Links tagged with “history”
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Old maps of Southwark - Southwark Council
Not just maps of Southwark, but good resolution PDFs of historical maps of London. Good. (via @alanconnor)
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The battle of Towton: Nasty, brutish and not that short | The Economist
Fascinating account of a War of the Roses battle from an excavated mass grave. I didn’t know men of the time weren’t much shorter than the average today (people shrank in the Victorian era). (via Kottke)
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LRB · James Davidson · Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly
This article, about the changes in names given to children over the years was fascinating, at least (for me) until it gets round to the main subject, ancient Greek names.
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War Cabinet (ukwarcabinet) on Twitter
World War II told daily in tweets and links to web pages where you can add free PDFs to your shopping cart, check out, give your email address, and finally download them. Nice idea, spoiled by execution. (via @blech)
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Modern Two-Party System in the Senate Timeline
Fascinating and detailed graph of shifts in Republican/Democrat senators from 1857-2006. I’d love to see something similar for the UK.
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Google LatLong: History in the Unmaking
Very nice - Google Earth layers of London and Paris in 1945. I also didn’t know Google Earth had lots of different post-2000 layers (for London at least). (via Booktwo)
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The Participant Observer » Blog Archive » Cyborganic and the Birth of Networked Social Media (It’s here!)
PhD thesis from a couple of years ago, on Cyborganic and other things (like Wired/Hotwired) that its members were involved in.
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Why trust Facebook with the future’s past? — Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard
Twitter and Facebook are storing what will be our history, but it’s not accessible. (Which is why I have my own public archive of my Twitters, and rarely use Facebook.) (via Preoccupations)
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A Vision of Britain through Time | Your national on-line library for local history | Maps, Statistics, Travel Writing and more
This is interesting. Seems to be a collection of historic texts and maps and data, all searchable by location. Some nicely done stuff.
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Connecting Historical Authorities with Links, Contexts and Entities
“We want to help create an historic placename gazetteer for the UK, publish it as Linked Data and link it to other widely-used sources of placename reference information on the semantic web.”
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Historypin | Home
This is rather nice, especially when you finally get to viewing the historical photos in place in Google Streetview. (via Beyond the Beyond)
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How to be a beer historian in just 10 books « Zythophile
Reading lists about really specific fields of knowledge by people who know their stuff are good. (via Chris Heathcote)
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DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
All good, but particularly the points from “everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.” Very good. (via Russell Davies)
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The arrow of WordPress time « Jon Udell
On trying to do something a little Pepys’ Diary-esque using a standard WordPress.com site.
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LRB · Charles Nicholl · ‘A Naughty House’
Entertaining account of some early 17th century people and places around Whitecross Street, St John Street, Barbican.
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LRB · Keith Thomas · Diary
About taking notes from books, keeping commonplace books, etc. Interesting to read about his laborious technique.
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The Revision Thing | The Texas Tribune
A fascinating view of what the Texas State Board of Education (which effectively determines what children across the US study) changed in the US History standards.
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Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper’s Magazine)
Lovely article that is more a reminiscence of a lost San Francisco and childhood than it is another “we must save newspapers” plea.
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Experimental Rockets at the Naze - Windows Live
There was secret rocket testing going on at Walton on the Naze during World War II.
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The day the music died - Vox
Simon Wistow on the end of the UK dot.com bubble ten years ago.
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Free Audio Walks in London - Download free podcast episodes by Robert Wright on iTunes.
I haven’t tried these but could be good…
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When Science & Poetry Were Friends - The New York Review of Books
I liked this Freeman Dyson article from last year, recounting the scientific world of 1770-1830 and comparing it to today.
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Timeline twins, music and movies
I keep thinking about this old post. I must be getting old. “Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller today is equivalent to listening to Elvis Presley’s first album (1956) at the time of Thriller’s release in 1982.”
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WW2: A Civilian in the Second World War
Another historical-diary-as-weblog, this time diaries from the home front in Essex during World War II.
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Westminster City Council - The Life and Loves of a Victorian Clerk
Least inspiring implementation yet of realtime-historical-diary-online? No RSS, links, weblog view. Does have pictures though. And pointless generic “Was this useful?” block.
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The Diary of a Nobody, as a daily weblog
From ‘Punch’ magazine in 1888.
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Looking Into the Past - a gallery on Flickr
Lovely photos featuring an old photo of the same view held between camera and background. Oh, just look, it’ll make more sense.
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Grand Unified Timeline of Human History - Meta
Sounds interesting, although I’m not quite sure what it is… A project to combine lots of existing timelines? An attempt to create a huge new timeline from scratch?
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Visualizing empires decline on Vimeo
Lovely visualisation of the expansion and contraction of four empires over 200 years. (via Long Now)
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Royal Society - Trailblazing
A little thin in content so far, and overly flashy for me, and the original articles are all but hidden. But otherwise a good start on making this old material more accessible.
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Augmented Reality Does Time Travel Tourism | Singularity Hub
I remember 20ish years ago walking round my home town wanting something like this (only portable, and working everywhere).
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Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]
The history of the image element in HTML. A great bit of documenting internet history. (via Waxy)
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Reocities , rising from the ashes - RIP Geocities…
Wonderful - one guy raced to copy all of GeoCities. Worth reading ‘Making of’. He should win medals, awards, certificates, etc. (via Kottke)
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100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words - Ars Technica
How companies have complained that new technologies will destroy content industries over the past century. Like when home taping killed music. Wasn’t that terrible. (via Kottke)
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Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: Saving Britain’s Past
This really is a good programme, with a nice balance of old and modern. And no struggling to make stories over-dramatic, like too many documentaries these days.
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Historical Blogging
Pretty fantastic. Students from The Anderson School in New York created blogs, IM chats and blog comments for American Civil War-era characters. Have a read.
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Internet Archaeology
Some lovely “old” fragments of the web.
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Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community | Tawawa.org
Fascinating history of the early days of weblogs, with a prominent place for Dave Winer’s NewsPage stuff, which I remember being important to me (the Haddock Directory started on Userland Frontier in 1997). (via Preoccupations)
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Walton Tales - Windows Live
A blog and photos about the history of Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex.
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The London Gazette - Munday Septemb 3, to Munday Septemp 10, 1666
Facsimiles of four pages of ‘The London Gazette’ reporting on the Great Fire of London. “Published by Authority”.
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DreamHost Blog » They’re Internet History
More stuff about the history of GeoCities and WebRing. (via Waxy)
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ASCII by Jason Scott / Geocities: Lessons So Far
Not just for the good stuff about archiving Geocities, but also about the history of the site and its structure. (via Waxy)
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Magical times at the picture palace - Evening Star 24
Second part (of two, I think) of my grandad’s memories of growing up in Ipswich in the early 1900s.
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Child’s-eye view of Edwardian Ipswich - Evening Star 24
Part one of my grandad’s memories of growing up in Ipswich in the early 1900s.
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140 Characters » How Twitter Was Born
How Twitter went from idea to product. I love stories like this because you know how much it means to the people involved. (via Preoccupations)
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Photographic collection homepage from London transport museum
More than 16,000 historical photos of London, nicely browsable. You can even add comments to each one. Would be nice if they enlarged bigger, but otherwise fab.
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Newspapers and magazines - Digital National library of Serbia
Scanned and browsable issues, from the avant-garde ‘Zenit’ to ‘Advanced Beekeeping’. Awesome (especially if you read Serbian).
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Twitter / novelsin3lines
I’m very much enjoying the 1906 French news summaries by Félix Fénéon (and not just because I wrote it up as an idea myself a while back). Lovely writing.
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Cabinet Magazine Online - A Timeline of Timelines
A history of different timelines. (via Kevin Kelly)
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Bristol Then and Now Photographs - Page One
Lots of animated images with photos of past and (nearly) present Bristol. A shame more of them don’t line up better, but still interesting.