collectivehistory:

A man walks through a destroyed city in Germany looking for food, 1945, by Werner Bischof. 

itsjohnsen:

A blinded Australian soldier is guided to a field hospital away from the battlefront by a Papuan native. Buna, Christmas Day, 1942.
George Silk

collective-history:

Aerial bombing of Barcelona in 1938 by the Italian air-force

(via collectivehistory)

collective-history:

Bruce Lee sparring with Ip Man, ca 1955.

(Source: collectivehistory)

kimtrelletheonly:

Ancient manuscripts from Mali, Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan and Nigeria line storage cases at Abdel Kader Haidara’s home, the director of Bibliotheque Mama Haidara De Manuscripts, Timbuktu. These manuscripts are waiting their turn to be cataloged and added to the library collection. Inside them is a history of Africa from the 11th century onwards, with dialogue on Islam, trade, history, the law and so on. Image by Brent Stirton, National Geographic, September 2009.

Article from pulitzercenter.org

umzoology:

Oological Collection ca 1890

Yesterday was so exciting!  Jim Williams, a Fish Wildlife and Parks Program Manager, had been holding onto this collection of historical eggs which were collected in the 1890’s for quite a few years without knowing what exactly to do with them.  He contacted Dave a couple of weeks ago asking if we would be interested in accessioning it into our collection, and of course we agreed! We already have a well-established oological collection and it is certainly not every day that someone brings in such a wide assortment of eggs predating the 20th century, so we are very grateful to Mr. Williams for considering us for this gift.  

I’m sure you all can imagine how incredibly fragile this collection is — it showed up in what we are assuming are old clothing/vest boxes, lined with pillows of cotton.  Despite a few broken eggs many of them are still in great condition; soon I will be carefully transferring them into foam-lined boxes before we attempt identification.  Wouldn’t it be incredible if there was a passenger pigeon egg in here?!    

These historical oology collections are valuable for a number of reasons, one of the most important being that researchers are still able to extract valuable DNA samples from shells and yolk remnants.  In the past, eggs from museums were tested for thinness before and after the use of DDT to determine whether or not the pesticide was having an effect on the sudden decline of many bird populations — come to find out it was leaving a fatal impression which is why today there is restricted use of DDT as a pesticide.  Just another reason why museums and their preservation of these materials is so important!

(Source: thebrainscoop)

collective-history:

Man sleeping in a stone sarcophagus, Christ Church, Spitalfields, London, by Bill Brandt, 1940

(via collectivehistory)

thedorkages:

Maya blue.

Getting a good solid dye is a pain in the ass, technologically. Most natural dyes fade pretty fast, on the archaeological scale, and when you paint your giant statue, you want to know that the sparkling cornflower blue of his pants will stay that way for the generations immemorial your civilization is totally going to have. Woad and indigo, which were great for textiles, were not going to work on walls. Artificial dyes, however, require some fairly intense engineering problems. Blue in particular has posed issues of toxicity and durability throughout the years. Egyptian blue and Han blue, which are both stable, chemical, cupric, and probably related, got used in their separate world-spanning empires for a couple thousand years but vanished into the mist of the ages by about 300 CE. That left Eurasia with azurite and similar ineffective “if we smear enough blue rock on this, that will turn it blue forever, right?” techniques.

Meanwhile In America, the Maya were facepalming really hard, because they had solved this technological problem actually something like four hundred years before our period in between games of protolacrosse. See, the thing you do to make Maya blue is you take indigo and you combine it with white clay, called palygorskite, and it dyes the clay, and then you melt the clay and have a pigment. This is a more complicated process than it sounds, since you need to create chemical bonds between the indigo and the clay, which means using incredibly high temperatures. The Maya also probably used a binding agent called copal, which is a tree sap incense, thereby making the whole process much more aromatic and possibly sanctified. Very well played, The Maya.

There are scattered uses of Maya blue during the pre-Classical period, but it really kicks off during the Classical period, when there were mines opened in the Yucatán to get enough palygorskite to decorate every elaborately beautiful urban center and temple site. It is hands-down the best blue dye to survive from the archaeological world. This process, of course, was lost too.

Here’s a fun fact: the guy who invented Prussian blue, which for some reason is referred to as the first synthetic dye even though that title is off by something like five thousand years, is named Diesbach. Diesbach appears to be a mysterious incompetent who didn’t understand dye-making and didn’t leave a first name but who did collaborate with a dude who tried to actually, in real life, buy Castle Frankenstein in order to make an elixir of life in it. I’m not saying that the most logical conclusion is that Diesbach was a time-traveler  who destroyed all evidence of other blue-making processes in order to get credit for his shitty one. I’m just strongly implying it.

thedorkages:

The Banu Musa and the Book of Ingenious Devices, 850.

So during the 800s, under the Abbasid Caliphate, there was a university in Baghdad that was called the House of Wisdom. It was initially founded as a center for the study and propagation of translation, particularly of the Greek and Roman classics, but pretty rapidly the priorities of the collected academics turned to such topics as “but these medical documents haven’t been properly peer-reviewed,” “I really feel the world needs another book of sexy poems about God,” “you know these histories leave out whole countries and if you give me tons of silver I can probably go explore the crap out of those places,” and “look what I can make.” The Banu Musa, or sons of Musa, were three brothers who enthusiastically fell into that last category.

Musa was an ex-highwayman in Khorasan who somehow became friends with the future caliph al-Ma’mun and signed on as a court astronomer. He prevailed on the Caliph to take in his kids when he tragically died young in some sort of stargazing and/or robbery accident, and the Caliph duly handed them off to the university, where they flourished through, apparently, spending huge amounts of money on Greek translations and successfully measuring the circumference of the Earth. (They were scooped to this by Aryabhata, among others, but I do like the story of al-Ma’mun asking the House of Wisdom what Ptolemy said the circumference of the Earth was. 180,000 stadia, the translators explained, proudly. What’s a stadium? al-Ma’mun asked. Uh, said the translators. “This does not tell us what we need to know,” al-Ma’mun said, presumably rather dryly, and dispatched them to measure the Earth.) They also appear to have measured the length of the year and, in their spare time, invented the gas mask.

They are most famous for building robots, though. Some of you are probably going like “WAY TO BURY THE LEDE! Surely the title of this article should be ROBOTS!!!!!”, but automata weren’t invented in our period, like, not even close—they date practically back to the wheel. No, no, the Banu Musa were simply some of many people during the “Dark Ages” casually building robots automated devices for profit but mostly fun. They invented the player piano, automatic Vegas-style fountains, a self-trimming lamp (pictured above), and a ton of toys. Their work was hydraulic; my favorite manifestation is probably the automatic flute player, which worked by blowing hot steam through a flute and was programmable one thousand years before the invention of the Jacquard loom.

This would all be totally overshadowed in three hundred years when al-Jazari and his musical robot band showed up. Watch this space.

(via asianhistory)

itsjohnsen:

Cologne Cathedral, 1947.
Karl Hugo Schmölz

fyeaheasterneurope:

unhistorical:

November 3, 1957: Sputnik 2 is launched.

Designed and built in around four weeks, this Soviet satellite was the second ever launched. Sputnik 2 was notably also carrying Laika, a dog (a stray picked up off the streets of Moscow) who would become the first animal to go into orbit. She was called “Muttnik” by the American press (the United States had yet to launch its first satellite), and she was the first of several dogs used by the Soviet space program to test the effects of spaceflight on living things. 

Because the technology needed to return a satellite from orbit had not yet been developed, it was a foregone conclusion that Laika would die sometime during spaceflight. It was not known exactly how it happened until after the fall of the Soviet Union, however. Initially, it had been reported that Laika had been euthanized or that she had died from oxygen starvation, but it was revealed in 2002 that Laika had probably not survived more than a few hours in space and that she had died from overheating and stress. After over 160 days in orbit and over 2,000 orbits, Sputnik 2 returned to Earth, carrying Laika’s remains with it. 

Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who was responsible for Laika’s flight, later expressed regret:

Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it… We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.

itsjohnsen:

Celebrations on Wall Street upon news of Germany’s surrender. Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.
W.L. Drummond

(via itsjohnsen)

pbsthisdayinhistory:

Happy Birthday Carl Sagan!

On this day in 1934, Carl Sagan, a legendary American astronomer and author, was born. Sagan is most well-known for the award-winning PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. Cosmos covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. 

The program has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history.

Check out NOVA’s interview with Sagan, who ponders time travel with intellect, humor and flair.

Photo: AP Photo/Lennox McLendon

fyeaheasterneurope:

Archaeologists in Bulgaria say they have uncovered the oldest prehistoric town found to date in Europe.

The walled fortified settlement, near the modern town of Provadia, is thought to have been an important centre for salt production.

Its discovery in north-east Bulgaria may explain the huge gold hoard found nearby 40 years ago.

Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC.

That is about 1,500 years before the start of ancient Greek civilisation.

The residents boiled water from a local spring and used it to create salt bricks, which were traded and used to preserve meat.

Salt was a hugely valuable commodity at the time, which experts say could help to explain the huge defensive stone walls which ringed the town.

(More at BBC.)

collective-history:

World map ca. 1689. 

(Source: collectivehistory)