The Earth and its Peoples, over 100 years ago
January 13, 2012 1:16 PM   Subscribe

Take a photographic journey into the past with Illustrated Past, which offers glimpses of life in Brittany, a trip to Tunis and Algiers, scenes of Dutch daily life. These examples are excerpts from the Dutch book, De Aarde en haar Volken (Project Gutenberg), or The Earth and its Peoples (Google auto-translation). Where the 1906 edition featured photos from around the world, the 1877 edition featured etchings (Gutenberg; Google translation).
posted by filthy light thief (10 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Good thing they put illustratedfarce.com (or the somesuch) on all the pictures they take from other sources or we'd never know where they come from.
posted by peacay at 1:52 PM on January 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


Good to see someone aggregating pictures, though I've seen better sites like this. What irks me is he uses PD content from book scans from Google Book and Internet Archive, but doesn't mention which books or links, and then puts his own watermark on the pictures, presumably to discourage re-using the images or as cheap advertising for the site. There is also a "Copyright © 2012" notice which is copyfraud since these images are all PD, though his original text is copyright, there is no notice of distinction, everything at the site is being Copyrighted. He then requests if you use any of the pictures, you should link back to his site, as if these images are not already fully available for free elsewhere. He also does Google display advertising. Anyway, the whole thing just seems to be a way to monetize PD content without giving credit to those organizations or people who made it available, much less even recognize it's free.
posted by stbalbach at 1:55 PM on January 13, 2012 [2 favorites]


I'm pretty sure that this was a standard high school text -- my Dad had a later edition of it (bought used, no doubt), which was passed down through his brothers and then back to him again. Huge tome.

It's very strange to see these lost worlds, which aren't all that distant, however great the changes are.

For the Dutch pictures, they show a life my great-grandparents, and even grandparents would have known quite well, despite being a bit later than 1906. I myself had a rare glimpse of women in traditional costume (in a non-tourist-trap setting) as late as 1981-2, one being a neighbour of my grandparents in the isolated village they chose for retirement, and another, a total stranger in full getup and klomp, walking the aisles of a huge modern supermarket, just as my parents were buying me new shoes for school. Those women must have been in their seventies or eighties then. Which is the point I guess I'm making, that as vanished as these worlds are, as irretrievably gone, there were still traces of it in my own living memory, which seems very strange indeed. Huh.

But yeah. Great find. Thanks, OP!
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:56 PM on January 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


I agree. What an absolute waste of effort to mark all of the photos with the name of the website. This sophmoric tactic will be the only thing remembered about illustratedpast.com.
posted by Sparkticus at 2:39 PM on January 13, 2012 [1 favorite]


The pictures don't come up on my device. I Like looking at old pictures like that.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 1:30 AM on January 14, 2012


The ladies hats are so uniform, they start to look like a Dutch version of a burka. No wonder foreign adventure was so popular amongst Europeans! Anything to get away from the repressive environment of 19th century Christiandom!
posted by Goofyy at 3:05 AM on January 14, 2012




Wow, I'm from Duluth, and I moved last year to Normandy (next to Brittany).

how odd to find two relevant things together like that in one post.
posted by EricGjerde at 12:09 PM on January 14, 2012 [1 favorite]


How weird. The site is gone/dead already.
posted by Goofyy at 10:27 PM on January 14, 2012


And the Project Gutenberg sites are back. Weird.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:41 AM on January 16, 2012


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