"Tekeli-li, or Hollow Earth Lives": A huge (comprehensive?) annotated bibliography of Antarctic and hollow earth fiction. Wow. (Thanks, Jonah!)
Engineers Help to Save and Reconstruct the Past: The University of Arizona's awesome-sounding Heritage Conservation project, in which lost technologies are resuccitated.
Dorothy Parker in the Paris Review, 1956: "I wanted to be -cute-. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense." If I ever have a trans-historical dinner party, I want Dotty to show up, get smashed, and leave with Walter Rathenau.
Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia & The Garden of Cyrus: My education is lacking, as until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of this overstuffed, Pynchonesque (Sternean?), melancholic slab of 17th century goodness.
Coconino Classics: Rare early 20th c. comic strips, including T.S. Sullivant's great "Fables for the Times" and several examples of a non-"Krazy Kat" George Herriman strip. Amazing.
Atlantis, the Antediluvian World: A nice reproduction of the classic from the "Prince of Cranks". (via Jonah)
The lost towns of New York: Upstate villages, flooded for New York City's watershed. (via ThingsMagazine.net)
Hugh Thompson, R.I.P.: The warrant officer who ordered his helicopter crew to draw their guns on the war criminals at My Lai, then flew Vietnamese civilians to safety, dies of cancer at age 62.
CNN: A Chat with Hugh Thompson: "Soldiers are taught to fight. Soldiers are taught to kill the enemy. This is not what occurred at My Lai."
The origins of the phrase "a country of laws not of men": Judge Damon Keith overturns the Mitchell Doctrine that national security is what the Attourney General says it is, in a case tangentially involving pot, Dr. Spock, and the MC5. I had no idea. (PDF) (via Crooked Timber)
Frequently Asked Questions About Naval History: From the Fighting Sullivans to flogging, from proximity fuses to the Philadelphia Experiment. Well-linked, well-sourced, and uniformly polite. A 21-gun salute for the Navy's historians!
Rosa Parks dead at 92: The Montgomery bus boycott is more complicated than a lot of history books make it out to be, which is why I'm even more glad that I got to shake her hand once.
How Race Wrecked Liberalism: A review of Nick Kotz’s "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America".
John Mage, "An Homage to Walter Benjamin: Arcades, Barricades and Public Sex": An article about the lost final work of one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, who killed himself upon being turned over to the Gestapo sixty-five years ago last week.
Hostile Witnesses: Arthur Liman on Ollie North and the Iran-Contra hearings.
The mystery of the Declaration of Independence: "The fact is the real name of Timothy Matlack who penned the Declaration of Independence is Tomislav Matlakowski..."
The American Diner Museum: A treasure trove of diner car designs, vintage signs, and perhaps the occasional blue plate and greasy spoon, coming to Providence, RI.
Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is: The rise and fall of the canonical variety of Washington apple.
Medieval Boston: What did Boston look like before the urban renewal of the '50s and '60s?
The DeMoulin Bros. Catalog of fraternal society gear: Amuse your friends at the next Odd Fellows lodge initiation with this 1930 catalog of "Burlesque and Side Degree Specialties".
The Passenger Pigeon Memorial: "The exhibit pays tribute to Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, who died at the Zoo in 1914." The Cincinnati Zoo was also home of the last Carolina parakeet.
Selections from "A Century of Parody and Imitation": Meanspirited nineteenth century parodic poetry, including Swinburne doing a quite passable Tennyson.
The game that got away: The Tri-Mountain League and the rise of "Knickerbocker" baseball.
The eWorld That Was and Wasn't: "And here is what really killed eWorld. What we forget about those days at Apple was how dark they got." The life and death of Apple's first online offering.
H.L. Mencken's "Declaration of Independence in American": A belated happy Independence Day. (via Unqualified Offerings.)
Least Wanted: A Flickr photostream devoted to criminals who are no longer a danger to themselves or others.
From corsets to catsuits: A brief timeline of tennis fashion.
The Gran Chaco War: On the "war of engineers" between Paraguay and a well-equipped but disastrously misprepared in the 1930s.
Things Magazine on "How to Write for the Papers": "In the first half of the twentieth century, London was awash with specialist publications, weekly and fortnightly papers that provided a steady diet of derring do, adventure, non-fiction and what we now call 'human interest.'"
The world's last survivor of the 1914 Christmas truce: "Only the guards were on duty. We all went outside the farm buildings and just stood listening. And, of course, thinking of people back home."
Surviving with Wolves: "Misha was only six years old when her parents were taken away from their home in Belgium to Auschwitz.... Misha crossed Belgium, Germany and Poland on foot alone - until, close to starvation in a vast forest, she was adopted by a family of wolves."
theferrett: The Weirdest Book I Ever Got: "Yes, that's correct; he has the theory that dinosaurs, enraged by fallen angels, attacked Noah's Ark as the flood began in a no-holds battle to the finish." Awesome.
The Closer and the Damage Done: How Bruce Sutter changed the last thirty years of baseball.
Did the Chinese discover Nova Scotia?: When an amateur expresses disbelief that professionals are ignoring something that will "turn history on its head", he or she is usually confused.
The Cincinnati Subway System: Abandoned during the Depression and now relegated to the ashheap of history. (via Things Magazine)
The Baseball Reliquary Inc. - Home: You've got to love an art museum that features fake Moe Berg "Spy Catcher" brand fruit labels and an interview with Jim Boulton. (via Hit and Run)
Deep Throat outs himself: He's former FBI assistant director Mark Felt, who was considered the leading candidate by Slate's Tim Noah (but not by the huge U of I Deep Throat survey).
Kronos: A Chronological History of the Martial Arts and Combative Sports: "Being a compendium of useful facts and figures to assist in the research and development of the knowledge of the martial arts, East and West." (via Things Magazine)
Kroger Babb’s Roadshow: How a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education: A lengthy and -wonderful- summary of an exploitation classic: "EVERYTHING SHOWN! EVERYTHING EXPLAINED!"
Rube Waddell: The Man, The Nutjob: "America's greatest southpaw pitcher, alligator wrestler, firetruck chaser, actor, bigamist, obsessive fisherman, rugby player, baton-twirling parade leader, Herculean drinker and philanthropic live-saving hero."
George Will embarasses himself: Find me three serious historians who say that the defining characteristics of postmodernism are "skepticism and cynicism".
Christian Century: New world order, old world anti-Semitism: Pat Robertson, populism, Christian anti-usury movements, economic unrest, and the Elders of Zion.
In Buenos Aires, Researchers Exhume Long-Unclaimed African Roots: A two-hundred-year-old demographic mystery is explained. (via Colorado Luis)
The American Museum of Radio and Electricity: "A ONE-OF-A-KIND MUSEUM FOR NORTH AMERICA"
Tonga: A Little Kingdom and a Great Queen: An American doctor's recollections of Tonga in the early '20s.
Sisyphus as Social Democrat: Brad deLong on the meaning and meaninglessness of J.K. Galbraith.
New York Press shreds Thomas Friedman's new book: The whole damn thing is premised on a metaphor that -didn't apply in 1492-.
Inscape & Outlandishness: On William Barnes and the gainrising of Anglo-Saxon speech. (via Making Light)
The Fisherman's Ring: What I really want to know is whether the ring itself is -replaced- for every new pope, or they just recreate the seal. Why won't the web give me my arcane Catholic trivia?
"After the Party", a biography of Joe March: Author of "The Wild Party", the poem that summed up the hard-partying Lost Generation.
Stephen Metcalf on Ross Douthat: A harsh but insightful review on Douthat and the problems of meritocracy (that doesn't even take Douthat for his painful comments about Harvard's philosophy department)
The Good Empire: Sociologist Vivek Chibber takes a run at Niall Ferguson's "Colossus".
When a nineteenth-century African-American author turns out not to be: For decades, scholars believed that despite her novel's complete lack of attention to black life Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was not white. (via the Little Professor)
Kayfabe Confidential: This is the most wonderfully ludicrous idea for a roleplaying game ever: the James Ellroy wrestling noir starring Classy Freddie Blassie.
The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse: The Dekker and Middleton play, otherwise only middlin', features my favorite Jacobean cross-dresser: she swears, she fights, she speaks to high and low, and she refuses to get married at the end.
Whispering imps on magic posters: Boy, the motif was absolutely everywhere. (via Waxy)
Film Threat's 10 best urban legends about the movies: Godzilla did -not- defeat King Kong in the Japanese version (and nine more).
Old circus posters: A scam SEO site, it looks like, but the graphics are still pretty nice.
Statisticians and the Panzerkorps: A statistical analysis of captured German tanks' serial numbers produced better estimates of total unit strength than military intelligence.
Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay: Pieces from Ricky Jay's new book are being exhibited in San Francisco. And I'm not there! (via Redfox)
If it had not been for 15 minutes...: "In 1979/80 my family took part in the biggest espionage scandal that the former country of East-Germany ever saw in its 50 years of existence."
The Galloper Magazine: Europe's online magazine for old showland.: Frost fairs, freak shows, organ grinders, and much much more. (via Ramage)
The Ida Tucker 48: A recreation of Preston Tucker's innovative and sued-into-oblivion car, made by a custom car manufacturer whose father owned a doomed dealership. (via Things Magazine)
Outside The Beltway : California Professor Flunks (Awful) Pro-U.S. Essay: Watching people rationalize the essay (and smear a reasonably common polisci textbook) because the professor is a Marxist is amusing; discovering that defending the student has become, in the tiniest way, a -cause- is absolutely surreal.
I Have a Dream: Seventy-five years on, is his dream still deferred? (MP3; listen to one of the greatest and most moving speeches of the twentieth century)
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin: "It was as though the earth itself had shifted, and all the detritus of an empire had washed ashore." Among the very best things I've ever read about the Second World War. (via MetaFilter)
Why did the market crash in 1987?: "Because everyone was thinking about 1929." This guy's explanation is nutty, but at least its amusing.
The paper clip evolutionary tree: The brief flourishing of weird paper clips corresponds to the Jurassic Period of the modern office, I guess. (via)
Best. Thread derailment. Ever.: Because there's nothing much nice to say about Eric Milton, the people at the Transaction Oracle argue about Neville Chamberlain and Sam Bowie
American Institute for Economic Research Cost-of-Living Calculator: Useful for making sure you get the occasional gag in the 1953 Peanuts collection.
The Battle of the Bulge: The Army presents an excellent website on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.
Greetings From Earth: MP3s of the Voyager messages to our alien brothes, or "why is the Ukrainian from Ithica"?
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: Memories of the Boy Plunger, the frantic trader who made as much as $100 million during the 1929 crash. (PDF)
"This is the voice of your Communist government speaking.": A 1961 Catholic comic fantasy of a dystopian Soviet America.
The Real Moon Landing Hoax: Were Russians trying to reach the moon in 1968?
Kempa plays with a working Japanese model gramaphone recorder: ...And then discovers that they make Edison cylinder kits as well.
Slate on JFK Reloaded: What could Ted Kennedy find so objectionable?
The Edelweiss Pirates: A semi-criminal long-haired folk-singing proto-hippie anti-Nazi youth movement. (via)
Isaac Newton, the last of the magicians: I was thinking about his Leibniz-bashing just the other day.
"...and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.": JWZ is present at the creation of the dot-com bubble (and a whole new industry, and the explosive growth of the Internet), ten years ago last night.
The man who buried the man who never was is dead: By the time of Operation Mincemeat, British intelligence had crawled inside the German's brains and thrown a tea party.
Anti-New Deal cartoons from African-American papers: After 1932, FDR eventually garnered a great deal of support from blacks, but it obviously wasn't universal. (via)
Every loss contains a memory of all the other losses.: A tree stump, a history lesson, a public art project, a memorial.
The Telephone EXchange Name Project: "I'm just barely old enough to remember that my phone number at home when I was 5 or so started with SYcamore 4, or SY4."
The Pacific Wreck Database: Tracking down the remnants of WWII's Pacific theater. (via)
The ritual killing of Canadian rifles: "A symbolic association has been postulated between trade musket brass dragon sideplates and the Northern Iroquoian panther/fire-dragon (meteor) man-being and the water lynx, Mishipizheu, among Algonkian-speaking groups..." (via)
Amazing Revelations timeline: Like a Paul Laffoley poster put together in MacPaint; alternately, it's the religious version of every UI and design "don't" ever conceived.
"Bill Clinton was a Jesuit, determined to carry out the Jesuit plan of Chieri.": "The Monroe Doctrine was America's response to the Jesuit's Congress of Vienna and Verona," and more truths from Bizarro Earth.
Mythical Geography: For sale: Maps of explorers' and cartographers' honest mistakes. (via)
The history of phrenology: I can't find the "neuro-linguistic rhyme hypnotist" bump.
Pirate flags: Calico Jack Rackham may have died like a dog, but he had the closest thing to the iconic skull and crossbones flag. (via)
The shipwrecks of Minnesota: Everyone remembers the Edmund Fitzgerald, but the Samuel P. Ely gets no respect.
Maps of Trajan's Rome: From Empire to Collesium. (via)
The history of probability as a single Excel spreadsheet: Wow. Just wow. There's a lot more fabulous game theory stuff at Roll the Bones, too.
"Cigarettes were also subject to the workings of Gresham's Law.": A British economist on his stint in a World War II P.O.W. camp. (via)
"We regret the omission.": How and why a Lexington, KY, newspaper ignored the civil rights movement. (via)
Gwendolyn Britt reaches the merry-go-round: Glen Echo Park's merry-go-round is still beautiful; I hope some of the protestors who fought to the Supreme Court to desegregate the park got to enjoy it.
The American Highway Project: Photos documenting a lost America.
William Tozier's bibliophilic expidition: 1 minivan, 1000 miles, 2000 pounds of books. Also, mummies.
The Science Frontiers Sourcebook Project: "The ashen light of Venus; The Martian 'pyramids'; Kinks in Saturn's rings; Continuing debate about the Voyager life-detection experiments; Neptune's mysterious ring...." A series of Fortean anomalies; these look absolutely delightful. (via)
What mysterious events led the Maya to leave Lorain, Ohio?: On migration, abandonment, and the dangers of seeking a simple answer to anything. (via)
It's All in the Cards: A history of playing card design. (via)
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: A weblog devoted to the golden days of radio.
Kitchens of the Future: "Her declaration that 'this kitchen doesn't need a woman' captures a central theme of this paper." An astoundingly great linkdump from Anne Galloway.
Cornell University's Home Economics Archive: Before there was mock apple pie, before there was health class, there were a lot of frustratrated proto-feminists who wanted to make a science of the arts of domesticity.
"And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore": Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'" (though you may know the Pogues version): Then in nineteen fifteen my country said: "Son, / It's time to stop ramblin', there's work to be done" / So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun / And they sent me away to the war
Letters from Normandy: "He must have been a very fine lad and I feel that their marvellous young spirits can never die and that they together will go into battle with the others to inspire and encourage them."
Black Victorians: History is not, in fact, lily-white. (via)
A Celebration of Winters Long Ago: My air conditioning is broken; I need to get in the right mindset. (via)
The history of credit & debt: For all those who have wanted to see what debtor's prison looked like.
Howard Besser's T-Shirt Database: Man oh man, is this thing cool.
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: The successful creation of the modern revolutionary Peking opera "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy" is a splendid victory for Chairman Mao's revolutionary line on literature and art. (via)
Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously: I have some problems with this piece -- I don't care for the anti-revisionist stance at the end, the counter-evidence is almost entirely from after the period of Hockney's concern, and I think Hockney's photo collages are actually pretty good -- but I can't argue with the conclusion. (see also)
Grotesques: "Pope-ass and other monsters..." (via)
"Under the Big Top": If Janet Davis' prose style is any good, this cultural history of the American circus could be a hell of a lot of fun. (see also)
120 years of electronic musical instruments: From the Musical Telegraph to the Alesis Quadrasynth, with many, many steps in between.
The DuMont television network: Vanished networks of the 1950s, we salute you!
British National Archives' First World War resources: Including timelines, propaganda posters, service records, and more.
THEN: A history of British s.f. fandom. (via)
The history of street names in America: How we got from "Church Street" to "Fox Run Drive"
The development of spectacle: "A site devoted to Renaissance and Baroque theatrical spectacle," so all you Debordians can settle down. Extra points for flying machines! (via)
The history of plagues and epidemics: Warning: Horrible photos of syphillis victims within. (via)
The History of...: Lightbulbs and treadmills and college savings, these are a few of my favorite things. (via)
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane found: 60 years after the "Little Prince" author disappeared while scouting Nazi troop positions, his plane has been found off the coast of Provence.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography: From A-CA-OO-MAH-CA-YE to SEBASTIAN ZOUBERBUHLER! (via)
Mistakes of the Mac dev team: They're largely the result of not realizing how long the Mac was going to survive. (via)
GUI obituary posters: Happy Mac, we hardly knew ye.
Historical nuclear weapon test films: Home movies of big, big booms.
The missing Faberge eggs: One was in a minerals museum, misfiled as a lamp. Way to go, jewel thieves!
Ricky Jay's Radio Journal: This, then, is what they invented the Internet for.
Giants in the Head: The Cardiff Giant in American Historical Consciousnes: I wish anything I had written as an undergrad had been this interesting.
Nosepulling and shame: "Hardly any account mentions [Andrew] Jackson's nose as the object of either the intended or the actual attack."
Winston Churchill dines with Isaac Berlin: He thought he was meeting the philosopher and historian Isiah Berlin. Hilarity ensued. (via)
The historical price of gold: How much did the stuff that dreams are made of used to cost? (via) (see also)
The Mikhail Bakhtin Manuscript Smoking Page: "Assuming 1,000 double-sided pages of text, that's 500 smokable sheets."
Mars, or, Misunderstanding: A masterful account of Helene Smith (the Medium from Mars), her Martial exploits, and alien walk-ins today.
Prince Whipple: The black slave in 'The Passage of the Delaware'
Zelda: History or Myth?: On the internal consistancy and temporal progression of Link versus Ganon (via)
The radicalism of the Finns: I knew about the racial classification questions -- 'white' is and was a fluid category -- but the Socialist thing was new to me. (via)
Postcards from the Park: Brad's exploration of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis
Licensing "I Have a Dream": Profiting from the most rousing American oratory of the late 20th century. (see also)