Welcome to the History Carnival for May, 2012. The blog at Not Even Past is one section on a public history website made up of blog posts on books, movies, documents, oral histories and podcasts, with a special little section on Texas, and this blog for everything else.
It’s written by the faculty and grad students at the UT Austin History Department in order to make our research available and accessible to the public. We hope you’ll look around while you’re here.
This month we’ve chosen some outstanding blogs of three kinds: posts with stories on specific events or sources, posts on digital history and digital sources, and posts on visual history sources.
Stories
Invisible Ink, by Kristie Macrackis at Wonders and Marvels
The curious history and interesting uses of invisible ink
The Free Russian Press in London, by Sarah J. Young on her blog.
Censorship in tsarist Russia compelled some of the best writers on current events to publish abroad and smuggle their works back into the country
Anglo-Saxon Astronomy Over Easy, by Christopher Cevasco at ZOUNDS!
Images of a New World: The Watercolors of John White, by Ben Breen at Res Obscura
A beautifully told record of the exquisitely detailed 16c watercolors of Native Americans
A History of the American Bachelor, by Bret and Kate MacKay at The Art of Manliness
Shooting the Bolsheviks by Bert Patenaude on the Hoover Institution blog
The political uses of atrocity footage:In the late afternoon of May 26, 1919, in a field about thirty miles outside Riga, Latvia, a squad of nine German riflemen executed eighteen Latvian Bolsheviks. And it was filmed.
Ballyhoo: The Art of Selling the Movies, by Nancy Kaufman on the George Eastman House Blog
Alice Austen: Photographs, by Liza Cowan and Penny House at Dyke: A Quarterly
Remarkable photographic chronicle of Austen’s life among her friends, her partner Gertrude Tate, and their everyday things.
American Islam in Dearborn: A Portrait, by Dan Bryan at Religion in American History
A short but revealing history of Muslims in Dearborn, MI
Digital History Projects
Reflections on Building the Digital Blue Ridge Parkway, by amwhisnant at Visualizing the Past
An extensive consideration of the problems, successes, and prospects of creating this wonderful digital history project
Neighborhood visualizer at Infothetics
This digital mapping project allows users to see the material and energy uses of neighborhoods in cities around the US.
Review of Tice and Steiner’s Vasi Map of Rome by Elijah Meeks at Visual Humanities Specialist
A discussion of the terrific digital project, Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome and what makes it so unusual.
Visual Historical Sources
Revolutions (33, 45, 78): USSR in Construction (1935), by Chris George, at Fans in a Flashbulb, the blog of the International Center for Photography
Photomontages of records and gramophones from USSR in Construction, the international journal produced in the Soviet Union to promote its industrial achievements.
South Pacific, by Anna Krentz at The Passion of Former Days
Sometimes photographs dispel illusions formed by fiction; these are so faithful to the visual record in my head they make me want to stand up and sing, “there ain’t nothing you can name…”
Twenty Years Since the Bosnian War, by Alan Taylor at In Focus (Atlantic’s photo blog)
A photo essay on the worst fighting in Europe since World War II and the destruction of the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo.
