Longitude by Way of Wounded Hounds: Kenelm Digby’s *Sympathetick Powder* (1669 edition) — The Public Domain Review

This is the power of the “powder of sympathy”, which Digby supposedly had learned about from a Carmelite in Florence who had traveled extensively through present-day China, India, and Iran….

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Diagrams from Willem ten Rhijne’s De Acupunctura (1683)

A Dutch physician’s encounter with acupuncture. Source link

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Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype — The Public Domain Review

The rise of competitive typesetting amid a period of intensifying labor conflict pointed to an uncomfortable truth facing the world’s printshops: while the rest of the printing process had become…

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“Plaything of the Gods”: Photographs of Pushball (early 1900s) — The Public Domain Review

In 1894, he commissioned the first pushball: a leather-covered wooden frame, six feet three inches in diameter, which weighed around 70 pounds (32 kilograms). It cost him $175 ($6,775 in…

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*The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer* (1877) — The Public Domain Review

The Seer’s final prophecy is his most famed. Renowned across the Scottish Highlands, he was summoned by Lady Seaforth, the countess at Brahan Castle, for news of her husband, Kenneth…

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Harold A. Taylor’s Autochromes of California Flowers (early 20th century) — The Public Domain Review

Despite his range of subjects, it was flowers that were perhaps closest to Taylor’s heart. While he photographed flowers embedded in California’s lush outdoors — growing wild in fields and…

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Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: The Zoophyte from Tartary — The Public Domain Review

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vegetable lamb leapt off the pages of natural historical description and into Baroque cabinets of curiosity. Preserved specimens from Tartary began appearing in…

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Covers from *Cerîde-i Adliye*, a Turkish Law Journal (1924–26) — The Public Domain Review

Their profession was relatively new. Until the nineteenth century, justice in the Ottoman Empire — as in all Muslim states at the time — had operated largely through the auspices…

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The Launch of Our Mid-Year Fundraiser!

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Soil. Source link

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Genevieve Stebbins’ *Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression* (1886) — The Public Domain Review

Every possible element of a gesture or expression was deconstructed and fit into this rubric, with specific exercises for the “Fingers, Hand, Fore arm, Entire arm, Head, Torso, Foot, Lower…

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