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Tag: history

  • Modern magic unlocks Merlin’s medieval secrets – University of Cambridge

    Afragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur. The manuscript, first discovered at Cambridge University Library in 2019, has now been identified as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a French-language sequel to the legend of King Arthur. The story was part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, a medieval best seller but few now remain. There are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, with each one unique since they were individually handwritten by medieval scribes. This latest discovery has been identified as having been written between 1275 and 1315.

    The manuscript had survived the centuries after being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham. It meant the remarkable discovery was folded, torn, and even stitched into the binding of the book – making it almost impossible for Cambridge experts to access it, read it, or confirm its origins. What followed the discovery has been a ground-breaking collaborative project, showcasing the work of the University Library’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) and combining historical scholarship with cutting-edge digital techniques, to unlock the manuscript’s long-held secrets – without damaging the unique document.

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  • ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones – The Guardian

    “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” […]

    Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040. This stuff is going to last millions of years, some releasing its toxins and chemicals into the natural world,” she says, raising serious questions for us all: “Do you need that? Do you really need to buy more?”

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  • How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris – NPR

    “There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures,” he says. But he says among the resistants at the store, there must have been at least one traitor, because in early 1943, someone denounced both Raoul and Marthe Minot in an anonymous letter to the police. […]

    Broussard’s four-year investigation appeared as a series of articles in Le Monde in September. His stories recounting his sometimes frustrating search raised Minot out of obscurity. The late camera-slinging department store employee has now been officially recognized by the French government as a “résistant” — a high national honor — who died for France, bearing witness to the reality of Nazi Occupation.

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  • Surveillance and the secret history of 19th-century wearable tech – The MIT Press Reader

    Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a Portland night watchman. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media — media that count, quantify, or enumerate — to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod. […]

    While much of the popular discussion in the early 19th century focused on men’s uses of pedometers, in the second half of the century the devices became part of women’s fashion and close surveillance as well. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in 1879 that “a pedometer is now an indispensable feature of every young ladies’ attire.” In a piece titled “A Slap at the Dancing Girl” that ran in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1890, a “frail consumptive Connecticut girl who wanted to attend a dance” but pleaded illness when asked to wash dishes was sent to the local dance by her father in a coach with two servants and a pedometer in her pocket. As the paper reported, “When she got home in the morning it indicated that she had danced enough to cover thirty-one miles.” Echoing yet inverting earlier textual accounts of women’s behavior, the paper suggested that the tracking revealed the untrustworthiness of young women.

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  • The drift of things: David Goodman Croly’s Glimpses of the Future (1888) – The Public Domain Review

    And some of the predictions do seem truly oracular, especially for a person writing in 1888. In terms of politics, Sir Oracle worries about “the accumulation of wealth in a few hands”, how “the middle class . . . will become reduced in numbers”, and a coming era when “there will be no more cheap land”. He suspects that “California is destined to have a dense population”; he believes that the US will soon annex Hawai‘i. He fears Germany above all other nations and speaks of “the coming international war”. In terms of foreign policy, he predicts that “the United States will some day take its place among the nations as a great power in international questions”; domestically, he worries that the postal service will be treated as a for-profit venture, when it should really operate as a public service. He foresees the successful opening of a Panama Canal, suspects that “the drift of things is towards the emancipation of women”, and worries that daily newspapers will be absorbed into journalistic monopolies. He augurs that the jet-setting age will soon be upon us: “If the aerostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter.” On the relation of the sexes, he laments — despite the civilizational benefits of monogamous marriage — that “we have promiscuity, polyandry, and polygamy right here in New York”, and suspects that these practices may one day become more socially tolerated. He has no time for one Mr. Fanciful, who suggests that narcotics akin to opium, nitrous oxide, and cocaine could one day allow us to actively control our dreams, and thus prevent a third of one’s life being lost to unproductive sleep.

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  • Video Game History Foundation Library

    The VGHF Library is operated by the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to the history of video games. This is the home for our collections of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.

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  • How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war – The Guardian

    What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?

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  • A century ago, Warren Harding prefigured Trump’s brand of strongman nationalism – Conflict and Civicness Research Blog

    Historical analogies are often misleading devices. But it is difficult not to be struck by the parallels between Harding’s early 20th century American nationalism and Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. For the latter’s success perhaps lies in it bringing back to the surface of the country’s political life a violent ethnic nationalism that was for years suppressed, but never wholly absent from the fabric of American culture.

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  • Elegance and hustle – Aeon Essays

    “Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” […]

    But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.

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  • Century-scale storage – Harvard Law School Innovation Library Hub

    We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”

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  • Find awe and inspiration in thousands of public domain artworks – Hyperallergic

    “Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic.

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  • The gentrification of video game history – Felipe Pepe

    For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends’ houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc. As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South. There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.

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  • 20 maps that changed the world – Mental Floss

    A lot has changed in the world of cartography since people first started trying to map the world, with advancements in knowledge and technology over the centuries leading to increased accuracy. And yet each map offers a subjective view of the world, one that is shaped by the specific time and culture in which it was produced. Here are 20 such pieces throughout history that have changed humanity’s understanding of the world—from an ancient Roman road map to a poverty map of Victorian London.

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  • From Pong to Pokémon: A history of holiday ‘It’ toys – The New York Times

    1970s: After the initial success of its electronic table-tennis game Pong, the arcade pioneer Atari went big in 1977 with its first major home gaming console, which proved an immediate hit despite its hefty price tag — about $200, or nearly $1,000 in today’s currency. … Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell, with its predictive coding speech synthesizer, gave language learning a talky-robot twist, while “Star Wars” action figures, an early pioneer of the blockbuster movie-to-toy pipeline, flooded the market after the film’s 1977 release.

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  • “Here I gather all the friends”: Machiavelli and the emergence of the private study – The Public Domain Review

    Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self.

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  • 15 years of Horrible Histories – kids’ TV so good it’s getting a Bafta – The Guardian

    The Axe Factor: A batch of wannabe beheaders battle it out to be the next royal executioner on this Tudor talent contest. “The type of noose varies according to the appointed time of the public hanging. This is the nine o’clock noose, his is the noose at 10 … ”

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