Found History

Lots of bloggers are posting histories of Halloween today. Here’s a small sample, ranging from the Christian to the Socialist, from the synthetic to the sarcastic: (e)mergent Voyageurs Respect darkfairy99 OmniNerd Late Update (Halloween Bonus): It’s not a history of the holiday so it doesn’t fit with the other links, but Syd Lexia’s history of [...]

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This Week in Geek Humor has a post today chronicling “The 20 Funniest Computer Geek Humor Bits of All Time.” I personally don’t find all the author’s choices very funny, but I appreciate his clear attempt to open a historical dialog.

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Watchismo is a collector and online dealer of vintage watches, especially digital watches, from the mid-20th century. He describes himself as “devoted to the highly unusual, obscurely rare and advanced modern designs of the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s” and focused on the “rarest styles of the space-age.” There are some interesting galleries on the main [...]

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Saturday Night Live had a funny sketch this weekend exposing the anachronisms inherent in living history museums and exploring how family- and employee-friendly public history venues like Colonial Williamsburg struggle with historical realities (e.g. slavery) that aren’t so family-friendly. As of this posting the video is still available from NBC, but I can’t promise it [...]

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Check out Webcomics Nation for Mikael Oskarsson’s ambitious graphic history of 60′s Rock and Roll. Follow the story of classic rock legends through eighty-two (yes, that’s 82) chapters, from Elvis and The Everly Brothers to Woodstock and The Who.

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Bill Turkel has a fantastic post about the ways people search for history online. Using search data released by AOL and some statistical methods, Bill has been able to tell us a lot about how ordinary Internet users think about history and what topics interest them most. Clearly this is very important stuff for Found [...]

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This is slightly off-topic, but anyone interested in public history should check out the student blogroll for Alan MacEachern’s graduate seminar at the University of Western Ontario. (Most of MacEachern’s public history students are cross registered in Bill Turkel’s digital history class, so there’s lots of good history and new media stuff there too.) I’ve [...]

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This is huge, or potentially so. Yahoo! has launched what they are calling an “electronic anthropology project”—a digital time capsule of images, stories, video, audio, and artwork, all submitted by Yahoo! users. As of this posting, the project has collected more than 4000 objects from nearly 3000 people in just over a day. When the [...]

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The English History Matters (not to be confused with the U.S. History Matters—CHNM’s own “U.S. Survey Course on the Web”) is encouraging all England and Wales to submit entries to a “mass blog” on October 17 as part of their One Day in History drive. Organizers say they picked October 17—an “ordinary day”—because they are [...]

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Last night Jeremy mentioned an article from Slate about GM’s use of images of Rosa Parks and other historic persons and events to sell Chevy trucks. Here’s another article from the New York Times. Commentary on the ad—which also features images of Joe Louis, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, the World [...]

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