In the series of exaggeration postcards collected below, it is California that takes center stage. Produced by the prolific San Francisco–based publisher Edward H. Mitchell, each card features a single…

Three centuries later, Foucault argued that Descartes hadn’t just excluded the glass man from his rationality — he had employed him. “The man who imagines he is made of glass…

Moneymaking caricatures by a teenage Monet, before he turned to Impressionism. Source link

One of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written. Source link

Beelzebub has, Boaistuau claims, been incarnated on earth in two places. First he ruled over the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, where he pretended to give oracles in exchange for…

From the surviving testimony of resurrection men, it is clear that pauper burial grounds, without guards or mortuaries, were favoured hunting grounds. Pauper grave-pits were often left open until the…

I can imagine someone walking away thinking about all kinds of things — what did I learn about history from digging through this older art? What does it mean to…

It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839…

Fifteen years ago, The Public Domain Review began its life as an online journal, a creature of the internet — and proudly so. This relatively new medium, with its capacity…