Found History

It’s not nearly as subtle as the Colonial Williamsburg sketch from a couple months ago, but here’s some more history from Saturday Night Live. Enjoy! Update (7/6/07): I just noticed that the original clip was pulled from YouTube. I replaced it with another, but don’t be surprised if the new one vanishes as well.

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I can’t tell you how tired I am of reading about baby boomers and their impending retirements. The self-indulgence of aging newspaper, magazine, and television news editors in running story after story about just how interesting and important their generation has been is very nearly unbearable. Newsweek is case in point. Its 50-something editors’ self-congratulatory [...]

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The tech blogs are buzzing about Geni, a new genealogy application launched by former Paypal executive David Sacks (see Valleywag and TechCrunch for example). Billing itself as “a unique approach to solving the problem of genealogy,” Geni “lets you create a family tree through [its] fun simple interface”: When you add a relative’s email address, [...]

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Tekkie, a.k.a. Mark Miller, “loves computers and software.” Apparently the software developer also loves the history of technology. In Great Moments in Modern Computer History, Tekkie gives us his take on the best demos, announcements, and breakthroughs in the history of computing. At more than 4000 words long, it must truly be a labor of [...]

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In a post today called Remember the old “Two Cultures” Debate? Tim O’Reilly points to Jon Bosak’s keynote at the XML 2006 Conference to show that C.P. Snow’s two cultures thesis is phooey. He writes that Bosak’s referencing of Kant and Donne “puts to rest the idea that engineers don’t know the humanities.” Maybe, but [...]

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About.com is one of the most confusing places on the web. It seems to bill itself as one-stop-shopping for reliable “how to” and other information. The fact that it’s owned by the New York Times and written by so-called “expert guides” reinforces this image. Yet when you look closely at the articles themselves, it’s immediately [...]

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I was happy to read in this month’s Public History News that the National Council for Public History’s Long Range Planning Committee has posted its working definition of “public history” on Wikipedia. In the spirit of “sharing authority,” the committee invites thoughtful edits and comments at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_history

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There’s a new trend in online amateur history that digital history scholars would do well to notice. A few months ago I pointed to Yahoo’s Taglines, a Flash visualization of the changing use of Flickr tags over a 16 month period from June 2004 to September 2005. More recently Chirag Mehta, an IT manager living [...]

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This morning Automobileblog gives us the Five Greatest Rivalries in NASCAR History. No surprises in first place. It’s got to be Ford v. Chevy.

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A quick one tonight from Popular Mechanics: The Top 10 F/X Scenes in Movie History. In fact it’s not a countdown of scenes at all, but rather a list of the most important applications of digital technology to recent filmmaking. Yet it’s ordered chronologically according to the dates of the films in which the techniques [...]

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