Tag Results
112 posts tagged history
Here’s a great series from Slate: Daily Rituals: Lifehacking tips from novelists, painters, and filmmakers.
It’s written by Mason Currey, whose now inactive blog, Daily Routines, explored similar territory. You can peruse its archives or pick up his new book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work for more.
Forty Years Ago Today, Snarky Tech Journalists Made Fun of the First Cell Phone
Forty years ago today, a Motorola engineer named Marty Cooper made what has gone down in history as the world’s first cell phone call, dialing a rival at AT&T from a handheld mobile phone while standing on a sidewalk in New York City, just to show that he could.
It was an impressive technical feat at a time when people didn’t even have cordless landline phones yet. But the press wasn’t exactly bowled over.
PHOTO: Motorola then-CEO Ed Zander jokingly introduces the 1980s-era Motorola DynaTAC 8000, the first commercially available handheld mobile phone, during a keynote address at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Michael Falco uses his own large-format pinhole cameras to capture the history of the American Civil War while covering reenactments across the country.
The recently started project is being continually updated on Michael’s blog as Civil War anniversaries unfold through 2015.
Chronicling the American Civil War Through A Pinhole Camera
via Pro Photo Daily
The Very Real History Behind the Crazy Politics of ‘House of Cards’
The Netflix series may not be a totally accurate representation of Washington, but a decent number of its more outlandish moments are uncomfortably similar to real life.
Read more. [Image: Netflix]
The income gap from our first and second Gilded Ages. Look for our interview with Emmanuel Saez and David Grusky next week.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflecting on the Trinity test.
Roe v. Wade and the rise of the Religious Right: A Myth Exposed (via)
The sun’s still not quite set.
SINCE 1946, the United Nations has compiled a list of the world’s “Non-Self-Governing Territories”: overseas domains it considers, in effect, to be colonies. Since then 100-odd entries have come and gone… Today the number of entries has dwindled to just 15, most of which are British, or 16 if you include ambiguous Western Sahara.
The game still doesn’t even have a single set of rules – or one name. You’ve got lagirt in Turkey, jouer au baby-foot in France, csocso in Hungary, cadureguel-schulchan in Israel, plain old table football in the UK, and a world encyclopedia of ridiculous names elsewhere around the globe. The American “foosball” (where a player is called a “fooser”) borrowed its name from the German version, “fußball”, from whence it arrived in the United States.
Manhattan’s skyline, 1880 to 1932
This amazing series of photos was featured in TIME Magazine’s LIFE Aug 31, 1942 issue, “New York’s Skyline Sits for a Long Portrait.” The photos come from two amateurs of the Pierrepont family: John Jay Pierrepont, “a wealthy New Yorker”, was inspired from his Brooklyn rooftop view and took hundreds of photos from the vantage point until his death in 1923. His great-nephew, Abbot Low Moffat, continued the tradition until the Pierrepont home was bought by the city of New York to turn into a public park.
When Pierrepont took the first photos in 1880, church steeples and ship masts are the tallest structures, with the most recognizable landmark being Trinity Church on lower Broadway. By 1930, the lower Manhattan skyline was dominated by towers after the building boom.
Read the original article at Google Archives.
(via pegobry)
Rates of travel in 1800. That’s about 6 weeks to Chicago.
(via How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s? | MNN - Mother Nature Network)
In 1913, the shot that killed Song Jiaoren ended China’s best hope for democracy:
AT 10.40pm on March 20th 1913 a young man who represented one possible future for China stood on the platform at Shanghai railway station, waiting with friends to board a train to Beijing. Song Jiaoren—30 years old, sporting a Western suit and a wisp of a moustache—had just brilliantly led his new political party, the Nationalists, to overwhelming success in parliamentary elections, the country’s first attempt at democracy after two millennia of imperial rule. He was in line to become China’s first democratically elected prime minister, and to help draft a new constitution for the Republic of China.
Song (above, centre) was exultant. A fortune-teller had told him—when he was a fugitive in Japan, plotting a violent end to the Qing dynasty—that he would serve as prime minister for 30 peaceful years. With his Jeffersonian ideals and admiration for Britain’s Parliament, he was ready to change his country’s fate.
But an assassin’s bullet prevented him from trying.
(via)
