Unique series of maps showing a particular empire’s knowledge revealed through a mass of broiling black cloud. | Continue reading
On the evening of May 31, 1921, several thousand white citizens and authorities began to violently attack the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Karlos K. Hill investigates the disturbing photographic legacy of this massacre and the resilience of Black Wa … | Continue reading
Dorothy Levitt’s practical, how-to guide for those who wanted to take to the roads, but did not quite know how. | Continue reading
Illustrations from the 19th-century physics text books of Amédée Guillemin. | Continue reading
In a 1870 paper, Hubert Airy became the first to attempt to explicitly visualise the scintillating scotomata of his migraine. | Continue reading
A series of six lithographic dreamworlds inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. | Continue reading
Being in debt was once an artful promenade — the process of eluding creditors through disguise and deceit. Erika Vause explores a forgotten financial history: the pervasive humor that once accompanied the literature and visual culture of debt. | Continue reading
For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid. | Continue reading
Images from Agostino Ramelli's Diverse and Artificial Machines, which despite their detail obscure as much as they reveal. | Continue reading
Angus Trumble on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company's curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that "most beautiful of God's creatures" which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes. | Continue reading
Exquisite miniatures of 16th-century Persia by Bosnian-born Ottoman polymath and all-round genius Matrakcı Nasuh. | Continue reading
Inspired by Jules Verne’s scientific novels, *The electric life* has garnered retrospective praise for successfully anticipating much of modern life. | Continue reading
Angels emerge from avian eggs and a figure climbs a ladder to the moon, in Blake's unique take on the emblems tradition. | Continue reading
In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism brought on by the death of his son and brother in WWI, Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of the Cottingley Fairies. Mary Losure explores how the creator of Sherlock Holmes became convinced that t … | Continue reading
A catalogue showing the entries for a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one of their own. | Continue reading
Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the w … | Continue reading
In his final work, William Fairfield Warren set out to become a cartographer of the poetic imagination, mapping Milton’s cosmos in *Paradise Lost*. | Continue reading
Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to marble. | Continue reading
With its dreamlike inversions and kaleidoscopic cast of anthropomorphic objects, animals, and plants, the world of French artist J. J. Grandville is at once both delightful and disquieting. Patricia Mainardi explores the unique work of this 19th-century illustrator now recognised … | Continue reading
During the summer of 1895, in a Brooklyn park, there was a cotton plantation complete with five hundred Black workers reenacting slavery. Dorothy Berry uncovers the bizarre and complex history of Black America, a theatrical production which revealed the conflicting possibilities … | Continue reading
The Florentine engraver imagines an expedition to a lunar landscape peopled by New World figures in fantastical, size-shifting scenarios. | Continue reading
A sample book of gorgeous French silk in various patterns, from around 1900, from the Mary Ann Beinecke Decorative Art Collection. | Continue reading
Bills of mortality for the year 1665 in London, recording the number of plague dead, as well as other causes of mortality. | Continue reading
Beautiful diagrams exploring the nervous system from two pioneers in the field. | Continue reading
The 19th-century whale hunt was a brutal business, awash with blubber, blood, and the cruel destruction of life. But between the frantic calls of “there she blows!”, there was plenty of time for creation too. Jessica Boyall explores the rich vein of illustration running through t … | Continue reading
Colorful chromolithograph postcards depicting Don Quixote in twentieth-century scenes. | Continue reading
As the French Revolution entered its most radical years, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Samantha Wesner traces the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s … | Continue reading
Images from colour pencil drawings made while the artist was submerged in a diving bell. | Continue reading
Wright’s theory, illustrated by 32 plates, mixes influential discoveries about the milky way with fantastical visions of divine creation. | Continue reading
When we think of early New England, we tend to picture stern-faced Puritans and black-hatted Pilgrims, but in the same decade that these more famous settlers arrived, a man called Thomas Morton founded a very different kind of colony — a neo-pagan experiment he named Merrymount. … | Continue reading
Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman ex … | Continue reading
Temperance movement book full of tales, poems, and illustrations warning readers against the perils of alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. | Continue reading
On one of the most striking and intriguing creations by a Flemish master of trompe l’oeil paintings. | Continue reading
At the end of the 17th century there appeared the first noting of a mysterious kayak-paddling “Finnman” seen in Orkney waters. Jonathan Westaway explores the subsequent explanations and how early modern science's fascination with unfamiliar objects, and the “out-of-place” in … | Continue reading
Short pamphlet of conversations with Whitman in his last years by the art critic and poet Sadakichi Hartmann. | Continue reading
During the 17th century, as knowledge of the Universe and its contents increased, so did speculation about life on other planets. One such source, as Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, was Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens, whose earlier work on proba … | Continue reading
Peddling lies in public goes back to antiquity, but it is the with the Tabloid Wars of the 19th-century when it first reached the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. | Continue reading
Engravings from an ambitious and beautiful attempt to catalogue, for the first time, the musical instruments of the world. | Continue reading
Stunning hand-colored transparencies of life in Meiji-era Japan, from the Canadian businessman Herbert Geddes’ collection, acquired in Yokohama from 1908–1918. | Continue reading
From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll's Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art and literature. What might this say about past knowledge of hallucinogenic fungi? Mike Jay looks at early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species in particu … | Continue reading
A chapter from Charles Babbage’s *The Life of a Philosopher* railing against noise pollution in 19th-century London. | Continue reading
Living through the devastating Italian plague of 1656, the great polymath Athanasius Kircher turned his ever-enquiring mind to the then mysterious disease, becoming possibly the first to view infected blood through a microscope. While his subsequent theories of spontaneous genera … | Continue reading
From infographics to digital renders, today's scientists have ready access to a wide array of techniques to help visually communicate their research. It wasn't always so. Gregorio Astengo explores the innovations employed in early issues of the Royal Society's Philoso … | Continue reading
The diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, published after her death from tuberculosis aged just 25, won the aspiring painter the fame she so longed for but failed to achieve while alive. Sonia Wilson explores the importance of the journal — one of the earliest bids by a woman to secure ce … | Continue reading
Lorenz Stoer’s wildly imaginative depictions of polyhedral shapes and fantastical ruins intended to instruct and inspire woodworkers. | Continue reading
For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists' colours. Honing in on painting's primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball … | Continue reading
American fiction of the 19th century often featured a ghoulish figure, the cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found both unnerving and entirely plausible. Looking at novels by Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Chel … | Continue reading