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Newseum has a fascinating little online exhibit on the manipulation of photographs in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Basically if a public figure was killed or fell out of favor their image would be removed from any public photos:
The Commissar VanishesThe scary thing is how often this is done today. For example, during the 2004 election season ( Read more... )

I think this recent PBF comic is brilliant: "Now Showing"Sadly, this seems to relate quite a bit to my last post. Both this cartoon strip and Bush's (mis)understanding of our first president show how historical memory can be distorted and manipulated. It's also painfully ironic that the fictional future movie version of World War II presented in ( Read more... )

King George's History


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Q: What should you do when you find yourself in the stocks?

A: Don't let the bastards get you down... theres nothing a little drunken fiddling won't solve.


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An amazing online companion to the Fitzwilliam Museum:
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/pharos/index_front.html

And of course I'm particularly fascinated by the seal of Erasmus.

An in-depth article on the newly rediscovered Gospel of Judas:

Judas: So Hot Right Now!I think the only reason that this manuscript has caused such a controversy is that most Christians have no sense of the history of their own religion. The problem with the Gnostic Gospels is that they clearly show that there were huge variations of belief among ( Read more... )

After reading this book I'm convinced that Thomas Paine was an 18th century Trotskyist... or maybe Trotsky was a 20th century Painite. The first half of the book is primarily a biographical sketch of the corset-maker, pamphleteer, and revolutionary, and the latter half is mostly an analysis of Paine's influence on American and French ( Read more... )

A few medieval artifacts, including some dice with mercury inside so they'd always fall in the same way:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4457602.stm

( Anatomia del corpo humano... this is a bit morbid )