Skip to main content

Links tagged with “history”

  1. Clair Wills · Life Pushed Aside: The Last Asylums · LRB 18 November 2021

    Very long and good history of a psychiatric hospital in the 20th century, outsider art, and the authors’ mother and grandparents who worked there. More interesting than I initially expected.

  2. The Gloucester Road Story

    Nice. What business was in each location on the road (in Bristol) since 1870.

  3. 404PageFound – Active Vintage Websites, Old Webpages, and Web 1.0

    Lots of old sites that are still live. (via Web Curios)

  4. Why are hyperlinks blue?

    Some good digital archaeology. (via Adactio)

  5. Home | Layers of London | Recording the Layers of London’s Rich Heritage

    I think this is a good collection of old maps layered on a modern one although I was slightly baffled when trying it on an iPad. (via Things Magazine)

  6. Explore georeferenced maps - Map images - National Library of Scotland

    A lot of old OS maps as tiled overlays on modern maps.

  7. ONS Basemaps Comparison

    Nice way to compare places in the UK on new and old maps.

  8. Tom Crewe · A Girl Called Retina: You’ll like it when you get there · LRB 13 August 2020

    The first half of this especially good, full of jolly entertaining anecdotes about mid 20th century girls’ boarding schools.

  9. Horses and Ale – the end of two eras – Symbols & Secrets

    I knew there used to be stables up Whitecross Street but hadn’t realised it was in the (apparently recently closed) Travis Perkins .

  10. Photo Essay: 100 Years That Changed Houston | Houstonia Magazine

    I enjoyed these photos of people in Houston. (via Things Magazine)

  11. Ewyas Lacy Study Group

    Quite deep local history site, very near us.

  12. 15 Years of Yahoo.com | Flickr

    Screenshots of the home page through the years, from 1994 to 2009.

  13. A short history of body copy sizes on the Web

    I would like more histories of specific features of web design over the decades. (via Adactio)

  14. Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) (Kicks Condor)

    “…my notes on the book We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture … a pretty decent compilation of blog posts from … mostly 1999-2002.” Great. Fascinating excerpts and commentary.

  15. Graphing Calculator Story

    I don’t think I knew this before, and it’s much better than I expected “How the Mac’s graphing calculator was made” to be.

  16. Help me make a world history syllabus out of novels - books | Ask MetaFilter

    I don’t often read historical novels, but I like this idea.

  17. GeoCities Oral History #3. Jennifer Pursley | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

    I love these. This interview is with the “ringmaster” of the Anti-Titanic Webring.

  18. An oral history of “Silicon” Roundabout | Forward Partners

    One that sounds familiar to me! Well, a lot of it does anyway. I’d still like to read one of these that starts earlier - it wasn’t a wasteland before 2008.

  19. The 1959 Project

    I’m liking this blog, one post per day, about some things from that day in the world of jazz in 1959. Nicely done (aside from the lack of any navigation). (via Kottke)

  20. The oral history of the Hampsterdance: The twisted true story of one of the world’s first memes | CBC Arts

    I was looking up Hampsterdance two days ago but didn’t see this article. A bit bonkers. And nice GIF illustrations. (via b3ta newsletter)

  21. The Online Photographer: The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36

    Really good history of why “full frame” digital cameras have a sensor size of 24mm x 36mm, dimensions set in 1913.

  22. Berners Street hoax - Wikipedia

    What larks. (via Things Magazine)

  23. General Magic: Oral History of the Influential Tech Company

    “Oral history” seems to mean “interviews broken into tiny snippets to give the impression of a conversation” but this excerpt of a book is still good. I remember that interface from an early Wired article.

  24. Making

    Detailed and fascinating look at the issues with trying to make the time HTML element work for dates hundreds or thousands of years old. (via:tominsam)

  25. 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.

  26. How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

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

  27. Walton’s Telephone Exchange | Walton Tales

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

  28. 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.

  29. 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)

  30. The Agas Map

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

  31. Employee #1: Amazon · The Macro

    On building the first Amazon website. (via Kottke)

  32. 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.

  33. 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.

  34. 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)

  35. 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)

  36. 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.

  37. 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.

  38. 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)

  39. AltaVista: Main Page

    22 October 1996 (via @jah)

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

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

  41. A Brief History of Money - IEEE Spectrum

    Seemed like a good overview.

  42. 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.

  43. 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.

  44. 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.

  45. 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)

  46. 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.

  47. 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.

  48. 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.

  49. 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)

  50. 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.

The most common tags

  1. webdevelopment (804)
  2. london (381)
  3. uk (343)
  4. music (291)
  5. mac (184)
  6. javascript (182)
  7. maps (158)
  8. history (158)
  9. css (156)
  10. lrb (153)

More…