Interesting article on ten lost technologies.
Archive for the ‘history’ Category
old school
Great colorized photos of America taken from 1939 to 1943.
in memoria
It is fitting to post some great pictures of the D-Day landings in Normandy here.
UPDATE: See these too.
die fuhrer
Here, have some previously unpublished photos of Hitler’s bunker.
let the guffaws commence
No one is really sure why Mark Twain issued a 100-year moratorium on the publishing of his official autobiography. The good news is that the time has come. In November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume.
This is great news. I’m on a big Twain kick right now, so the timing couldn’t be more perfect.
all hail
The skeleton lake of Roopkund, India is a very odd place.
Einstein’s office
Ralph Morse’s photograph of Einstein’s office in Princeton, taken hours after Einstein’s death and captured exactly as the Nobel Prize-winner had left it. See more such pictures here.
The past is always a rebuke to the present – Robert Penn Warren
David Friedman, author of the interesting blog Ironic Sans, has a new project called Sunday Magazine, in which he posts the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine that was published exactly 100 years ago. Some really interesting stuff in here.
bizarre medical condition of the day
Dancing mania. In July 1518, numerous people in Strasbourg, France fell subject to an epidemic of ceaseless dancing, dying over the course of a month from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.
old school
Fascinating sets of historical photos from the New York Public Library.
paper trail
Letters of Note is one of my favorite new websites, although I cannot view it at work because I wouldn’t get anything done. Simply put, it’s a collection of rare, important, or otherwise culturally relevant letters, with transcriptions. For starters, check out this letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family, written from a repatriation camp after he was rescued from the nazis in 1945.
OS version .00000134
Interesting article on the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a “device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.”
historical artifact fo the day
The Kunyu Wanguo Quantu or “Map of the Myriad Countries of the World” was made in 1602 and shows an astounding grasp of geography, unheard of in that age. This is one of the most significant maps in existence.
ahhhhh yeah
Amazing. 2,500 years ago, Native Americans put bling in their grills
Ancient peoples of southern North America went to “dentists”—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico).
This and other great discoveries of 2009 can be found here.
