Since this page represents the group's complete conversation about "History," it is presented in chronological order to avoid the Memento
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Subject Index for History
By Hugh Pearman: Published first in Gabion Minoru Yamasaki was a very small man - only 5 feet one inch tall - who designed what were briefly the world's tallest towers: New York's World Trade Center. He also wrote, in...
M E-L wrote this on September 21, 2001
In Literature at the Khyber Pass, Charles Laurence describes his encounters in Afghanistan in 1979: Was I to be accused of taking pictures of those strange figures in black chadors, flapping down dirt paths like so many winged crows? Had...
M E-L wrote this on October 25, 2001
[NB: I am in NO way suggesting that the US is behind any of the recent terror attacks, or that there's any Wag-The-Dog going on, despite Willie Nelson's involvement. But this story is just too weird not to share.] ABC...
M E-L wrote this on October 25, 2001
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times...
M E-L wrote this on October 30, 2001
Fire truck dream should become reality today In 1867, after the Civil War, the FDNY raised money to buy a new fire truck for Columbia, SC (which had largely been burnt down). Columbia promised that "should misfortune ever befall the...
M E-L wrote this on November 15, 2001
Los Angeles Times: The Rarely Told Story of WWII Our tactics in the "good war" aren't any less brutal than our tactics in the present war. Excerpt below....
DAEL wrote this on December 3, 2001
For World AIDS Day, Trip wrote a moving tribute to Yale professor John Boswell. Let's not forget that while war rages abroad, the epidemic still rages at home....
M E-L wrote this on December 4, 2001
* Driving down Route 87, passing a red Neon with this URL emblazoned on the back. * On the back of a truck on 7th Avenue, a large machine is labelled "Putzmeister." Really. * Walking down Garfield Place, I pass...
M E-L wrote this on December 4, 2001
Oy McVey: From the Irv Rubin Bust to the Stern Gang: The Rich History of Jewish Terrorism This article by Jason Vest in this week's Voice starts off with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League condemning in strong...
M E-L wrote this on December 19, 2001
I'm still trying to figure out why this came from the Economist, but whatever. Fascinating. The week, to which we are all enslaved, has a strange and erotic history Why does The Economist appear every seventh day? The answer is...
Colin wrote this on January 11, 2002
I can't let today go by without writing of the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, which happened 83 years ago today. Here's is Zeitler's account: On January 15, 1919, an unseasonably warm day in Boston, tragedy struck. Neither this Massachusetts city...
M E-L wrote this on January 15, 2002
A book written by Blake Eskin - who I went to Elementary School, High School and College with. We were also best friends when I was in First Grade. Some of y'all may have known him at Yale or after...
Ennis wrote this on February 1, 2002
Speaking of books, here is a site I found when I was doing a search for International Fund Services (this site description contained the phrase "ifs of history"). Kinda of interesting if you are into that kinda thing....
patrick wrote this on February 27, 2002
“During the apartheid era, for every 10 policeman on the streets, one was fighting crime. The rest were enforcing apartheid laws.” And another apartheid legacy: “In a trial lasting two and a half years, witnesses had testified that Project Coast,...
M E-L wrote this on April 25, 2002
Humor appears in the unlikeliest of places. I wouldn't normally say that the experience of writing my dissertation is laugh-filled, but sometimes I come across humorous correspondence. The latest find is a letter from an English zoologist to his wife,...
DAEL wrote this on June 12, 2002
The movie is doing poorly, but ... [story taken from Rednations.com discussion of the Windtalkers] Hasbro Re-Issues G.I JOE Navajo Code Talker Action Figure By Newstream.com Web, AZ, Wed, June 2002 (Newstream) -- Hasbro, Inc (NYSE: HAS) has announced the...
Ennis wrote this on June 23, 2002
Just in time for the holiday, Debbie weighs in with this article on the Top Five Myths About the Fourth of July. Everything you know is wrong. But celebrate anyway! (And if you're still in a revisionist mood, read this...
M E-L wrote this on July 3, 2002
A group of DC citizens is asking Queen Elizabeth to place the US capital under British rule. A stunt, sure, but shouldn't they get representation in Congress? Story via songdog.net, another nycbloggers member....
M E-L wrote this on July 12, 2002
picture by Frank H. Jump Some beautiful pictures of old painted ads at the Fading Ad Campaign site. I've always wanted to photograph these myself but I'm glad someone else has. Read the photographer's page on how he started...
M E-L wrote this on August 20, 2002
Rec'd this email from my Aunt Martha. Thought everyone who lives and drives in NYC should know: By the way, here's a little known NYC fact for you. Jackie [my cousin] has been studying explorers in social studies, and informed...
Guest wrote this on October 11, 2002
Which Founding Father Are You?...
M E-L wrote this on November 12, 2002
I am not the person to write this. I am neither a Buffy scholar or a student of the occult. I've just noticed a couple of interesting correspondences between the Buffy mythos and the lost book known as The Necronomicon....
M E-L wrote this on December 6, 2002
Before too long, we may find the G.O.P.'s Big Trent here, in the robustly moribund Political Graveyard. An old-school "Web page" cross-referenced to beat the band....
Colin wrote this on December 18, 2002
But watch out for the telomeres. A pdf of Watson and Crick's 1953 publication available here....
Elizabeth Lynn wrote this on January 27, 2003
Following the time-honored tradition of kicking off World Wars with an assassination in or around Serbia, the Serbian Prime Minister has been assassinated. I know, I know, the Serbians were the assassins in the case of Archduke Ferdinand, so its...
Jimpy wrote this on March 12, 2003
Simon Schama's history of anti-Americanism amongst the Europeans, published in the New Yorker. Click here....
Ennis wrote this on March 13, 2003
Apparently this is a t-shirt, but I can't find it on the web. Gasp ! a grassroots phenomenon that hasn't gone virtual ?...
Ennis wrote this on March 19, 2003
More fun with Photoshop!...
M E-L wrote this on April 8, 2003
...
M E-L wrote this on May 12, 2003
What does it mean to be a man?...
M E-L wrote this on June 17, 2003
"Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery. From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond." I've been meaning...
Ennis wrote this on June 19, 2003
Debbie sent this one over the wire: THANK GOODNESS THE CIA WAS THERE TO PROTECT SANTA CLAUS From the Ottawa Citizen (June 30, 2003): One of the CIA's deepest and darkest secrets -- a classified report about a plot by...
M E-L wrote this on July 7, 2003
Make Your Own Bayeux Tapestry!...
M E-L wrote this on September 15, 2003
Actually, kind of a boring history lesson. We decided this would be one of the worst movies to see if you didn't understand English. But there is that cool dual-focus lens shot....
M E-L wrote this on October 2, 2003
I'm talking about Grover Norquist juxtaposing the Holocaust and the Estate tax.
Ennis wrote this on October 13, 2003
Jews run the world, must be destroyed, etc. etc. etc. Michael S. sent in this link: Malaysia's prime minister has told Muslim leaders that Jews run the world and has called on Muslims to unite against them.Dr Mahathir called on...
M E-L wrote this on October 16, 2003
What if the Marvelverse had happened in Europe in 1602? Gaiman is clearly having fun with this, although I really did need the annotations to understand who some of the (for me) more obscure Marvel characters' analogues were....
M E-L wrote this on October 24, 2003
[With the strains of Mozart's requiem, coming from my radio, in the background] Living in Boston means that the Kennedy Assasination is a big deal. It's just that, to me personally, the Kennedy Assasination means around as much as that...
Ennis wrote this on November 22, 2003
In one of my many notebooks, I have this list written down.
M E-L wrote this on March 17, 2004
Kewl. Via the real janelle....
M E-L wrote this on June 9, 2004
Via robotfilter...
M E-L wrote this on June 14, 2004
Here's the idea: you lose "hit points" by hitting things and people, but you can recharge by hitting people with your whip. Wholesome fun. href="http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/chariotrace/game/game.html" class="menutext">Chariot Racing on the Web...
MS wrote this on July 13, 2004
Next stop: Konventgarten....
M E-L wrote this on August 2, 2004
A talking car?
M E-L wrote this on August 4, 2004
Ben had enough, and grabbed the astonished pilot and flung him headlong against the wall, cracking his skull and killing him instantly.
Ennis wrote this on August 5, 2004
Some very cool sheet music covers from 1850 - 1920. Oh, and the music too, for those of us who are not merely obsessed with typography. Warning: contains racist content....
M E-L wrote this on August 9, 2004
No, this is not a Lewis Carroll post.
M E-L wrote this on August 17, 2004
Literally. There goes $110,360 of your tax dollars....
M E-L wrote this on October 12, 2004
I had heard the "one wooden bomb" story from WWII before."For months, Berlin has been camouflaging its streets, squares , parks and lakes to confuse Allied fliers," reported Donovan. "All of Unter der Linden is now covered with giant colored...
M E-L wrote this on October 27, 2004
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.
M E-L wrote this on November 5, 2004
You might think so, reading these anti-intellectual jokes. Well, they're 1500 years old, but maybe we should be concerned....
M E-L wrote this on November 10, 2004
...
M E-L wrote this on November 30, 2004
You said P.T. Barnum, and you're wrong. It was, in fact, a sucker who said it. Great story....
M E-L wrote this on December 14, 2004
For some reason, we tend to see the past as bland and washed out. This isn't just a matter of saying, "Oh, life was simpler then." I mean, literally, we remove all color and taste from it. We confuse our...
Ennis wrote this on December 23, 2004
Found on robotfilter....
M E-L wrote this on February 1, 2005
...
M E-L wrote this on March 11, 2005
"The origins of the egg cream reach beyond the 1940s to an earlier and more desperate time. And we can detect that era's poverty, struggle, and even cruelty in the very particular mix of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup." Found...
M E-L wrote this on March 30, 2005
Patrick writes: Remember the Simputer? I think I was alone in thinking it wasn't such a great idea; and now it's out and not selling very well. Now an even cheaper computer is being proposed: the 100 dollar laptop. This...
patrick wrote this on April 4, 2005
... that the corpse of Abraham Lincoln "visited" Wayne, PA?...
M E-L wrote this on April 8, 2005
Fred Korematsu passed away March 30, 2005 at his daughter's home of respiratory illness. He is known for having challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the court case Korematsu v. United States (1944), where...
Dot wrote this on April 14, 2005
things magazine is a memestream I Read Solely Syndicatedly. They've been offline for a while, but just burst a core dump of links on us. A few of interest to some of us: Aaron: Why Architects Give Me the Willies...
M E-L wrote this on April 18, 2005
Thurmond, FBI had cozy ties...
M E-L wrote this on May 2, 2005
Get a history book!
M E-L wrote this on May 3, 2005
...
M E-L wrote this on May 23, 2005
This book was completely engrossing; as is commonly said, the truth is grander than fiction. Here is written the history of the colonization of the Congo, the mass murder and exploitation, and the mass deception King Leopold II was able...
Dot wrote this on May 25, 2005
...
M E-L wrote this on June 18, 2005
"Enlightened hard-boiled-ness."
M E-L wrote this on June 22, 2005
I've just finishing reading 0060733357:The Confusion, Volume 2 of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. (This was part of the Neal for Neil loan/trade I made with Liz and Mark a while ago.) So far (a mere 1,792 pages into the Cycle)...
M E-L wrote this on July 5, 2005
If you're a wanted criminal, playing online games may be a bad idea. You may want to add "custody of MMORPG game accounts" to your pre-nup. Video game economies and the new sweatshops A talk show within Halo 2. Uninvited...
M E-L wrote this on July 25, 2005
In this Daily News article about the recent subway flasher caught on digital camera (is photography in the subway legal again?), a choice bit of New York History: Among the perv victims in 1939 was a woman who wore a...
M E-L wrote this on August 29, 2005
Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center...
M E-L wrote this on August 31, 2005
I saw this ad for the History Channel's series on Rome on the back of a magazine: Since then I've seen it on a huge billboard here in New York. I guess this is what you call bad timing, since...
M E-L wrote this on September 6, 2005
Does this story hit a geek trifecta, or what? Nature reports: Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It...
M E-L wrote this on September 16, 2005
Archive of Penny Dreadful and Dime Novel Artwork From BoingBoing....
M E-L wrote this on September 30, 2005
More images of this Leviathan speaker from 1943. From the prolific things magazine...
M E-L wrote this on October 10, 2005
Two articles today in the New York Times about exhibits that Debbie has worked on at the Museum of Natural History: One on the upcoming Darwin exhibit and another on "Voices from South of the Clouds", a Chinese photography exhibit...
M E-L wrote this on November 7, 2005
A review of Debbie's Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in today's Times....
M E-L wrote this on November 18, 2005
In our first year of business school, we had a course on Leadership. One of the classes was on Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a bit of hagiography -- was anyone really going to say anything bad about Rev....
M E-L wrote this on January 16, 2006
Nothing New Under The Sun Dept.
M E-L wrote this on February 28, 2006
Via Cynical-C comes this astoundingly racist editorial from Adele Ferguson at the Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal. (The Kitsap Peninsula is just to the west of Seattle.) In it, Ms. Fergusen brings out the tired argument that slavery was good...
M E-L wrote this on March 15, 2006
A strange mix of the historical and factual: 1930 Eliot Ness teams up with James Malone to take on Al Capone in Chicago (The Untouchables) Washington - The Republican-controlled House of Representatives wrongly raise tariffs to alleviate The Great Depression...
M E-L wrote this on March 27, 2006
Haven't read it yet, but I had no idea that there were any Asian American activists so prominent and so close to the Black Power movement: On February 12, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in...
Ennis wrote this on April 9, 2006
...
M E-L wrote this on April 12, 2006
Tune in, etc. Bicycle Day...
M E-L wrote this on April 19, 2006
The race for Duke Cunningham's seat is on, and TPM notes that the National Republican Congressional Committee has launched a particuarly nasty attack ad against the Democratic nominee, Francine Busby. Here's what the ad says: “Busby even praised a teacher...
M E-L wrote this on April 25, 2006
With flag burning in the news again, thanks to the proposed-and-defeated Flag Burning Amendment, I was reminded of something I saw on the internets some time ago: The Forgotten U.S. Civil Flag. According to a few websites like this one,...
M E-L wrote this on June 30, 2006
The Tapioca Time Bomb. A bit like the Molasses Disaster at sea....
M E-L wrote this on July 11, 2006
Here you stand, with a kite of paper in a world on fire.
M E-L wrote this on July 12, 2006
0786886323A fictional account of the life of the magician Charles Carter and his possible involvement with the mysterious death of Warren G. Harding. A great beach read and a book to borrow....
M E-L wrote this on August 2, 2006
A list of Secret Societies. Although what the "magic bullet" is doing on this list I'm not sure. Via Cynical C....
M E-L wrote this on August 17, 2006
It looked bad. Very bad. Internet '96 Via robot filter....
M E-L wrote this on September 6, 2006
Chris Rabb writes about researching his ancestors -- both white and black: Afro-Netizen: Written in the Blood "The more intently I sought to learn about my Black ancestors, the more I would have to research the white people who owned...
M E-L wrote this on September 7, 2006
Sleepovers at the Natural History Museum, oh my! The American Museum of Natural History next month will begin allowing all-night sleepovers, allowing kids (ages 8 through 12,) to roam the halls with flashlights and roll out the their sleeping bags...
M E-L wrote this on September 25, 2006
Three years ago I blogged about a chidren's book I had read as a youth and was trying to identify. I read this book sometime between 1977 - 1984, got from a local library in upstate New York where...
M E-L wrote this on November 12, 2006
BibliOdyssey is my favorite blogsource of book illustrations and other ephemera. I stopped short on seeing this illustration from Charles Hinton's 1904 work The Fourth Dimension: A tesseract, as every reader of Ishbadiddle knows from reading 0440498058:A Wrinkle In Time...
M E-L wrote this on November 28, 2006
History of Religion Animated Map. Via Cynical-C....
M E-L wrote this on December 20, 2006
Somehow, without sticky notes, the Romans knew all about productivity. Of course, their version of Getting Things Done would be one word: "slaves." Real Empires Ship (Ftrain.com)...
M E-L wrote this on January 8, 2007
How President's Day should really be celebrated. Plus, there's no such holiday, officially. And: think you know when Washington's birthday is? You're wrong, sort of. (More here.)...
M E-L wrote this on February 20, 2007
Remember Gopher? TidBITS: Down the Gopher Hole. (Via Kerim.) Man, I remember reading about this new "Mosaic" thing......
M E-L wrote this on March 22, 2007
Who knew that Ahmadinejad read Andy Borowitz?
DAEL wrote this on March 23, 2007
If ancient Rome had the Internet......
M E-L wrote this on March 31, 2007
According to yesterday’s Wikipedia’s this day in history. May 29th 1453 was the day the Ottomans (Ottormen?) took over Constantinople. This was the end of the middle ages, meaning that today is the anniversary of the first day of the...
patrick wrote this on May 30, 2007
Is Paris drowning? Is Paris liberated? (First by Coudal.)...
M E-L wrote this on June 28, 2007
It occurred to me, on the eve of this 232nd anniversary of the founding of our republic, that most of the independence days of which I knew were in the summer. As this group consisted of exactly 3 countries (USA,...
Tk wrote this on July 3, 2007
The 100-Year Old Photoblog Seen on Photoethnography...
Tk wrote this on July 16, 2007
Display phototype in New York. Via Luc Devroye....
M E-L wrote this on November 18, 2007
An obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II....
M E-L wrote this on January 10, 2008
Analysts may look to bellwethers such as Vigo County, or Guam, but for my money, you can't do worse than picking the coolest Secret Service code name to predict an election. Just look at the following match-ups: Timberwolf v. Peso...
M E-L wrote this on November 14, 2008
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