Highlights
Two articles I wrote about historical myths in general, and especially women in history:
More have gathered since then:
(see also: The Master List of Historical Women in Combat)
But also:
And the cherry on top:
Then there are other kinds of historical myths, too:
In other news, I once researched historical pirate flags for a story. Ended up not using the information, but it's very cool, a complex visual language:
And speaking of historical pirates:
More generally, history can be very useful to fantasy writers:
Or simply cool:
But mostly it's complicated, and often marred by colonialism:
Otherwise, history has the advantage of being divisible by eras somewhat.
Antiquity
Middle Ages
- Paying Moms to Breastfeed in Medieval Europe (6 June 2022)
- Explore this Fascinating Map of Medieval Europe (25 June 2021)
- Vikings May Not Be Who We Thought They Were, DNA Study Finds (18 February 2021)
- Lost recipe for medieval blue ink found (20 April 2020)
- The Medieval Invention of Toilet Paper (March 2020)
- Too Good Looking to Die: How to get saved from an execution in the Middle Ages (December 2019)
- Earliest fragment from German vagina poem found in abbey library (30 July 2019)
- Erotic Poem From The Middle Ages (29 July 2019)
- On colonialism, imperialism, and ignoring medieval history (26 July 2019)
- When Dancing Plagues Struck Medieval Europe (10 January 2019)
- Researchers Find Physical Evidence for the Existence of a Female Pope (3 September 2018)
- Hussite Wars 1419-1434 - European Wars of Religion (4 March 2018)
- ‘Allah’ Is Found on Viking Funeral Clothes (14 October 2017)
- Lost Dark Ages Fort Found in Scotland (22 January 2017)
- Once a magnificent medieval city and home to 200,000 people, the ghost city of Ani is now completely abandoned and has stood empty for centuries (15 August 2016)
- Chivalry Isn’t Dead, You Just Don’t Know What the Fuck it is (12 October 2015)
- Decoding the Medieval Volvelle (23 July 2015):
Made from circles of paper or parchment, the volvelle was part timepiece, part floppy disk, and part crystal ball
- A Pocket Guide to Medieval Castle Vocabulary (12 July 2015)
- Chain, Chest, Curse: Combating Book Theft in Medieval Times (10 July 2015)
- The Medieval Tube Map (December 2014)
Renaissance and early modern
Victorian era and Gilded Age
WW1 / WW2 and inter-war
Cold War and post-Communist era
America
Middle East
Language
Sci-tech
- Inventing Postscript, The Tech That Took The Pain Out Of Printing (23 April 2022)
- Revisiting the INMOS Transputer (31 March 2022)
- Analyzing Every Second of the Classic Dial-Up Modem Sound (2 March 2022)
- The Time Traveler Who Hunted Speed Records in an EV (6 December 2021)
- 70 years since LEO, the ‘world’s first business computer’. (16 November 2021)
- From Idea to Icon: 50 Years of the Floppy Disk (19 July 2021)
- The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam (13 July 2021)
- The Age of Steam: Introduction (18 February 2021)
- The Era of Fragmentation, Part 3: The Statists (17 May 2020)
- A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial (24 March 2020)
- TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers (November 2019)
- IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display (November 2019)
- Beware of Cranks (8 October 2019)
Misguided attempts to solve impossible mathematical problems.
- 'World's oldest webcam' to be switched off (20 August 2019)
- How the Escalator Forever Changed Our Sense of Space (27 June 2019)
- Getting to the Bottom of the Flat Earth (13 June 2019)
- These 400-Year-Old Rings Unfold to Reveal Astronomical Spheres (15 May 2019)
- Cemetery of Soviet computers (31 January 2019)
- Extending Interactivity (24 January 2019)
- When a cabinet and an automaton love each other very much… (15 January 2019)
- Accounting machines, the IBM 1403, and why printers standardized on 132 columns (January 2019)
- Cycloramas: The Virtual Reality of the 19th Century (16 December 2018)
- Discovering Interactivity (13 December 2018)
- The history of navy strength gin (12 November 2018)
- Math + The Mechanics (23 August 2018)
The story of the Curta Calculator, a stylish portable mechanical calculator that doesn’t use electricity and has a surprisingly dramatic origin story.
- Speak & Spell History: Texas Instruments' Greatest Product (19 June 2018)
- The Forgotten '80s Home Robots Trend (14 May 2018)
- The Transistor, Part 2: Out Of The Crucible (18 February 2018)
- The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms 📷 (9 January 2018)
- What Have We Learned from the PDP-11? (4 December 2017)
- Fly Through 17th Century London (26 October 2017)
- Trackball History: Canada's Earliest Gift to Computing (12 October 2017)
- The Little-Known Reason Pencils Are Yellow (24 July 2017)
- Lost Generation: The Relay Computers (10 May 2017)
- Interesting Photos of Computer Stores in the 1970s and 1980s (October 2016)
- The Most Famous Image in the Early History of Computing (28 February 2016)
- The History of Text Generation (15 December 2015)
- How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats (13 October 2015)
- Peripherals Behind The Iron Curtain (13 April 2015)
- The SECOND Oldest Tube: London's Lost Pneumatic Railway (12 April 2015)
- Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E. (20 March 2015)
- A Brief History of the ATM (March 2015)
- The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2 February 2015)
- Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain (15 December 2014)
- The story of Grace Hopper (aka Amazing Grace) (9 December 2014)
- Xerox Alto Source Code (21 October 2014)
- The revenge of QWERTY (25 June 2014)
- 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book (May 2014)
- Why Didn't People Smile in Old Portraits? (September 2013)
- The Writer Automaton, Switzerland (11 July 2013)
- Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard
(3 May 2013)
- The Data Center Inside a Cold War Nuclear Bunker (2 May 2013)
- A Brief History of Book Vending Machines (25 March 2013)
- This Was the First Word Processor Ever Used By a Novelist. It Weighed 200 Pounds and Had to Be Brought in Though the Window (March 2013)
- A Victorian Era Pocket Watch Spy Camera (23 February 2013)
- The Android of Albertus Magnus (19 January 2013)
- The Iron Hand of Gotz Von Berlichingen (March 2008)