About the Database: The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century.

The net changes the world’s power structures in a much more fundamental way than changing the way a few groups of entrepreneurs are able to make money. The net is the greatest equalizer that humankind has ever invented. It is either the greatest invention since the printing press, or the greatest invention since written language. The battles we see are not a result of loss of money; they are caused by a loss of the power of narratives.

Roanoke Island

The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

The introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in US Congress caused a wave of dissent, anger, and protest over the possible censorship and gatekeeping of the Internet. To bring needed attention to this law, a large number of sites took down access to their websites and replaced them with messages or warnings about the potential effect of SOPA. On January 18, 2012, these one of a kind pages provided an insight into crowdsourced protest and collective action. As a result of this and other work, SOPA lost support and faded. Archive Team has assembled a collection of WARC-format pages from that day

"The Anacreontic Song" was the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in London, and later became the tune to which the Star Spangled Banner lyrics were set to

Everything you know about Africa is wrong.

No, no, not you in particular. I'm thinking about a more general "you" -- the American "you," the Western "you," and even the 18- to 22-year-old "you" who enrolls in my introductory African history classes.

USGS township maps plus some other county maps

c. 1898

c. 1904

c. 1896

c. 1896

c. 1922

c. 1902

The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind

Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony – Edward Wright Haile

Vintage illustrations from my collection of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Alice Through The Looking Glass.

The Indo-European problem can be solved today because archaeological discoveries and advances in linguistics have eaten away at problems that remained insoluble as recently as fifteen years ago.

c. 1913

Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
by Jeffrey J. Kripal

In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society

They did more than wonder: they experimented. They choked chickens, gagged fish, strangled dogs and dissected living cats. They transfused blood from a sheep to a human. They tried to imprison a spider inside a circle of powdered unicorn's horn. They also suffocated mice; but according to their first chronicler, they themselves breathed "a freer air" and conversed quietly "without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age". These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker

World peace could be closer than you think.

Stratfor is temporarily offering their content for free.

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world. It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

Elaine Pagels

What the prophets did is, they took the most ancient version of the creation story — it's not the one you find in Genesis. The most ancient creation story tells how the God of Israel had to fight a giant dragon. This is a Babylonian story. It goes back to the god Marduk. But they took the story about God fighting a dragon in the beginning of time, and they applied it to the crisis of the war. The prophet Jeremiah talked about how the king of Babylon is a beastly sea monster whom God spears and slaughters. The prophet Isaiah calls on God to wake up and fight against Israel's foreign enemies. Isaiah pictures Israel's enemies. It's the Babylonian empire. He says, "That old serpent, the dragon, Leviathan, the dragon that lives in the sea." Isaiah also pictured Israel's foreign enemies as a rich and decadent whore. When John of Patmos, who was steeped in these writings, asks, "How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?" he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today's Babylon, which is Rome, although it's raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Just a note that this Book of Revelation doesn't contain things that many of its contemporary admirers claim to find. It doesn't have anything about a rapture. It doesn't have anything about a requirement that Jews become Christian. Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John's book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn't yet been invented. John never uses the term Christian. He wouldn't have applied it to himself, even if he knew the term. We don't know if he knew it, because it was probably coined by Roman soldiers to identify gentiles, that is, non-Jews, accused of atheism, because they didn't worship the gods of Rome, and accused of treason because they were now devoted to a cult that followed the seditionist, Jesus of Nazareth.

In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Princeton University religious professor Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from.

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) is custodian of the Alan Lomax Archive, a priceless collection of recorded music, dance, and the spoken word. Our mission is to facilitate cultural equity. We preserve, publish, repatriate and freely disseminate our collections. ACE practices “cultural feedback” by disseminating thousands of recordings, photos and videos through educational partners, free online resources and partners, and publishing partners; by repatriating artists’ rights and royalties to their estates and families; and, with the full participation of local institutional partners, by repatriating recordings, film, photos, with our comprehensive notes and data, to those communities.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
-- Jared Diamond

A new study by University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn and colleagues presents a reconstruction of this fossilized forest, lending insight into the ecology and climate of its time.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced the discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in the Kingdom. The finding suggests that the area was once intensively occupied and that the origins of architecture in the region date back twenty millennia, before the emergence of agriculture.

Hathi Trust Digital Library

c. 1890

c. 1885

John C. Leffel
c. 1913

Goodspeed Publishing
c. 1886

c. 1889

c. 1883
text

c. 1895

c. 1914 [?]

c. 1911
Accomack County, VA

A celebration of archives, archival material, and the amazing history that they protect.

Dr. Wehr and his colleagues attempted to recapitulate prehistoric sleep conditions ... They began by exploring what happens when the men switched from the conventional day length, or photoperiod, of 16 hours, which the average working adult adheres to year-round ... to a shortened photoperiod of only 10 hours, a schedule that approximates what prehistoric people in the middle latitudes would have experienced in the dead of winter.

Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation

history of earth on a 24 hour clock

"Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement." -Otto Weininger

Over millions of years, changes to our vocal organs have allowed us to produce a rich mix of sounds. One such change was the loss of the air sac - a balloon-like organ that helps primates to produce booming noises. All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ.

Ancient Greek trading vessels carried much more than wine

Two previously undiscovered pits have been found at Stonehenge which point to it once being used as a place of sun worship before the stones were erected.