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☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

β€œThose Disturbers of my Rest”: The First Treatise on Bedbugs (1730)

β€” June 28th 2023 at 06:06

Written by an exterminator, this treatise wanders into a surprising mode: one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869)

β€” June 21st 2023 at 15:38

Thirty albumen silver prints of designs created through ornamental lathework.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851)

β€” June 20th 2023 at 14:57

These caricatures of well-known Philadelphians transpose human heads onto animal forms.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Wonder and Pleasure in the Oude Doolhof of Amsterdam

β€” June 14th 2023 at 13:36

For almost 250 years, a mysterious pleasure park sat on the banks of Amsterdam's canals. Angela Vanhaelen leads us on a tour of the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids in the Oude Doolhof β€” an attraction that mingled pagan, protestant, and imperial desires.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

My Body is a Temple Four-Story House: Analogical Diagram from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708)

β€” June 14th 2023 at 13:36

In this Hebrew medical diagram, the human body is mapped onto a house: the stomach becomes a kitchen; the lungs, latticed windows.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune

β€” June 8th 2023 at 15:33

Was an alien woman really cast back into the sea after surfacing on the coast of Japan in 1803?

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

The Launch of Our Mid-Year Fundraiser!

β€” June 7th 2023 at 16:27

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Machines.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913)

β€” June 6th 2023 at 13:34

Time travel with a hairpin twist: two women land in the psyche of Marie Antoinette in 1792, while she is thinking about 1789.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

The Black Dandy of Buenos Aires: Racial Fictions and the Search for RaΓΊl Grigera

β€” May 31st 2023 at 11:03

A mysterious staple of Buenos Aires nightlife in the 1910s and 20s, Raúl Grigera was an audacious Afro-Argentine dandy, an eccentric bohemian icon, a man who called himself el murciélago (the bat). Paulina L. Alberto examines the racial stories told by photographs, comic strips, and newspaper articles about a person many knew only as β€œel negro RaΓΊl”, searching for the life behind the legend.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Denishawn Dance Film (ca. 1916)

β€” May 30th 2023 at 15:34

This silent picture offers a glimpse into the early activities of the Denishawn dance school.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Medieval Illustrations of Bonnacons

β€” May 25th 2023 at 13:34

To ward off attackers this mythical animal was said to expel excrement with a devastating explosive force.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

β€” May 23rd 2023 at 12:32

The heart of this book is the sharp and disjointed accounts of survivors, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Marvellous Moderns: The Brothers Perrault

β€” May 17th 2023 at 07:31

Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Peking Opera Characters (ca. 1900)

β€” May 16th 2023 at 06:54

Painted by an unidentified artist, these opera characters are gathered from literature, military history, and myth.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907)

β€” May 11th 2023 at 11:04

These images of the LA Alligator Farm depict a level of casual proximity unthinkable today.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Indian Sign Talk (1893)

β€” May 10th 2023 at 06:36

An early guide to communicating in the language now known as Plains Indian Sign Language.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

β€” May 3rd 2023 at 08:19

Those who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant and Jean Lorrain β€” psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of mind and suffered Promethean consequences.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Punctuation Personified (1824)

β€” April 27th 2023 at 10:06

Taking a child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal β€œcharacters”: admiring exclamation marks and militaristic semicolons.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

Jean Baptiste VΓ©rany’s Chromolithographs of Cephalopods (1851)

β€” April 27th 2023 at 09:54

In these images, VΓ©rany realizes his ambition β€” to accurately render β€œthe suppleness of the flesh, the grace of the contours, the transparency and the coloring” of cephalopods.

☐ β˜† βœ‡ The Public Domain Review

β€œThough Silent, I Speak”: A Book of Sundial Mottoes (1903)

β€” April 25th 2023 at 08:21

A collection of more than 60 sundial inscriptions, exploring various themes relating to the passing of time.

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