Found History

Yesterday I received a letter from Google addressed to Robert T. Gunther at Found History. As founder of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, where I did my doctoral work, and a major figure in my dissertation, I am very honored to welcome Dr. Gunther to the Found History staff. Despite having [...]

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Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library explores our ongoing fascination with Abraham Lincoln with 21st Century Abe. Launching officially on Lincoln’s bicentennial on February 12, 2009, the site will present reflections on Lincoln’s legacy by leading scholars and artists. More interesting is that between now and February, the project’s curators will also be using Twitter, Facebook, [...]

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(my) History of Technology by Verie Sandborg. A retiree’s recollections of a lifetime with personal technology. Roots Television. User-generated genealogy videos. Interesting, but too many ads. Technica. An archive of lego history, including early advertisements, a numbered set listing, and an extensive timeline.

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More from the grocery check-out. I suppose I understand the pairing of John-John and Diana. But John Lennon and John Ritter?

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Like many enthusiast communities, the legion of Mac users seems particularly interested in its history and in the history of its cause: the Apple computer. This takes the form of both casual interest by ordinary users (e.g. “Early Apple sound designer Jim Reekes corrects Sosumi myth” and “Steve and Steve in 1976″) and also more [...]

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If you get a chance, check out kevo.com, a new social networking site where users collaboratively profile their favorite celebrities, who are then ranked according to “fame” based on the number and reputation of members contributing to their pages (at least that’s what I gather from the site’s somewhat opaque FAQ pages). Paris Hilton, Natalie [...]

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Found on the floor of the United States Senate: James Inhofe (R-OK) explores his family history.

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In Mario Through the Years, GameDaily offers readers a several-thousand-word biography of Mario, twenty-six year veteran of Nintendo gaming, star of more than 100 games, and stalwart defender of Pauline’s virtue against Donkey Kong’s relentless advances.

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Predictably, the Harvard undergraduate plagiarism scandal has focused more attention on the thief—sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan—than on the thieved, coming-of-age novelist Megan McCafferty. In terms of found history, however, McCafferty is much more interesting than Viswanathan. Each day in (retro)blogger, McCafferty offers a glimpse into her past, reproducing an entry from her own teenage diary for [...]

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This is a little (lot) late in coming, but I want to say something about this past winter’s Oprah-James Frey controversy. For those of you who don’t remember, the controversy erupted when Oprah discovered that James Frey had “lied” in writing “A Million Little Pieces,” the memoir of his struggle with drug addition, which Oprah [...]

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