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
In 1929, three young women (Edith,
Dorothy, and
Evelyn), ages 23 and 25, went on a three-month-long, 12,353-mile road trip. Learn more about their experience, and follow an effort to recreate the journey, at
Three Months by Car.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Jan 27, 2013 -
22 comments
"New Englanders learn quickly to dismiss the chowder where tomato ruins its gorgeous broth, where references to New York tarnish its name...However, few know how such distinctions came about in the first place, what processes were involved that resulted in one person's disgust of another's beloved creation, and why, to this day, do we stand by such convictions?" The
New England Chowder Compendium, from the
McIntosh Cookery Collection at the UMass Amherst library.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Dec 4, 2012 -
92 comments
A fellow tried to impress his friends by fitting a billiard ball in his mouth -
he died. A young woman laced her corset too tightly -
she died. A woman fell down the stairs, which caused one of her hairpins to penetrate her skull -
she died. And, of course, many people had horrible encounters with mill and farm machinery.
Predictably, they died. (warning-occasionally graphic descriptions of death and dismemberment, mostly from the late 19th century).
[more inside]
posted by cilantro
on Sep 21, 2012 -
59 comments
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
Network Rail virtual archive Original drawings and plans of Britain's railway infrastructure from Network Rail, including the Forth Bridge, Bristol Temple Meads station, the Tay Bridge and lots more.
posted by Helga-woo
on Mar 4, 2012 -
6 comments
The Reel History of Britain, a BFI/BBC co-production, brings archive film into the nation’s living rooms. The footage shown in the series has been selected from the hundreds of thousands of films and programmes preserved in Britain’s film and television archives. We are complementing the series by making many of the films featured in The Reel History of Britain available online in their entirety, alongside expert commentary from the nation’s archive curators.
posted by Trurl
on Oct 17, 2011 -
4 comments
Medicine in the Americas is a digital library project that makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on May 31, 2011 -
9 comments
"[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history. So Archive Team did what it could, as well as other independent teams around the world, and some amount of Geocities was saved." Now, one year later, they have announced that nearly
a terabyte of web history will soon be made available to the public as
a 900GB torrent file.
(Previously. / Previously.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 29, 2010 -
57 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
"Young
Bert Stern was already one of the leading fashion photographers of the 1950's when he resolved to shoot his first film before he was thirty. He made it, with two years to spare. The result,
Jazz on a Summer's Day, is a luminously breezy film that brings the rich color palette of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar of those years into the world of the documentary cinema."
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jul 5, 2010 -
19 comments
Mr, KIng
So
Raymond Hamilton never killed anybody. If he can make a jury believe that I8m willing to come in and be tryed my self. Why dont you ask Ray about those two policemen that got killed near
Grapevine? And while you are at it better talk it over with his girl friend.
Bonnie and me were in missouri when that happened but where was Ray? coming back from the West bankjob wasn't he? Redhot too wasn8t he? I got it straight. And ask him about that escape at
Eastham farm where that gard was killed. Giess he claims he doesn't know fire any shots there don8t ge? Well if he wasnt too dum to know how tp put a clip in a automatic he'd hace fired a lot more shots and some of the rest of the gards would got killed too. He wrote his lawyer he was too good for me and didnt go my pace, well it makes a me sick to see a yellow punk like that playing baby ad making a jury cry over him either/ He stuck his
fingerprint on a letter so heres mine too just to let you know
thjis is on the leve;
X Clyde
posted by mrducts
on May 21, 2010 -
21 comments
MOONWALK ONE - A surprisingly groovy look at the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in a full length documentary that contains a lot of rare and not often seen footage of the preparations and launch of the first manned mission to the moon. Warning: Also contains lots of theramins, trippy optical effects, faux bohemians and some really blowy narrative.
posted by loquacious
on Apr 23, 2010 -
22 comments
Dr. Mayme Agnew Clayton was a librarian and collector in Los Angeles who
left behind a collection of remarkable value. Over the course of more than 40 years, she had collected the largest privately held collection of African-American materials,
with over 30,000 rare and out-of-print books, 1,700 films dating back to 1916, as well as more than 75,000 photographs and scores of movie posters, playbills, programs, documents and manuscripts. Her collection, which has been compared to the
Schomburg Collection in the New York City Public Library, was
opened to the public in 2007.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 8, 2010 -
6 comments
Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project The Library of Congress invites you to submit digital audio or video recordings of speeches made between January 16 and january 25, 2009 on the occasion of Barack Obama's inauguration. The speeches will be archived in a collection for future scholarship, much like the
Day of Infamyand other collections capturing signifcant American moments.
posted by Miko
on Dec 24, 2008 -
4 comments
The Archive of American Television "produces extensive video oral history interviews with television legends of all professions and makes them available online. To date, the Archive has completed over 2000 hours of videotaped conversations with over 570 Actors, Producers, Writers, Newscasters, Executives, Directors, Craftspersons, and more. ... The interviews are conducted by reviewing the subject's life and career chronologically. They discuss their childhood, early influences, how their career began, and thoroughly cover their television careers, ending with their thoughts on the industry and legacy."*
posted by not_on_display
on Nov 11, 2008 -
9 comments
The Great War Archive goes live today (November 11), the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. Launched by the University of Oxford in March 2008,
the initiative invited members of the general public to submit digital photographs, audio, film, documents, and stories that originated from the Great War. Although the dealine for submissions is past, photos can still be added to
the project's Flickr group.
posted by Abiezer
on Nov 10, 2008 -
19 comments
The Red Hill Guide is an amazingly detailed and well-written compendium of desktop hardware old and new, with a focus on PC and x86 compatibles. Look for your first CPU, hard drive or mainboard.
posted by loquacious
on Jan 6, 2007 -
40 comments
A Nazi Christmas Since its most ancient days, the Christmas holiday has been continually reshaped to serve commercial, social, and political ends. These Nazi-era Christmas materials, including an
Advent calendar and an
essay on how to turn Christian holidays into National Socialist ones, come from the
German Propaganda Archive of the Calvin College library. Of course, the Allies also enlisted Christmas in both pop culture and propaganda with
cards,
V-Mails,
and posters.
posted by Miko
on Nov 29, 2006 -
21 comments
