Showing all posts about history
When the famous die, people flock to their Wikipedia pages
14 September 2022
When someone famous dies, visits to their Wikipedia page usually surge, as this visualisation by The Pudding shows. Sometimes the count goes off the scale. A case in point is late musician Prince. When he died in 2016, his Wikipedia page was viewed over eleven millon times in the two days afterwards.
More than 1,300 notable people died in the past three years, according to Wikipedia. Here are 84 who got over half a million pageviews in the first 48 hours after their deaths. Although no one grabbed our attention quite like Prince, the spike in pageviews after a celebrity’s death can often overshadow that of other major events, even a presidential inauguration.
One can only imagine what the pageview numbers will be for British monarch Queen Elizabeth II, who died last week. Incredibly, or perhaps not, her death was noted on her Wikipedia page within seconds. Editors of the online encyclopaedia were also swift to change the page of then Prince Charles, to King Charles III, this before his regnal name had been officially confirmed.
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current affairs, history, trends
Apollo Remastered, beautifully enhanced photos of the Apollo flights
5 September 2022
Image courtesy of NASA.
The above image is of Aquarius, lunar module of the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon flight of April 1970.
Here it is seen moments after being jettisoned by the Apollo crew. For those who came in late, Aquarius acted as a “lifeboat” for much of the shortened Apollo 13 mission, after an explosion damaged Odyssey, the command module. Without Aquarius the crew may never have returned home.
I’m not sure though if it features in Apollo Remastered, the new book by British author and science writer Andy Saunders, which contains a veritable trove of photos from the Apollo missions. Saunders has spent the last few years enhancing four hundred previously grainy images, making them far sharper and clearer than those originally released.
Some before and after examples of the remastered photos can be seen in this BBC report by Jonathan Amos. And if you’re not familiar with the Apollo 13 story, American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 feature of the same name is well worth a look.
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books, history, photography, science
Why didn’t the Roman Empire spawn the Industrial Revolution?
3 September 2022
The Roman Empire — which dominated the then known world for near on five centuries — gave us its trademark roads, plumbing, floor heating, a postal service, concrete, and surgical tools.
Had the empire — as a whole, rather than the partitioned east, west, entity it later became — remained at its peak a lot longer, we can only speculate as to what other innovations may have been spawned.
An Industrial Revolution perhaps? Possibly. But prior to the fifth century, Common Era? Not likely, says Bret C. Devereaux, an ancient and military historian at the University of North Carolina.
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history, Roman Empire, technology
Albertina Museum makes thousands of digitised artworks available
30 August 2022
The Albertina Museum, in Vienna, capital of Austria, has released some 150,000 digitised images into the public domain. This will be a boon for anyone with an interest in European history and art, or both. Some of the images now freely available include works by Edvard Munch, featured above, who is best known for his painting The Scream, along with Albrecht Dürer, and Gustav Klimt, among others.
Nearly 4,000 of these images date between the 12th and 15th centuries, with another 23,000 dating to the 16th century. The Albertina has a large collection of works by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a German artist who was famous for his woodcut prints and a variety of other works.
Via Medievalists.net.
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Interview with Frank Prentice Titanic crew survivor
24 August 2022
An incredible interview with the late Frank Prentice, who worked as a storekeeper on doomed ocean liner Titanic. He recalls the ship stopping after being struck by the iceberg that led to its eventual sinking, though he didn’t feel any impact.
Prentice also talks of convincing a woman, Virginia Clark, to board a lifeboat even though she was reluctant to leave without her husband. When Prentice finally leapt from the ship, seconds before it sank, he swam through waters and was later pulled onto the lifeboat Clark was aboard.
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Kurzgesagt asks is civilisation on the brink of collapse?
19 August 2022
What if a tragedy — something like a full-blown war, or a deadly pandemic akin to the bubonic plague — befell the human race, plunging any survivors into a new dark age? Would they be able to pick up the pieces and (eventually) restore civilisation as we know it? Is such a catastrophe even possible? Kurzgesagt looks at the question.
At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about 30% of the world’s population, and in many ways the pinnacle of human advancement. Rome became the first city in history to reach one million inhabitants and was a center of technological, legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible to topple, stable and rich and powerful. Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth collapsed. If this is how it has been over the ages, what about us today? Will we lose our industrial technology, and with that our greatest achievements, from one dollar pizza to smartphones or laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too?
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Untapped a collection of out of print Australian books
15 August 2022
Untapped is working with Ligature Press, the Australian Society of Authors, Melbourne Law School, and libraries across Australia to make out-of-print books available once more. A growing selection of titles — dating back to 1926 so far — can be found in their collection.
Untapped is a collaboration between authors, libraries and researchers, working together to identify Australia’s lost literary treasures and bring them back to life. It creates a new income source for Australian authors, who currently have few options for getting their out-of-print titles available in libraries.
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Australian literature, books, history
Pirates are not about buried treasure and maps leading to it
13 August 2022
It seems there’s a lot I don’t know about pirates, except they are the scourge of the oceans. What they are not about — among other things — is buried treasure, and hiding maps leading to the booty.
On the other hand, if you are an insider, there’s a code that both binds and protects. Pirate crews can also be egalitarian, with their leader being chosen by ballot, according to Rebecca Simon, a historian who studies pirates past and present.
Many pirate ships had rules called articles. Some articles prohibited drinking on board because alcohol could cause trouble. Gambling was usually banned, too. There were rules about compensation if someone suffered a severe injury such as losing an arm or a leg.
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The history of the dumpling by Miranda Brown
11 August 2022
An animated history of the dumpling by Miranda Brown, professor of Chinese Studies, at the University of Michigan. While dumplings feature prominently in Chinese cuisine, they may have originated elsewhere, possibly closer to central Asia.
As archaeologists pored over ancient tombs in western China, they discovered some surprisingly well-preserved and familiar relics. Though hardened over 1,000 years, there sat little crescent-shaped dumplings. So who invented these plump pockets of perfection, and how did they spread across the world?
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Before cars arrived there was no such thing as jay walking
11 August 2022
Streets and roadways used to be the purview of people on foot, not motor vehicles, writes Clive Thompson. Jaywalking — whereby a pedestrian can be penalised for not crossing a street at the correct location — he tells us, is a misdemeanour created by the car industry.
If you travelled in time back to a big American city in, say, 1905 — just before the boom in car ownership — you’d see roadways utterly teeming with people. Vendors would stand in the street, selling food or goods. Couples would stroll along, and everywhere would be groups of children racing around, playing games. If a pedestrian were heading to a destination across town, they’d cross a street wherever and whenever they felt like it.
Maybe the solution, and to return roads to people on foot, is to lay down light rail or tram tracks on the streets. I was in the centre of Sydney recently where a number of once busy traffic thoroughfares are now light rail routes through the city.
Aside from trams trundling along the way every few minutes, pedestrians largely have free rein. The light rail lines have quite transformed parts of Sydney’s CBD in the last few years.
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