Found History

Ye Olde Hipster. Merlin Mann claims Thomas Jefferson’s ivory pocket notebook as the “great-great-grandfather” of his own creation for Getting Things Done, the Hipster PDA. A History of Snowboarding in 2 Minutes Flat. (Via YouTube.) Happy New Year!

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One last music post before I return to Found History‘s bread and butter. If you haven’t been watching HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, you’re really missing something. Take my word, it’s the best comedy to hit TV since FOX inexplicably pulled Arrested Development from the air more than a year ago. It’s way too weird [...]

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I’ll stick with music for one more post. “Kite” is one of my favorite of U2‘s more recent songs. In keeping with the title, Edge’s guitar is alternatingly lilting and soaring, and Bono’s vocals are more than usually impassioned. The chord progression is classic rock simple, but the rhythms are changeable and complex. In many [...]

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This is kind of creepy—it reminds me of Michael Jackson’s 1991 Black or White video, which is creepy on many levels—but it’s also kind of cool. Eggman913‘s 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art provides a compelling and potentially telling history of the evolution of Western female portraiture in the space of three minutes. [...]

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Ever wonder if the Trojan Horse would work today? Here’s your answer. (Thanks again to Rob for the link.)

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Here’s another great find from Jeremy. It seems a little rich to position Instapundit and NikkiChannel alongside Samuel Peyps, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Adams, but who’s to say it isn’t history.

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Ever wonder how Europe managed the transition from scroll to codex? This short video may provide some insight. I suspect the periodization is all wrong—historians of the book can let us know—but anyone who has ever worked in tech support will see the comedic conceit is right on. BTW: Unless you speak Norwegian, you probably [...]

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My good friend Rob was particularly disgusted by my Venerable Bede joke (sorry, Rob), so I’m going to try to make it up to him by posting one of his found history picks. Video podcast Yacht Rock parodies the silky sounds of late-70s and early-80s pop acts like Steely Dan, Chicago, Hall and Oates, Toto, [...]

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I was cleaning out my TiVo last night, and I caught this odd trio debating the makeup of Lincoln’s cabinet. The phone is an especially nice touch. (Don’t blame me for the crappy video embed. My initial instinct was to pull this from YouTube. After several fruitless searches there, I finally remembered Viacom’s DMCA lawsuit [...]

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Because it’s neither unintentional nor unconventional nor amateur, this may not belong here on Found History. But the new movie 300 is definitely historical, and it has managed to capture the fancy of widespread segments of the public, including movie critics, gamers, and many of my History 100 students. Very loosely based on Herodotus, 300 [...]

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