The world has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dramatically as how we see the world. That’s just what’s on display at the David Rumsey Map Collection, whose m...
Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has ...
Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. ...
Back when we last featured the New York Public Library’s digital collections in 2016, they contained about 160,000 high-resolution images from various historical periods. This seemed like a fa...
Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost cer...
Today, if you want to get started in home brewing, shop for a synthesizer, find out what cybernetics is, order non-genetically-modified seeds, start your own mushroom farm, learn how to repair a ...
Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space...
That vast repository of American history that is the Smithsonian Institution evolved from an organization founded in 1816 called the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. It...
https://www.openculture.com/2023/04/the-smithsonian-puts-4-5-million-high-res-images-online.html
“Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” So said Winston Churchill, perhaps not suspecting how frequently the remark wo...
https://www.openculture.com/2022/10/the-internet-archive-launches-democracys-library.html
“Early cookbooks were fit for kings,” writes Henry Notaker at The Atlantic. “The oldest published recipe collections” in the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe “emanated from the...
Though it may not figure prominently into the average whirlwind Eurail trip across the continent, Vienna’s role in the development of European culture as we know it can hardly be overstated. Gr...
Librarians are champions of organization, and among its best practitioners. Books are shelved according to the Dewey Decimal system. Categories are assigned using Library of Congress Rule Interpr...
Image of Charles S.L. Baker with his Superheating Demonstration Black History Month is February in the United States and Canada, and October in the United Kingdom and Europe. It may be July right...
The world thinks of Japan as having transformed itself utterly after its defeat in the Second World War. And indeed it did, into what by the nineteen-eighties looked like a gleaming, technology-s...
The popularity of graphic novels (and more than a few extremely lucrative superhero movie franchises) have conferred respectability on comics. Handsome reissues of such stunning early works as Wi...
https://www.openculture.com/2022/04/explore-a-big-archive-of-vintage-early-comics-1700-1929.html