MetaFilter posts tagged with archives and history

“Better finish it while there’s still an Apple II market out there,”

loquacious — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:13:35 -0800

The development blog for the original Prince of Persia from Jordan Mechner.

When this you see, think of me.

Miko — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:25:46 -0800

A tool for 20th-century Australian History

mattoxic — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:36:37 -0800

Even after some deliberation it is difficult to find reasons to support the appointment of women Trade Commissioners. The Virtual Reading Room of the National Archives of Australia is a mine of information about Australia, its relationships and past attitudes.

Bantoro = Henry Ford

Miko — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:25:07 -0800

Museum archivist, exploring Henry Ford's office records, stumbles into the interesting world of commercial telegraphic code.

Christmas at the BFI

Rumple — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:13:01 -0800

Christmas in the London Blitz, 1940; Making Christmas Crackers, 1910; Santa Claus, 1898; Christmas is coming, 1951: short films from the British Film Institute's wonderful Youtube Channel (including excellent playlists), which you can also explore through Google Earth using the kmz file found here.

Digital Vaults

netbros — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:46:06 -0800

This is a collection of the National Archives stored in the Digital Vaults. You can browse through hundreds of photographs, documents, and film clips and discover the connection between some of the National Archives' most treasured records. With the Pathways tool you can see the unique and surprising connections between events and people and test your knowledge of history. As you travel through the site and collect documents, images and films, you can then merge the objects to create your own poster or movie from your collection.

the tail wagging the dog

sergeant sandwich — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:08:00 -0800

webofdeception.com is a bizarre, timecubesque linkdump maintained and updated by private investigator and domain squatter Joseph Culligan. In addition to sleazy dirt-digging on various celebrities and politicians, Culligan also includes a huge resource list of links to databases and public-record searches. My favorite part was the document archive; highlights of the weird crap he's found include:

Letter from Elvis to Nixon, asking to meet with the President and be appointed a federal agent

White House internal reaction to Elvis' request

Immigration papers of the Sound of Music family

First draft of Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" speech

Letter from young RFK to his brother

Enjoy!

Pursuing Purloined Papers

amyms — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:27:38 -0800

To Catch A Thief. How a Civil War buff's chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents. Related article: Pay Dirt in Montana. And photo gallery.

Virginia Tech Artifacts

marxchivist — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:38:08 -0800

A Million Voices. Staff members of the University Archives at Virginia Tech are working to catalog and make available the more than 87,000 letters, poems, posters and artifacts that arrived at the school in the wake of the April 16 shootings. Dubbed The Prevail Archives, the website has a database with images of some of the items. Initial Metafilter post on the shootings.

From Abati to Zoppio: historic Italian texts

Rumple — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:56:08 -0800

OPAL Libri Antichi from the University of Turin offers over 3,000 books as free, open PDF files. Most of these date between AD 1500 and 1850 and most are in Italian, with many in French. They tend to be plain books with few illustrations. A few English titles are present, including David Hume's 1800 Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul; several texts by William Wycherley such as Love in a wood: or St. James's-Park (1735); and Richard Lassels 1686 work The voyage of Italy: or, a compleat journey through Italy with the characters of the peaple, and the description of the chief towns ... (volume 2) - an early travel guide. The PDFs are unsearchable plain scans. via this thread in the W4RF forum which contains hundreds of links to free online historical documents

Archive of 19th Century Americana

Rumple — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:08:45 -0800

Cornell University and the University of Michigan collaboratively present two sites on the "Making of America" (Cornell Site; Michigan Site), together including over one million pages of 19th Century American books and periodicals online. At this Cornell page you can browse or search some well-known, full-text periodicals including: The Atlantic Monthly 1857-1901; Harper's 1850-1899; Scientific American 1846-1869; Putnam's 1853-1870; and The Manufacturer and Builder 1869-1894. From Michigan, you can browse less well-known journals, including American Jewess 1895-1899; Ladies Repository 1846-1871; and the Journal of the United States Association of Charcoal Iron Workers 1880-1891. warning: frames abound I'll probably get no work done for the rest of the month, at least not until I have ingested such gems as: The Woman Who Talks The Ill-Bred Girl A Man in the Kitchen Life in Danbury The Ladies Medical Guide (1865) The Ladies Handbook to Etiquette and Politeness Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln A novel application of electricity A practical guide for making post-mortem examinations, and for the study of morbid anatomy, with directions for embalming the dead, and for the preservation of specimens of morbid anatomy (1873) A magician's tour, up and down and round about the earth. Being the life and adventures of the American Nostradamus (1890) Oh what the hell, just browse everything...... and everything else

Old Lady Leary Left Her Lantern in the Shed

Miko — Wed, 16 May 2007 08:53:24 -0800

The Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory compiles a fascinating array of primary sources about the 1871 fire that destroyed 4 square miles of the city of Chicago, killing hundreds and leaving nearly one out of five residents homeless. Explore 3D images, music [embedded], children's drawings, and personal recollections. See also a pictorial survey of the damage, including fused marbles and metal hardware, related documents and images at the Library of Congress, and an exoneration of Mrs. O'Leary and her bovine companion, along with a suggestion by John Lienhart that police corruption and class struggle were more to blame than a cow [embedded audio].

Interesting times

Abiezer — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:07:36 -0800

Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security "By far the most ambitious and integral project in the burgeoning field of cold war history"

John Smith's Ephemera

Len — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 09:44:22 -0800

"John Smith, Youngest, of Crutherland, was given the honorary degree of LL.D in 1840. In 1842 he announced the bequest to the University [of Glasgow] of his runs of publications from learned societies, and his volumes of ephemeral items. These came to the library on Smith’s death in 1849." Some examples: Playbill, Theatre Royal, York Street. Broadsheet account of an attempted prison break. Radical Party election ballad. See also: Glasgow Broadside Ballads: cheap print and popular song culture in nineteenth-century Scotland and Glasgow Broadside Ballads: The Murray Collection

Franklin Kameny Papers Online

LarryC — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 13:14:07 -0800

The Kameny Papers Project preserved and presents the papers of gay rights pioneer Franklin Kameny, who had activists picketing the White House in 1965, well before Stonewall. The website includes a nice archive of his papers, including correspondence, a small photo gallery, and some charming hate mail from members of Congress. See also the Franklin Kameny pages at the Rainbow History Project. Yesterday, the Library of Congress accepted Kameny's papers. [via Andrew Sullivan]

DeLorean out of gas? Try the Toronto Archives....

orange swan — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 07:57:39 -0800

From Muddy York to the Toronto of today.... My search to discover the exact age of the house I recently bought led me to the fabulous Toronto Archives. Even if you don't have the good fortune to live in Toronto and so have the ability to visit the Archives to take a free tour and check out their massive holdings, they have a whack of stuff on line. Of their million photographs dating back to 1856, over 21,000 are online. Check out some of their virtual exhibits. I couldn't begin to give you an overview of the site or even the best of its many gems, but check out Chinatown's VE day victory parade, Bay and Wellington as it was after a huge fire in 1904, old advertisements, letters and postcards (including some from the disenchanted), snapshots of a, er, less politically sensitive time (thanks, Capn!), and — inevitably! — hockey artifacts. A friend of mine makes a hobby of Toronto's history, and after this search of mine, I better understand her interest. It’s fascinating to see what lies beneath the layers of time on a surface so familiar and loved.

That's 2 shillings and sixpence in old money

greycap — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 11:56:51 -0800

Ever wondered what old amounts of money would be worth today? Or what you could buy with your current salary if you went back 200, 400, or 600 years? Now you can find out with a tool that converts English currency from 1270 onwards into today's prices. Based on Treasury records, it tells you that Mr Darcy's £10,000 a year would now be worth nearly £350,000, or that your house would only have to be worth the equivalent of £500 now to qualify for the vote after 1832.

Stuff About Dead People: or, History

marxchivist — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:29:12 -0800

The Public Archives of Nova Scotia has some cool online exhibits. The original list of dead bodies recovered from the Titanic sinking caught my eye, they also have original log book pages from privateers, lighthouses, slavery and abolition, boats, boats, and more boats. [via]

Close to Home

plep — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 08:48:33 -0800

Close to Home: An American Album. 'This exhibition is devoted to American family photographs that were separated from their owners and then rediscovered by artists, writers, collectors, and museum curators. ' Highlights and site visitors' submissions.
Site of related interest :- BBC Family History; and Third Generation: Family Photographs and Memories of Nazi Germany.

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighbourhoods 1889-1963

plep — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:26:43 -0800

Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighbourhoods 1889-1963. Scholarly urban history project.

Tickets, please.

braun_richard — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:28:35 -0800

TV Tickets! A great gallery of tickets to TV show tapings, some going back to the 1950s. Includes some fascinating commentary by Mark Evanier.

Fathom

plep — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 06:19:28 -0800

The biology of B-movie monsters ; ancient Greek curse and love magic; the correspondence of Elizabeth I and James VI; Egil Skallagrimsson, poet and killer; the mythology of Harry Potter; Pinocchio's cultural heirs; Tiananmen's legacy; experimental art in China; the question of Hatshepshut's character. Articles courtesy of the Fathom Archive, 2000-2003.

Never such innocence again

verstegan — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 03:17:52 -0800

The Mitchell and Kenyon collection consists of 800 rolls of nitrate film documenting scenes of everyday life in England between 1900 and 1913. This extraordinary archive, now painstakingly restored by the British Film Institute, includes footage of trams, soup kitchens, factory gates, football matches, seaside holidays and much else besides. Here are some sample images and a short clip of workers at a Lancashire colliery, all astonishingly evocative and reminiscent (to me) of Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV: 'The crowns of hats, the sun / On moustachioed archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark .. Never such innocence, / Never before or since .. Never such innocence again.'

a series of expressions

the fire you left me — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 18:20:25 -0800

120 Years of Electronic Music. Electronic musical instruments 1870 -1990.

It's all about access

grateful — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 11:47:31 -0800

The recent White House nomination of Allen Weinstein to become the next Archivist of the United States has produced some interesting reactions. Is this standard election-year politics, or is there something else going on?