Chasing Yesterdays

This is the shadow history.

[chasing-yesterdays]

Tea from the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773.

Three extant vials of tea purported to have been collected in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773.

“Tea that was gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester neck on the morning after the destruction of the three Cargos at Boston December 17. 1773.″ (Source)

“TEA THROWN INTO BOSTON HARBOR DEC. 16. 1773.” (Source)

“Glass Bottle Containing Tea” (Source)

[chasing-yesterdays]

Vintage button collection.

Inscription reads: “Buttons from Mothers Button Box. Earl Vinson, Dayton, OH Aug-16-41-Given by Viola Hull, Lebanon”

Source: Case Antiques

[chasing-yesterdays]

Park of photographer Mike Mission’s “Asphalt Archaeology” series (2012), chronicling the myriad objects found embedded in New York City streets.

Source: Fstoppers

[chasing-yesterdays]

Kalaallit (West Greenlandic Inuit) double-thumbed sealskin and dog fur mitts, ca. 1897.

Like carrying two pairs of mitts in one, this ingenious design allows the wearer to simply flip over their mitts to the dry side when the palms become wet.

Source: Hood Museum

[chasing-yesterdays]

The evolution of the pilcrow, or “paragraph symbol.”

“[...] [B]y the 12th century, scribes abandoned the K in favor of the C, for capitulum (“little head”) to divide texts into capitula (also known as “chapters”). Like the treble clef, the pilcrow evolved due to the inconsistencies inherent in hand-drawing, and as it became more widely used, the C gained a vertical line (in keeping with the latest rubrication trends) and other, more elaborate embellishments, eventually becoming the character seen at the top of this post.”

-Jimmy Stamp

Source: 1, 2, 3

[erikkwakkel]

Parchment face

Here’s something special. Last Friday I posted a blog on holes found in the pages of medieval books (The skinny on bad parchment). As in the image above, such defects are usually caused by the parchment maker: he pushed his knife too hard cleaning the animal skin, causing it to rip. While the resulting holes must have been a major annoyance to producers of books, the scribe of this twelfth-century manuscript used them to his advantage. He drew a bearded man while turning the gaps into an eye and a nose (slightly displaced), as well as a big laughing mouth. The reader of this serious text - a commentary to the Song of Songs - will no doubt have laughed at the unexpected sight of this funny stranger. Making art out of flaws: it’s just the perfect image, then and now.

Pic: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Patr.41, fol. 69r. Full digital edition here. This is a direct link to the page in question.

[chasing-yesterdays]

Examples of medieval craftspeople trying valiantly to depict lions when they’d never actually seen one.

Sources: 1, 2 , 3, 4

[chasing-yesterdays]

The Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks collection is an outstanding online resource of over 9300 scanned pages of handwritten cookbooks from the 1600s-1900s, from the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections, University Archives, and Iowa Women's Archives.

Almost all pages, as of January 2019, have been transcribed by a crowdsourcing initiative.

(Image: English cookbook page, ca. 1600s, from this project.)

[chasing-yesterdays]

Returning to this blog after...six, seven years?

This was a fun project. I’ll give it a go again.

-JT

[odditiesoflife]

Incredible Vintage Animated Gifs

Nearly 155 years before the first animated gif appeared in 1887, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau unveiled an invention called the phenakistoscope, a device that is largely considered to be the first mechanism for true animation. The simple gadget relied on the persistence of the vision principle to create the illusion of images in motion.

The phenakistoscope used a spinning disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc’s center were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it were a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture.

Though Plateau is credited with inventing the device, there were numerous other mathematicians and physicists who were working on similar ideas around the same time, and they too were building on the works of Greek mathematician Euclid and Sir Isaac Newton who had also identified the principles behind the phenakistoscope.

source 1, 2, 3, 4

[in-the-horniman]

Dashing through the snow…

Horniman Advent Calendar object no. 4 is a wooden model sleigh pulled by a reindeer, from Greenland.

[in-the-horniman]

Object no. 2 in our Horniman advent calendar is a rather terrifying-looking cloth mask with a wool felt hat, used in a Christmas-time ritual in Romania.

[chasing-yesterdays]

Lovely and complex 18th century headstone from Forteviot, Perthshire, Scotland.

The skull and crossed bones (with the banner proclaiming "MEMNTO MORE [sic]"), as well as the running hourglass, recalls to the viewer that death is always imminent.

The winged head represents the soul of the deceased.

The two other figures, raising their hands to heaven, may represent other deceased family members.

Source: Tour Scotland Photographs (Sally Stevenson, photog.)

[smithsonian]

Happy Halloween! 

Don’t adjust the volume. The silence in this video of a 450-yr old automaton friar makes it that much creepier. Found lurking in the National Museum of American History’s collection. 

(via NMAH’s 11 collection objects giving us the creeps this Halloween)

[chasing-yesterdays]

Silk Adelaide boots with beaded domino design to match a fancy dress outfit a woman would have worn to a costume ball (ca. mid-19th century).

Source: Bata Shoe Museum blog

[chasing-yesterdays]

Traditional (and utterly terrifying) Halloween turnip jack-o-lantern carved in Ireland in the early 20th century. Note the horrifying teeth.

On display at the Museum of Country Life (National Museum of Ireland).

Source: wikipedia

[chasing-yesterdays]

Hello everyone! I've been away from my tumblr for a while to get the after-effects of a brain injury under control. I'm looking forward to beginning to post again.

Happy to be back!