The
George Eastman House is producing a series of nicely produced videos, each about 10 minutes long, demonstrating
every major technological development in photographic process with guidance from historians, curators, and artists and illustrated by objects from their collection. There are more to come, but you can start now with
The Dageurrotype,
The Collodion Process,
The Albumen Print,
The Woodburytype,
The Platium Print, and
The Gelatin Silver Print.
posted by Miko
on May 5, 2013 -
12 comments
The Pickwick Papers, one of the most honored first novels of all time, was conceived as a showcase for the comic etchings of the celebrated illustrator
Robert Seymour. His publishers tapped a 24 year old journalist named Charles Dickens (their third choice) to provide the humorous "commentary" linking the pictures, which were to depict the hunting mishaps of a club of cockney sportsmen. Dickens, who knew nothing about hunting, ignored the prospectus and wrote his own way forward. As it became clear that Seymour was ill-equipped to depict
the darker turns of Dickens' imagination, illustrator and writer fell into
a conflict which ended in horror.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Apr 30, 2013 -
14 comments
In 1960 or so, Professor Perry C. Van Arsdale was helping his 7-year-old granddaughter researching the Santa Fe trail. He found his granddaughter's textbook to have some number of errors.
He set off to create a map of pioneer history (prior to the 1900's), using his own knowledge and information from judges, sheriffs, and descendants of historical figures. This was his start in creating
the Pioneer New Mexico map, which would contain 300
towns that no longer exist,
old trails of all sorts (including the three historic Santa Fe trails and various
camel routes), locations of minor squabbles and major battles, and because he couldn't fit everything on the maps, he also included
extensive notes in the corner of the map.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 27, 2013 -
17 comments
The Atlantic reports on the 2008 removal/"archiving" of the original three American Girl dolls, dolls whose arrival on the market in 1986 represented a "sensibility about teaching girls to understand thorny historical controversies and build political consciousness."
[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Apr 26, 2013 -
34 comments
In the Year of the Pig is a documentary on the Vietnam war, produced and originally released in 1968 as the war raged. It begins with some background on the end of the French colonial period, then moves on to the American involvement. It features gripping historical footage from the war itself and from leading political players of the time. At the time of its release, a
New York Times review said "There are no frills and few ifs, ands or buts about the stinging, graphic and often frighteningly penetrating movie". It is highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand more of the history of the war. Viewable in its entirety
here.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 21, 2013 -
27 comments
Blood, Sweat, and Steel: My Afternoon with the Ace of Swords. “When I got this sword, it was completely covered in blood rust.” Sword maker Francis Boyd is showing me yet another weapon pulled from yet another safe in the heavily fortified workshop behind his northern California home. “You can tell it’s blood,” he says matter-of-factly, “because ordinary rust turns the grinding water brown. If it’s blood rust it bleeds, it looks like blood in the water. Even 2,000 years old, it bleeds. And it smells like a steak cooking, like cooked meat. I’ve encountered this before with Japanese swords from World War II. If there’s blood on the sword and you start polishing it, the sword bleeds. It comes with the territory.” [Via]
posted by homunculus
on Apr 16, 2013 -
13 comments
"If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away." American ballerina
Maria Tallchief died Thursday.
[more inside]
posted by mynameisluka
on Apr 13, 2013 -
18 comments
"
But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived..."
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Apr 4, 2013 -
18 comments
The Cambridge University Library houses the world's largest collection of Charles Darwin's letters: more than 9,000 of the 15,000 letters he is known to have written and received in his lifetime. They've been posting them online since 2007
(previously on MeFi), in the
Darwin Correspondence Project, where we can now read and search the full texts of more than 7,500 letters, and find information on 7,500 more -- all for free. This weekend, they added nearly all of the
Darwin-Hooker letters: Over 1400 pieces of correspondence between Darwin and his closest friend, botanist Joseph Hooker.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Mar 31, 2013 -
9 comments
PhotosNormandie is a collaborative collection of more than 3,000
royalty-free photos from World War II's Battle of Normandy and its aftermath. (Photos date from June 6 to late August 1944). The main link goes to the photostream. You can also peruse
sets, which include 2700+ images from the
US and
Canadian National Archives.
posted by zarq
on Mar 19, 2013 -
12 comments
"
It was John Polidori's misfortune to be comic without having a sense of humor, to wish to be a great writer but to be a terrible one, to be unusually bright but surrounded for one summer by people who were titanically brighter, and to have just enough of an awareness of all of this to make him perpetually uneasy. Also, he couldn't jump."
posted by Iridic
on Mar 18, 2013 -
107 comments
John Cline writes book reviews for
The Los Angeles Review of Books, and has co-edited
two anthologies on grindhouse cinema. Last May he was awarded his PhD in American Studies and like so many others in the humanities was unable to find a job in his field. So he decided to go for a walk. Inspired by his
hometown poet and drawing on his longtime interest in American music and history, John decided to follow the path of
The Great Migration up the Mississippi, recording and blogging his experience. This would not be a test of endurance, but an sociological/anthropological immersion, a document about the land, history and people of the Mississippi River valley.
With some help from
Kickstarter John arranged to walk from New Orleans to Memphis, to work river boats from Memphis to St Louis and finally to travel by train the last leg to Chicago. Having started on
Ash Wednesday, he has already visited
Angola Prison, encountered a down on his luck former
Rodeo Star and discovered
the joys of walking fifteen plus miles with a fifty pound pack on his back. Most importantly he is sharing what he has learned of our
modern lifestyle and the nature of
human kindness.
posted by bozeman's simplex
on Mar 18, 2013 -
6 comments
Letters From A Private: "...[19 year-old Pvt. D. Bruce Hirshorn] was in the Army in 1944 and 1945. He wrote home almost every single day.... Today, Uncle Bruce is the same upbeat, funny guy. He’s 87 and he loves syrup and ships!"
[more inside]
posted by knile
on Mar 18, 2013 -
8 comments
The blog
US Slave collects long-form articles on every aspect of the history of slavery, primarily focussing on African slaves in the USA and their descendents. Among the content there is
this biography of Ota Benga, the Congolese Pygmy man who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, and several posts about
Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus.
[more inside]
posted by daisyk
on Mar 15, 2013 -
16 comments
The History of Philosophy podcast has the ambitious goal of covering the entire history of (Western) philosophy from the
Pre-Socratics to the modern day, without skipping any major philosophers or schools. At 110 episodes, it's just reached the end of the Roman Empire and
Boethius and has very far still to go.
posted by empath
on Mar 13, 2013 -
32 comments
