Links tagged with “history”
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Unlikely simultaneous historical events
Some great stuff there. Also makes me think a site that just summarises interesting Reddit pages would be great (does it exist?) because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the source page itself for more examples.
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Locating London’s Past
Amazingly good versions of the 1746 Rocque map of London, and the first (1869-80) OS map. All fully tiled, zoomable searchable, etc. The mapping methodology page makes me glad I never tried this. (via @agpublic)
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Oxford Bags (Put This On)
Blimey, look at the size of some of those 1920s trousers! They make, say, “Madchester” baggy jeans look like drainpipes.
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Richard J. Evans reviews ‘The People’s Car’ by Bernhard Rieger · LRB 12 September 2013
Lots of interesting nuggets in this history of the Volkswagen Beetle. (Subscribers only)
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Britain from Above | Rescue the Past
This is amazing. Prepare to lose some time to looking up places you know. Over 47,000 aerial images of Britain from between 1919 and 1953.
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Internet of Dreams - Time and Edges
StreetView showing the same street both pre- and post- gentrification, giving a hint at its historical importance. Imagine being in the 22nd century and being able to use today’s StreetView. (via New Aesthetic)
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xkcd: The Pace of Modern Life
Quotes from 1871 to 1915 about the increasing pace of modern life. (via Kottke)
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Terrorist or Martyr? by Christopher Benfey | The New York Review of Books
Solely for this incidental quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, after commenting on the “gloom” of Harper’s Ferry: “Yet there would be a less striking contrast between Southern and New-England villages, if the former were as much in the habit of using white paint as we are. It is prodigiously efficacious in putting a bright face on a bad matter.” (Subscribers only)
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David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Old maps overlaid on their modern Google Maps. I want to add something like this, using a 17th-ish century map of London, to the Pepys site. Somehow. (via Kottke)
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The Last Places
Henry VIII’s wine cellar, once part of Whitehall Palace, still exists under the Ministry of Defence. Although the entire cellar was moved, in one piece, when the MoD was being built. (via ?)
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How London’s Silicon Roundabout really got started — European technology news
Brilliant - really glad this got written up. Matt Biddulph’s timeline of how “Silicon Roundabout” became a thing.
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Leningrad Siege: Now and Then | English Russia
Very simple, a blending of old and new photos, but very effective.
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What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? by Jared Diamond | The New York Review of Books
Diamond reviewing ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’. an interesting read. Social change etc. I love that stuff.
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Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
Really nice visualisation of how different states have voted over time. (via The Functional Art)
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Tower of London
The Tower of London’s Facebook timeline goes back to 1066. (via Londonist)
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1906 Earthquake Blended with Today | Shawn Clover
Lovely merging of photos of San Francisco from 1906 and today. (via New Aesthetic)
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Building workers stories
Free PDFs containing oral histories from the men who built the Barbican, the M1, Sizewell A, the South Bank and Stevenage.
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BBC News - How to read London
Paul Mason, brilliant on the nature of London. Well worth a read.
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Escape into Whiteness by Brent Staples | The New York Review of Books
Some of the details of 19th and early 20th century courts etc deciding whether specific mixed-race individuals count as white or coloured are bizarre, as if part of some kind of epic theatre piece.
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Retirement Researcher Blog: The Shocking International Experience of the 4% Rule
Historical number-crunching, looking at one of the universal rules-of-thumb of financial blogs. (via Monevator)
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List of windmills in London - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“A list of existing and former windmills whose sites fall within Greater London.” Lists 15 locations in Clerkenwell alone. Internet is brilliant.
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Authenticity/Access | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
On how historical web pages (such as Geocities) appear differently now, even if you have all the original assets. eg, browser rendering, text anti-aliasing, MIDI audio, screen resolutions, etc.
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London Trails
“Walking Tours with Old Maps.” Sounds good.
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Origins of e-mail: My mea culpa - Omblog - The Washington Post
A good apology but it’s surprising that they could publish something that wrong, twice. Yes, we *do* expect journalists to check everything; isn’t that why they’re better than mere bloggers (or so they tell us)? (via @alanconnor)
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Between the Lines - Features - Los Angeles magazine
Fascinating long article on the history of parking, parking meters, parking lots, parking costs, and how they all affect towns and cities. (via Kottke)
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Michael Neill reviews ‘Medicinal Cannibalism…’ … and ‘Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires’ … · LRB 1 December 2011
About “mummy”, the processed remains of humans that was considered a valuable medicine as recently as the 19th century. (Subscribers only)
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Crosswords: the meow meow of the 1920s | Crosswords | guardian.co.uk
A lovely selection of quotes from 1920s newspapers about how the new mania for crosswords was going to destroy society.
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Astonishments, ten, in the history of version control < Francis is
A nice summary of advances in version control systems over the decades. With any technology it’s easy to forget the many incremental changes that make up the current norm.
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Home | The British Newspaper Archive
Looks very impressive - loads of scanned and searchable British newspapers from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. It costs to view the results though (from £6.95 for two days) so not for casual browsing.
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11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard - Mental Floss
Sounds of things that you no longer hear. I started making a list of these ages ago, but didn’t even get this many. (via Kottke)
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United States Early Radio History
A fascinating read, with loads of links to text and images from period articles and adverts.
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BBC Dimensions: How Many Really?
Lovely thing from BERG that “compares the number of people involved in key historical events or situations to the people you know through Facebook or Twitter.” Very good.
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The Floodwaters Rise
Jason Scott has been busy importing loads of old computer magazines into Internet Archive. Great stuff (and a great job!).
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The First Year of Frames
I completely forgot sites used to offer the choice of “Frames or No Frames”.
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Who Invented the Avant Garde v.3
Oh, this is a nice painted timeline which I want to spend lots of ink on printing out and putting on the wall to ponder. (Via @mildlydiverting)
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LRB · Stephen Sedley · Plimsoll’s Story
Some interesting bits about the development of laws and reforms in 19th century England.
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TimeRime.com - Homepage
Create your own (Flash-based) timelines. You know when you have an idea for a site and then you find something that sort of does it, but not quite how you wanted?
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LRB · Richard J. Evans · The Wonderfulness of Us
I’m finding this discussion (the article and many letters below it) about how history should be taught in British schools interesting, although I’ve lost track of exactly who thinks what.
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London’s Holy Wells
Some interesting history about the location of wells in London, with photos and maps. eg, St Agnes Well was round the back of the Foundry on Old Street.
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Twitter / alex butterworth: For the next ten weeks I w …
“For the next ten weeks I will be tweeting the events of the Commune through the voices of the participants.” Lovely idea, seems a bit hard to follow what’s actually happening, or maybe I’ve missed the point.
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Scripto | Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription
“A light-weight, open source, tool that will allow users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects. The tool will include a versioning history and full set of editorial controls, so that project staff and [sic] manage public contributions.”
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John C.H. Grabill’s Photos of Western Frontier Life | Plog — World news photography, Photos — The Denver Post
Lots of photos of late 19th century America, centered on the town of Deadwood. Some lovely images there. (via The Online Photographer)
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Street Traffic Accidents (Metropolis). (Hansard, 18 May 1914)
“…can [the Home Secretary] see his way so to alter or relax the police regulations as to enable the more expeditious slaughter of animals meeting with serious accidents in the streets?”
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How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? - Population Reference Bureau
The number of people alive today is something like, very vaguely, 6% of all those who ever lived. (via @GreatDismal)
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Thoughts of a Bohemian » Blog Archive » The fire this time
It’s not just digital archives that are being destroyed: The liquidator in charge of the defunct Corbis Sygma agency is planning to destroy an archive of 12 million photos. We need a real world Archive Team. Grrrrrrrrr. (via The Online Photographer)
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Wilderness to brothels to Apple store: the History of Development in one block
I like this description of one spot of Manhattan and how it changed over the centuries. Although calling the block’s current state “the ultimate culmination of centuries of development” assumes nothing’s going to change ever again. (via @GreatDismal)
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One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent
A blog outlining some peoples’ explorations of the torrent of all the archived GeoCities data. Some lovely old bits of early web archaeology in there.
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David Long :: Hidden City
“The Secret Alleys, Courts and Yards of London’s Square Mile” Sounds like a good read.
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BBC - WW2 People’s War
At least one of those BBC sites, a good one, threatened with deletion/archiving/whatever is already archived by the British Library here. I haven’t looked for others.
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YouTube - The London Nobody Knows (Part 1 of 4) Documentary
‘The London Nobody Knows’ has found its way to YouTube. Watch, if you haven’t seen it, and you like/know London, in case it disappears.