January 2012
3 posts
“Erard… begins by visiting Bologna, Italy, the hometown of one of history’s...”
– From the New York Times review of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.
December 2011
7 posts
“Now the staff at Townend House in Troutbeck have made a good discovery: a...”
– Library book overdue by 123 years - but George Washington still holds the record | UK news | guardian.co.uk
“The result, as the historian Lawrence W. Levine has written, ‘is a mélange...”
– 19th-century American Women: Ex-Slave Ellen Butler’s Christmas Memories - an addendum, quoted from the Library of Congress’s site, about the language of recorded interviews held with former slaves.
November 2011
5 posts
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“Much they marveled at the playing of the fly and needle, which they could see so...”
– John Smith, amazing the Indians with a compass and then a vaguely drugged-out vision of the world, in The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1612/1624).
Also you can now ask me questions, despite probably not having any.
August 2011
4 posts
“It is also against nature to cut our nails, our hair, or to shave the beard....”
– Charles Knowlton, challenging the dismissal of birth control as unnatural, 1839.
May 2011
6 posts
“The Victorians are us – but half-formed, more innocent, unaware of the future....”
– From James McCreet’s ”Why We All Love a Victorian Murder,” at the Guardian’s Comment is Free section.
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
7 posts
“She threatened to ‘Whitechapel’ him. The prosecutrix interefered,...”
– Fascinating post at Cat’s Meat Shop about false Jack The Rippers (falsely accused men, those claiming to be him, etc) in nineteenth-century London, including this passage about a female prisoner using the terminology of Jack the Ripper as a threat.
January 2011
25 posts
“Thanks to its ongoing relationship with a disabled gamer, Sony San Diego has...”
– MLB 11 The Show has one-button controls for the disabled.
“About the only thing that prevents some men from telling bare-faced lies is a...”
– An 1895 joke, found at a compendium of Victorian jokes at The Cat’s Meat Shop: Joking Aside.
“There are different degrees of coercion. While involuntary commitment is the...”
– The Conversations We Should (and Shouldn’t) Be Having, at Cat in a Dog’s World. A thoughtful response to the common call for more surveillance and more institutionalized response in the wake of the Tucson shootings. Well worth reading in its entirety.