Funny how the mid-20th century looked more like the future than the 21st has turned out to be.


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Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), "Foxes Practicing the Art of Shapeshifting," 1840s.


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The coin in the center is a US one-cent piece: from 1849, to be specific. To the left is its Mexican denominational equivalent - un centavo - minted in 1888.


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This Mexican 1/4 real coin (called a cuartilla in its day) is one of my favorites. I got it a long time ago; long before I learned the significance of the year imprinted on it. (That's a U.S. quarter next to it for scale.)


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A provocative 1846 map showing the extent of American territorial ambitions in western North America, and in the disputed lands of the independent Republic of Texas. Mexico is shown with its northwestern boundary truncated at Sonora, and its province of Nuevo Mexico reduced to a mere strip of land along the west side of the Rio Grande. Oregon ( Read more... )

If you have any kind of interest at all in the goings-on in the Middle East - both present and historical - you should find this to be a very information-rich reference.

http://www.vox.com/a/maps-explain-the-middle-east

King John and his hunting dogs, c.1307 - c.1327.


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Skyline of San Francisco, stitched together from the opening credits of the 1957 film, Pal Joey.

( Behind a cut for extreme width. )

The evolution of our neighbour to the north.


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In Civil War times, most citizens of the Union states were forced to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Compounding the misfortune, the strife of war made small coinage so scarce that millions had to resort to using postage stamps to pay for everyday transactions. This unduly strained local post office revenues and the national economy in ( Read more... )