History Extra Podcast Black Tudors
Historian Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors: The Unknown Story, explores the lives of several Africans who resided in 16th-century England
Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person
There may be no more contentious an issue at the level of local U.S. government than education. All of the socioeconomic and cultural fault lines communities would rather paper over…
A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1711)
A classic piece of parody from the great Anglo-Irish satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift. The particular butt of Swift's sharp pen in this instance was Robert Boyle…
The Art of Making a Tapestry
Learn how tapestries were made in the time of Louis XIV and are still made today. Explore the process of tapestry weaving at the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, where historical…
Allusionist: Curse Soup
Somebody has really ticked you off. You're all steamed up inside and you want to vent that rage using words, but you don't want to confront them directly because you're…
Seduced & Abandoned: The Body in the Virtual World – The Feminine Cyberspace
Seduced & Abandoned was one of a series of ICA conferences (spanning 12-13 March, 1994) held under the umbrella title Towards the Aesthetics of the Future that explored the connections…
What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?
Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship's hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at…
Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)
Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. I asked friends on Facebook…
Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work
Many of the titans of literature have left, alongside a body of work that models powerful writing, abiding advice on the craft that examines the source of that power. Unrivaled…
Free: Download 5.3 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years
Rather than using optical character recognition (OCR), as most digitization software does to scan only the text of books, Leetaru’s code reversed the process, extracting the images the Internet Archive’s…