The 100 Most Influential Singles of the 1960s. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by item on Mar 18, 2013 - 66 comments

Random Article. Bunny Ultramod likes hit "random page" on Wikipedia and sometimes he reports what he finds there. [via mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk on Feb 10, 2013 - 20 comments

You wouldn't think so from its trendy shops and restaurants today, but Seven Dials was once one of the worst slums in London. Intended as a smart residential area when its construction was completed in 1710, this cartwheel of streets between Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden quickly declined to become an over-crowded refuge for the city's thieves. It was here that London's thriving trade in gallows ballads made its home.

A collaboration across more than 100 years, from the jobbing hacks writing ballads and selling them at the foot of the gallows to the historical investigation of the British Library's broadsheet collection by MeFi's own Paul Slade, to modern rock, folk, and blues musicians, and then to your ears. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Jan 6, 2013 - 9 comments

Obsolessons: selected passages from the self-help and guide books of the past. [via mefi projects]
posted by The Whelk on Sep 14, 2012 - 17 comments

Rank of states and territories in population at each census: 1790 - 1890
Political History (Supremecy of Parties and Popular Vote)
Insanity (1870)
and more at
A Handsome Atlas: The Amazing and Incredible Statistical Atlases of the United States of America compiled in the final decades of the Nineteenth Century. [via projects]
posted by carsonb on Sep 12, 2012 - 11 comments

ArtHistoryImages: Over 1000 artists organized by movement, from Byzantine to Realist, from Gothic to Pop. Each movement gives you a list of artists, and each artist's page joins images of their works with information from Wikipedia about their lives. [via mefi projects]
posted by ocherdraco on Jun 26, 2012 - 2 comments

World War II in Photos "A retrospective of World War II in large-size photo stories. 900 photos in all, over 20 chapters, telling many of the countless millions of stories from the biggest conflict and biggest story of the 20th century." [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by bru on Nov 1, 2011 - 34 comments

Ewart Scott Grogan was a British-born figure of controversial sorts, the kind of fellow who would either end up buried in Westminster Abbey-or hanging from a yard-arm. After he survived as soldier in the Second Matabele War, he went on to be the first European to traverse the distance of the African continent from the South in Cape Town to Cairo in the North to win the hand of his bride-to-be from a skeptical father. He started the trek with the uncle of his bride-to-be in February 1898. Two years later, Grogan returned to London, a lone hero (the uncle turned back part way through). In 2007, MeFite Julian Smith retraced Grogan's path, "in part to dispel [his] own pre-wedding jitters," and wrote a book about Grogan's journey, and his own. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Dec 14, 2010 - 5 comments

Ephemera Magica: A Daily Offering of Vintage Magic: "I found some great and mysterious things in some old boxes my Mom passed on to me from my Father and Grandfather. I am scanning and posting a page, trick, letter, or booklet from a huge collection of vintage magic articles every day." Click on each of the pictures for larger versions, or check out the Ephemera Magica Flickr Feed. [via mefi projects]
posted by zarq on Jun 10, 2010 - 13 comments

Northwest Coast Archaeology [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on Apr 15, 2010 - 8 comments

Gridface has an on-going series of interviews as part of its Chicago House music history section. The first interview was with Stacey Collins, aka VERB, who started working security at The Music Box in 1983. Others interviewed include producers Merwin Sanders (discog) and Jamal Moss (aka Hieroglyphic Being, IAMTHATIAM, The Sun God) and Frank Youngwerth (discog), and DJ Leonard "Remix" Rroy. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Jan 11, 2010 - 15 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

Are you looking to review your art history knowledge but find google too chaotic, and Prof. Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe's site is overwhelming and has a few too many dead links? Maybe wikipedia lacks the visuals you associate with an art history review, and Art cyclopedia could be a bit more straight-forward? Then The Art Browser might be the thing for you. The site combines brief descriptions of movements and artists from wikipedia, classifications from Art cyclopedia, and large images from Art.com for compact visual overview of art history. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Mar 25, 2009 - 9 comments

The Centennial Project. During the 100th Anniversary of Oklahoma's statehood, MeFi'er Brittanie is serializing two personal first-person accounts of her family's journey into the Sooner State, including both her great-great-grandfather's efforts to make the 1891 Land Run and another relative's meticulous biographical history which extends as far back as the Civil War. [via mefi projects]
posted by Ufez Jones on Jul 9, 2007 - 10 comments

Public Domain Photos [via mefi projects]. An extraordinarily rich resource for free stock photography.
posted by melissa may on Jun 22, 2007 - 10 comments

Jonson takes pictures of The Salton Sea, which is a strange place, like some kind of huge, perpetual, Burning Man, but by a huge, salty, polluted, manmade lake with distant shores, dying fish, has-been resort towns, Salvation Mountain, fundie dinos, fountains of youth, and nice churches. [via mefi projects] [previously] [howdy]
posted by brownpau on Jan 30, 2007 - 36 comments