Found History

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 McDonald’s Halloween “Happy Pails” [...]

[Read more →]

I’m sure many of you noticed the recent controversy over Google’s use of Spanish surrealist Joan Miro’s work in a logo commemorating the 113th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Intended by Google as a “tribute” to Miro’s “extraordinary contribution,” the artist’s family and their representatives at the The Artists Rights Society nevertheless cried foul [...]

[Read more →]

When I launched Found History over the weekend, I didn’t fully appreciate the timing. It only occurred to me yesterday in the supermarket that late-December is a great time to start collecting examples of non-professional history. For the next two weeks or so, we will be bombarded by year-end retrospectives, “Best of 2005″ lists, [...]

[Read more →]