“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess — The Public Domain Review
About the matter of her own deceitfulness, Mary concedes a surprising amount. She claims not to be lying about the big things. She is German and she is innocent —…
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The Shadow of Desire: Painting the Origins of Art (ca. 1625–1850) — The Public Domain Review
In Pliny’s time, Kora’s act of tracing may have been overshadowed, as it were, with the cluster of associations swirling around the word eidolon, which, according to Hagi Kenaan, “held…
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The End of the World as We (Didn’t) Know It: *Now and Then #5* — The Public Domain Review
The world was supposed to end yesterday, and didn’t. A viral TikTok anxiety trend (aka #rapturetok), this latest Rapture non-starter was predicted by Joshua Mhlakela of South Africa, who, in…
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Birth of the Pearl (1901)
A "living picture" film staging Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with a twist. Source link
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Vertiginous Accounts: Travels in the Air (1871 edition)
Expedition accounts of aeronauts bravely venturing into the heavens on hot-air balloons. Source link
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The Adventures and Experiences of the First Slovak Novel — The Public Domain Review
Book II tells of René’s travels in “places that were less perfidious and less dangerous” (Northern Italy, Austria, and Upper Hungary). Like Montesquieu in Persian Letters (1721), Bajza uses the…
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The Nature of the Beast: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806) — The Public Domain Review
Still, he admits, it is true that prominent men have prominent noses — everyone since Aristotle has agreed about that. An aquiline nose, we learn, is a necessary component of…
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Paramaribo and the Plantation: Gerrit Schouten’s Dioramas of Suriname (1810–30) — The Public Domain Review
Born in 1779, Schouten was the son of Hendrik Schouten, a Dutch administrator and littérateur, and Suzanna Hansen, a free woman of color who belonged to a prosperous and, at…
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A Treatise on the All-Healing Qualities of Earth Bathing (1790) — The Public Domain Review
Long before “earthing mats” became a pseudoscientific health trend and Japanese “cedar enzyme baths” went viral, James Graham (1745–94) encouraged his readers to bury themselves alive in the name of…
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Hooked on Sonics: Experimenting with Sound in 19th-Century Popular Science — The Public Domain Review
Mayer patiently introduces children to many of the cutting-edge principles and theories of sound that were circulating in the late nineteenth century, covering topics such as reflection, transmission, vibration, and…
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