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
Makers: Women Who Make America is a sweeping 3-hour documentary of the movement for women's equality in the last half of the twentieth century. Airing this month on US public television, it's accompanied by an
online archive of videos of interviews with individual women in leadership across a variety of fields. Leaders and activists, celebrities and pioneers, and everyday women retell the story of their awakening, organizing, and world-changing efforts.
posted by Miko
on Feb 28, 2013 -
5 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
The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History uses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection as the starting point for a deeply informative, chronologically arranged exploration of world art history, with maps, timelines, art images, thematic essays, and more.
posted by Miko
on Sep 19, 2012 -
7 comments
The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
The American Festivals Project takes you along on two guys'
National Geographic-funded 2008 tour of the "small, hidden, and bizarre"
festivals celebrated all over the United States. Through photos,
video, and a
blog, discover
Rattlesnake Roundup,
Okie noodling, an American
Fasnacht, the
Idiotarod, and
plenty more.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Feb 17, 2011 -
23 comments
Don't Make Excuses - Make Good! Between World Wars I and II, the U.S. economy was booming - workers had choices and employers competed for their time. How to motivate and gain loyalty from a labor force that knew it could walk out the door and find more work soon?
Charles Mather, head of a family printing business in Chicago, offered employers a solution: the
first motivational posters for the private workplace market. Printed between 1923 and 1929, Mather's "
Work Incentive Posters" used strong imagery and short, clear messaging to encourage workplace values like
teamwork, punctuality, safety, and loyalty. Today, some of his 350 designs can be seen in
traveling exhibitions and
poster galleries, and
Antiques Road Show - or you can soak up some motivation from his modern-day successors at
Successories - or
generate your own.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Oct 12, 2010 -
25 comments
A mining town in Kentucky hoping to build a different kind of future. One of the last three Negro League stadiums. A 34-acre ranch owned and run one of California's earliest entreprenuers and rare early female landowners. The "cathedral of African Methodism" which saw the funerals of Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. Otherwordly sand dunes in Michigan, mysterious freshwater caves in Guam, the Wilderness Battlefield...and the Merritt Parkway. These and more sites are on the (US) NAtional Trust's 2010 roster of the
11 Most Endangered Places.
posted by Miko
on May 19, 2010 -
14 comments
Museums build some pretty cool websites. To help people find them, use them, and give them props, the Museums and the Web conference has held an annual Best of the Web contest since 1997.
This year's nominees are here. Just a sample:
the MOMA on Bauhaus, the Center for New Media's
Bracero History Archive, the Textile Museum of Canada's
In Touch:Connecting Cloth, Culture, and Art, Perception Deception from The National Science and Technology Center of Australia,
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum, the Smithsonian's
Prehistoric Climate Change and Why it Matters Today, and more . If that doesn't wash out the remainder of your Friday, you can always dig into the
past nominees.
posted by Miko
on Mar 26, 2010 -
8 comments
Valentines from E.B. White, Mark Twain, Katharine Hepburn, E. E. Cummings, Alexander Hamilton, and Zero Mostel. From libraries and archives around NYC, via the NYT (
more info here).
posted by Miko
on Feb 14, 2010 -
11 comments
"If I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away."
Audio recordings from interviews with former slaves, conducted by WPA folklorists and others, including the Lomaxes and Zora Neale Hurston. Only these
twenty-six audio recordings of people formerly enslaved in the antebellum American South have ever been found.
posted by Miko
on Feb 7, 2010 -
16 comments
In 2000, the Library of Congress celebrated its 200th birthday by inviting representatives and members of the public from each of the 50 American states to nominate folk traditions, local customs, and special places to a "century's-end time capsule" called the
Local Legacies Project. A nice little introductory catalog to points of local pride, like
Fountain Green, Utah's Lamb Day, Oakland, CA's Black Cowboy Parade,
Kentucky's Bourbon tradition, and
Binghamton, NY's Spiedie Fest, and plenty more.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Feb 5, 2010 -
7 comments
There was a historic music festival in the summer of 1969. But it's not the one that took place in Bethel, NY. The
Harlem Cultural Festival ran from
June 29 to August 24 that summer, presenting a concert every Sunday afternoon in
Mount Morris Park (known today as Marcus Garvey Park).
Three hundred thousand people turned out for the
six free concerts, hearing acts like
Nina Simone , Sly & the Family Stone (the only act to play both Woodstock and the "black Woodstock"), Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, The 5th Dimension, Moms Mabley and. Speakers included Jesse Jackson and "blue-eyed soul brother" Mayor John Lindsay. Security was courtesy of the
Black Panthers, since the NYC police refused to provide it. Filmmaker Hal Tulchin recorded
over 50 hours of concert footage, which has remained unreleased.
Historic Films seems to hold the footage; it was supposed to be made into a movie to
premiere at Sundance 2007, but its
release seems to be continually delayed for reasons unclear.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Aug 20, 2009 -
19 comments
Stan Hugill, often known as "
The Last Shantyman," authored a
book called
Shanties From the Seven Seas, based on his own work experiences in the last days of sail. Influential in the folk revival, the book is one of the most important written sources for music sung aboard ships in the 19th and early 20th century,
the "Bible" of sea music. Decades of chanteying in pubs and at festivals have kept many of the songs alive, but in most cases they've strayed stylistically from the verses and versions Hugill collected, or dropped out of popularity entirely. Now,
one musician is returning to the source and creating a new audio archive for the original versions of the songs as written, by
singing through the more than 400 songs in the book, one song each week, and posting the songs on YouTube, with commentary.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Jun 15, 2009 -
28 comments
