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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“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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