the bill in a street eatery in Hangzhou; small-town society and politics with the muddle-headed magistrate; a non-performing temple bell offers a chance for sceptical commentary on religion; the gentlemanly pastime of cricket-fighting.
posted by Abiezer on Nov 17, 2009 - 4 comments

Doll Kind :: Dolls of the 20th Century - A Celebration in Pictures and Histories
posted by anastasiav on Nov 16, 2009 - 20 comments

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell [more inside]
posted by Miko on Nov 16, 2009 - 59 comments

Charles Van Schaick was a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin in the late 19th and early 20th Century. His work was made famous by Michael Lesy in the book Wisconsin Death Trip in which the photographs were juxtaposed with local newsreports of murder, suicide, disease, insanity, animal mutilation and other calamities plus the occasional non-morbid event. Flickr set of photos used in Wisconsin Death Trip. Some of the texts from Wisconsin Death Trip. Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lesy about Wisconsin Death Trip and other things. Over 2500 photographs by Charles Van Schaick owned by The Wisconsin Historical Society. [Warning: Some of the photographs are of deceased infants]
posted by Kattullus on Nov 15, 2009 - 20 comments

History of a New York Block. A nearly complete record of the life cycle of Eldridge St between Stanton/Rivington. Click on the buildings for details. [more inside]
posted by minkll on Nov 15, 2009 - 21 comments

In 2010, Obama will have a miserable year, NATO may lose in Afghanistan, the UK gets a regime change, China needs to chill, India's factories will overtake its farms, Europe risks becoming an irrelevant museum, the stimulus will need an exit strategy, the G20 will see a challenge from the "G2", African football will unite Korea, conflict over natural resources will grow, Sarkozy will be unloved and unrivalled, the kids will come together to solve the world's problems (because their elders are unable), technology will grow ever more ubiquitous, we'll all charge our phones via USB, MBAs will be uncool, the Space Shuttle will be put to rest, and Somalia will be the worst country in the world. And so the Tens begin.

The Economist: The World in 2010. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Nov 14, 2009 - 60 comments

Animated Stereoviews of Meiji Japan [more inside]
posted by BuddhaInABucket on Nov 13, 2009 - 37 comments

Mefi's own Jason Scott (jscott) wants to raise $25,000 using waxy's Kickstarter to work full-time on computer history. He made BBS documentary (previously), founded the Archive Team, and owns textfiles.com (previously) and, yes, sockington. So far, 237 people have pledged $20,340. On Nov. 4, Jason did a 5-hours, non-stop Scottathon. Apparently, fundraising ain't easy. [more inside]
posted by Monday, stony Monday on Nov 8, 2009 - 38 comments

Past Tense is a publishing project exploring London radical history. Their website has texts telling us about William Cuffay, the black Chartist tried and transported for levying war against Queen Victoria; an account of an early instance of women's organised labour struggle during the 1908 Corruganza box-makers strike; the drunken uproar of the 18th-century elections for the spurious Mayor of Garratt, really putting the 'mock' into 'mock election'; a yeoman farmer in Kett's Great Rebellion of 1549; the burning of the Albion Mills; and much more, including some walking tours to locations linked to radical history in various parts of the metropolis.
posted by Abiezer on Nov 8, 2009 - 7 comments

Take your nose on a stroll down memory lane with vintage perfumery. The Vintage Perfume Vault features fragrance reviews and articles on perfume history. Perfume Shrine offers articles on perfumery including essays on the science of fragrance and aroma materials, interviews with perfumers and industry professionals, trend-watching. Inspiration in Perfumery profiles Henri Robert, Andre Fraysse, Ernest Beaux and Edmond Roudnitska. More about olfactory delights from 1000 Fragrances. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Nov 6, 2009 - 24 comments

The Gecko Wears A Tiara [via mefi projects] Sumarian proverbs. Compare those with the 1600BCE Ashubanipal proverbs and Proverbs From the Ancient Egyptian Temples and indeed, modern Iraq and Arabic more generally. Enjoy, culture geeks. [more inside]
posted by jaduncan on Nov 6, 2009 - 32 comments

Enheduanna was a priestess and poet in the city of Ur in the 23rd century BC and supposedly the daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad. She is the first author known by name. Here are a number of her poems in English translation, The Exaltation of Inana, Inana and Ebih, A Hymn to Inana, The Temple Hymns and A Balbale to Nanna. Here are two alternate translations of The Exaltation of Inana, one by James D. Pritchard and an English rendering of Dr. Annette Zgoll's German translation. If you want to learn more, go to The En-hedu-Ana Research Pages.
posted by Kattullus on Nov 5, 2009 - 27 comments

From The Titusville Morning Herald of June 17, 1866, "Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col. Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo. ... The torpedo... is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it. ... The object of the torpedo is to clean out all the deposits at the bottom of the well."
In the western Pennsylvania oilfields of the second half of the 1800s, "shooters" were men who set off nitroglycerin charges in wells to get the oil flowing again. Tales of Destruction relates stories and legends of this absurdly hazardous job. Additional notes here, in Samuel Pees's Oil History. (Previously)
posted by tss on Nov 5, 2009 - 4 comments

The Fore River Shipyard was in service between 1886 and 1985, first under the management of the Fore River Ship and Engine Building Company, then Bethlehem Steel, and finally General Dynamics. She helped to close out the age of sail with the construction of the largest sailing vessel in history without any kind of engine. Besides providing a substantial number of liberty ships, surface warships of various classes, and submarines during WWII, it may also be the source of the "Kilroy was here" graffiti. [more inside]
posted by rmd1023 on Nov 4, 2009 - 3 comments

Making the Modern World presents a set of twisty little passages through the history of science and invention, from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, brought to you by the UK's Science Museum.
posted by Miko on Nov 4, 2009 - 4 comments

The capture of Adolf Eichmann is one of the more daring spy operations in the post WWII era. The story spans 17 years, beginning with Eichmann's clandestine escape from the Allied forces and the Nuremberg trial, and ending with his hanging in Israel. [more inside]
posted by reenum on Nov 4, 2009 - 23 comments

Why do we have an IMG element?
posted by chunking express on Nov 3, 2009 - 84 comments

Perhaps you have seen the recent video of flies zooming around a "German trade show" like little banner planes? That "German Trade Show" was the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse)—the most important event in the book publishing world. It's international; all the major US publishers go, as do many agents, to meet their foreign counterparts and to buy and sell projects amid publishing's eternal and ever-present air of fatalism. This year's fair had some interesting subplots, the most visible of which was the complicated dance the organizers did with this year's guest of honor, China, as accusations of censorship (on the part of China) and of brown-nosing (on the part of the fair's organizers) flew. [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco on Oct 30, 2009 - 16 comments

The Thirty Years War is a website covers that ginormous kerfuffle that consumed Europe in the first half of the 17th Century from the Second Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia. It has a handy map with a place locator which will help you tell your Schweidnitz from your Schweinfurt. Here are some other maps, The Religious Situation in Central Europe about 1618, Principal Seats of War, 1618-1660 and Europe in 1648 - Peace of Westphalia.
posted by Kattullus on Oct 29, 2009 - 55 comments

Forty years ago today, Leonard Kleinrock and a team of engineers at UCLA connected to Stanford Research Institute and typed (an incomplete) message between the first two nodes of the Internet: "lo." [more inside]
posted by starman on Oct 29, 2009 - 35 comments

The BBC World Service has put together a special report on the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (they also have a simpler portal). There is a wealth of material, including TV reports on key events from the BBC archives, interviews, a map timeline, a report on Catholicism's role in the 1989 revolutions, a first-hand report of what it was like to gather news in East Germany during that time and much more.
posted by Kattullus on Oct 27, 2009 - 20 comments

Iconic Photos
posted by Joe Beese on Oct 26, 2009 - 28 comments

These files, I thought, only tracked daylight savings time for all the different timezones & offsets from Greenwich Time. Actually, they have a detailed, fascinating history of timezones scribbled in the margins. (via)
posted by Pronoiac on Oct 24, 2009 - 18 comments

A Day in the Life of a Blacksmith (start here) is the 1869-70 diary of an apprentice blacksmith in Medfield, Massachusetts, in blog form. Brought to you by the American Antiquarian Society and its new blog Past is Present.
posted by Horace Rumpole on Oct 23, 2009 - 15 comments

There was a rivalry between the parties, of course, but in Potter's account, it was more like the rivalry between Cal and Stanford than that between today's Republicans and Democrats. The parties had somewhat different constituencies and pledged fealty to a different set of men, but each attempted to encompass as much of the political spectrum as possible rather than merely half of it. The story of the 1850s, by these lights, is about how this changed.

Funkytown: The Montreal Disco Era. Studio 54? Qu’est-ce que c’est? By the late 1970s, “Montreal had platinum-status admission to the VIP lounge of coolest-of-the-cool disco cities.” An oral history of the city where no one bats an eye at going out to dance at 1:30 AM in –20°C weather. (Contains links to MP3 of CBC Radio documentary.) [more inside]
posted by joeclark on Oct 21, 2009 - 14 comments

The 30,000 men of the British Merchant Navy (one-fifth of its pre-war strength) who fell victim to the U-boats between 1939 and 1945, the majority drowned or killed by exposure on the cruel North Atlantic sea*, were quite as certainly front-line warriors as the guardsmen and fighter pilots to whom they ferried the necessities of combat. Neither they nor their American, Dutch, Norwegian, or Greek fellow mariners wore uniform and few have any memorial. They stood nevertheless between the Wehrmacht and the domination of the world. - John Keegan
posted by Joe Beese on Oct 20, 2009 - 23 comments

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn’t believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, “Make them look new.” He probably hadn’t had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the “Going out of business” sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters. The Collectors Weekly interviews Scott Buckwald, propmaster for Mad Men.
posted by dersins on Oct 18, 2009 - 44 comments

"Promoting the Love and Study of American History." The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has many resources on its website, including over 50 free lecture podcasts, a collection of war letters throughout history, a Lincoln bicentennial page, and a new John Brown exhibition. [more inside]
posted by Hargrimm on Oct 17, 2009 - 7 comments

Today is the 150th anniversary of John Brown's abolitionist raid on Harper's Ferry, and the commemorations are underway.
posted by Pope Guilty on Oct 15, 2009 - 121 comments

Norman Centuries is a new podcast by Lars Brownworth, best known for his podcast series 12 Byzantine Rulers (previously). Norman Centuries, as the name suggests, recounts the history of the Normans, those literal vikings who gained Normandy and then England, Sicily, Malta, Antioch and, well, a whole heck of a lot of other places too. They were a conquering bunch. First two episodes are out with more to follow. [iTunes link]
posted by Kattullus on Oct 15, 2009 - 18 comments

Jean M. Fasse (Red Cross during WWII, and later the Special Service). Shirley Ann Thacker (WAVE). Just two of the interviews from the extensive collection of material (photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, oral histories and posters) at the Women Veterans Historical Collection.
posted by tellurian on Oct 14, 2009 - 4 comments

Vivian Maier's Photography. "This [site] was created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s - 1970s. Vivian's work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago." [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Oct 14, 2009 - 35 comments

They're responsible for the slang terms "hip" and "dive."¹ Among many other traditions, Chinese immigrants brought opium dens to the Western world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde all embellished the existence of opium dens in Victorian England. In the expanding US, Chinese railroad workers brought opium dens to outposts as far-flung as El Paso. By the 1880s, US readers were familiar with the stereotypical opium den of urban Chinatowns like San Francisco's (pdf) -- where it was made illegal for white people to smoke -- and New York's (pdf).²

Learn more about opium dens, and see the photos, at the online Opium Museum. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie on Oct 12, 2009 - 45 comments

Vulgar Army: Octoprop to Octopop is "an informal study into the representation of the Octopus in propaganda and political cartoons, and influence on, or co-option of, popular culture." [more inside]
posted by ollyollyoxenfree on Oct 10, 2009 - 10 comments

Winter 1900. You are in Dawson, Alaska. The Klondike Gold Rush is fading. Suddenly... news from Nome - Gold Strike! (on the beach of all things) You are snowed-in at Dawson, and recovering from tetanus. You have to get to Nome before the thousands of other gold seekers. What to do? How about hopping on your bike and riding the 1200 miles across snow and river ice!!! [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio on Oct 7, 2009 - 21 comments

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean, were among the earliest filmmakers. Their father, Claude-Antoine Lumière, ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for him. It was not until their father retired in 1892 that the brothers began to create moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera — most notably film perforations as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector, and the cinématographe. Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895 in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Oct 6, 2009 - 11 comments

Native American Sites in the City of Philadelphia is a superbly illustrated exposition of the historical development of Philadelphia, with a focus on those few surviving Native American sites which lie under the urban fabric. Lots more excellent Public Archaeology is available from the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum. Bonus link: Philly's lost creeks and streams. [more inside]
posted by Rumple on Oct 5, 2009 - 12 comments

50 years ago today, IBM announced the 1401 Data Processing System. Originally designed as a spooling system for the larger machines, the 1401 became very popular as a mainframe in its own right, eventually being called 'The Model T of Computers'. By the end of 1961, the number of 1401s installed in the United States alone had reached 2,000 - representing about one fourth of all computers installed by all manufacturers at that time. 15- 20,000 were eventually built. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is having a 50th anniversary celebration on November 10th. Here's what $125,600 (or $2500/month rent) would get you: [more inside]
posted by MtDewd on Oct 4, 2009 - 52 comments

"The What Cheer House catered to men only, permitted no liquor on the premises, and housed San Francisco's first free library and first museum." Opened in 1852 by Robert B. Woodward it became immensely popular. "[S]ailors enjoyed staying there... [he] was such a well-liked man that they would often bring him trinkets from around the world when they’d come to town. For Woodward, these gifts were the beginning of what would become a life-long obsession with collecting." He moved the collection and opened Woodward's Gardens in 1866 between Mission and Valencia at 13th-15th streets. Called the Central Park of the West, it was San Francisco's most famous public resort. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Oct 4, 2009 - 23 comments

The Virtual Museum of Iraq.
posted by homunculus on Oct 4, 2009 - 6 comments

1969: The Year of Gay Liberation is an online exhibit of the New York Public Library focusing on the radical gay rights movements of the late sixties and early seventies, focusing on the organizations The Mattachine Society of New York, Daughters of Bilitis, Gay News, Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries and the Gay Activists Alliance, and the events of the Stonewall Riot and Christopher Street Liberation Day. This is but one part of the NYPL's fine LGBT collection, which includes, among other things, resources for teens, AIDS/HIV collections, and digital collections on ACT UP, Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen, Bessie Bonehill, Gertrude Stein, Gran Fury, Julian Eltinge, Richard Wandel and Walt Whitman.
posted by Kattullus on Oct 1, 2009 - 14 comments

September 22, 1939: In the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, in Belarus), "a monumental military parade took place.... What is unusual is that the parade was held not by the Polish army, but by the soviet Red Army and the Nazi German Wehrmacht – together." The excellent blog Poemas del río Wang (which usually features gorgeous illustrations from books) provides historical context, many photos, posters, and cartoons, even a five-minute official German newsreel (the parade takes up the first half). The event itself is a historical footnote, but in Russia, with the "cult of the victory of Soviet people and of the Soviet state in WWII," the very idea of it was anathema and it was denied until last year. [more inside]
posted by languagehat on Sep 27, 2009 - 26 comments