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Bookmarks tagged with “history”

  1. Cinema Treasures

    Such a nice site that keeps turning up in my searches for cinemas I went to years ago, many of them closed, split, renovated or simply renamed.

  2. How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

    John Lanchester on re-evaluating the ease of life for hunter gatherers vs settled societies. (via @cityofsound)

  3. Walton’s Telephone Exchange | Walton Tales

    Nice reminisces of an Essex telephone exchange in the 1960s.

  4. Why Growth Will Fall | by William D. Nordhaus | The New York Review of Books

    On how the rate of increase of standard of living and economic growth in the US was greatest from 1870-1970 and will never be the same again.

  5. Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Stephen Wolfram Blog

    Nice summary of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. I realised how little I actually knew about them. (via @cityofsound)

  6. The Agas Map

    Really nicely done zoomable, clickable, searchable perspective map of London from the 16th century. Very good.

  7. Employee #1: Amazon · The Macro

    On building the first Amazon website. (via Kottke)

  8. A Visit to the Treasure Vaults

    Some good stuff about how Kodak was often too early with digital camera technology, not too late, and was no good at marketing it.

  9. Home - London’s Silent Cinemas

    “It documents the early lives of over 700 cinemas across London and its suburbs” from 1906 to around 1930. The map’s really good.

  10. oldweb.today

    Browse pages archived on archive.org using period browsers and operating systems. Amazing, although the screen sizes seem a bit large to me, for the period. (via Waxy)

  11. Histography - Timeline of History

    Nice explorable timeline of different categories of things pulled from Wikipedia. A few annoying interface things, inevitably, but fascinating. (via Kottke)

  12. Insurance Plan of London Vol. VI: sheet 135 – 1887 – Chas E Goad Limited – Chas E Goad Limited – Visualize

    After a lot of clicking through lists of sheets I found this 1887 map of where we live. So many buildings. Book marblers! Feather warehouse! Umbrella factory! Tranters Temperance Hotel! Nicely done, British Library.

  13. Fire insurance maps and plans

    The dull title, and initial interface, doesn’t do this collection justice. Really, really detailed old maps of towns - lots of London - showing individual buildings and usage, each sheet carefully overlaid onto Google maps. It’s an effort to find a particular area though.

  14. Steven Mithen reviews ‘Earth’s Deep History’ by Martin Rudwick · LRB 30 July 2015

    On the history of how we’ve explained the history of Earth and life on it. (Also subscribers only)

  15. AltaVista: Main Page

    22 October 1996 (via @jah)

  16. What We Wore — A People’s Style History

    I do love some of these photos. (via Put This On)

  17. A Brief History of Money - IEEE Spectrum

    Seemed like a good overview.

  18. The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

    This was good. More about the case for having a discussion about the case for reparations. It was more affecting to me than, say, ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, which was too easily put in the “that’s just history” or “one person’s experience” buckets.

  19. Archeological Desk Based Assessment of 141-47 Whitecross Street (PDF)

    Interesting to see the what they need to assess before redeveloping even quite a small site like this, with information going back to Palaeolithic times.

  20. Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York: On Spike Lee & Hyper-Gentrification, the Monster That Ate New York

    A look at the gentrification of New York. Lots of good stuff, and interesting. But it feels a little too biased towards the author’s personal experiences of the recent wave. It may well be true that this is more important and destructive than previous waves but this needs more objective data.

  21. A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

    (June 2011) Really good look at corporations in a very broad sense, from East India Company, Smithian Growth, Mercantilist Economy (1600-1800), to Schumpterian Growh, Industrial Economy (1800-2000), and now Coasean Grown and the Perspective Economy. (via Interconnected I think)

  22. Citation Needed – blarg?

    Got round to reading this, about why arrays are indexed from zero, which is also an illustration of how history can be effectively lost when old academic papers cost a lot of money to read.

  23. Oral History: Sex! Drugs! Apps! SXSW Interactive At 20 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

    Mainly for the 2000 era memories, the Weblogs Roundtable, etc. I only felt like an observer - I wasn’t blogging and didn’t know anyone really - but I’m happy I was able to be there.

  24. 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.

  25. 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)

  26. 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.

  27. 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)

  28. 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.

  29. 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)

  30. xkcd: The Pace of Modern Life

    Quotes from 1871 to 1915 about the increasing pace of modern life. (via Kottke)

  31. 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)

  32. 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)

  33. 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 ?)

  34. 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.

  35. Leningrad Siege: Now and Then | English Russia

    Very simple, a blending of old and new photos, but very effective.

  36. 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.

  37. 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)

  38. Tower of London

    The Tower of London’s Facebook timeline goes back to 1066. (via Londonist)

  39. 1906 Earthquake Blended with Today | Shawn Clover

    Lovely merging of photos of San Francisco from 1906 and today. (via New Aesthetic)

  40. Building workers stories

    Free PDFs containing oral histories from the men who built the Barbican, the M1, Sizewell A, the South Bank and Stevenage.

  41. BBC News - How to read London

    Paul Mason, brilliant on the nature of London. Well worth a read.

  42. 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.

  43. 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)

  44. 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.

  45. 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.

  46. London Trails

    “Walking Tours with Old Maps.” Sounds good.

  47. 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)

  48. 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)

  49. 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)

  50. 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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