Songs from the Commons: A Q&A with Simon Close about the Public Song Project — The Public Domain Review
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…
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Broken Ground: *The Fall of the House of Usher* (1928) — The Public Domain Review
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…
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Introducing PDR Press Minis — The Public Domain Review
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…
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“A Beautiful Purplish Hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s Experience with Ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884) — The Public Domain Review
At 10:15, having administered 0.46 ml and 1.39 ml, respectively, of the cannabis and ergot tinctures, his come up begins: he notes the experience of “momentary dizziness” and “peculiar lightness”,…
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Pulex irritans: The Attack of the Monster (1885)
Lantern slide of man battling bug. Source link
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Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult — The Public Domain Review
One of the most well-known mail-order occult societies of the time, and one which is still in existence today, was the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), founded in 1915…
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Pyramid of the Capitalist System (1911) — The Public Domain Review
In 1911, the image of enslaved laborers raising monumental pyramids for their ruling pharaohs was repurposed to visualize the stratification of the capitalist system. Published in Industrial Worker — a…
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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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