See also: more history links.
Two history blogs worth reading:
Medieval History, Pop Culture, Swearing
Where the Middle Ages Begin
Three more (social) science sites with good history sections:
Where News Meets Its Scholarly Match
The Most Interesting Articles, Mysteries & Discoveries
History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places
And two articles I wrote about historical myths in general, and especially women in history:
More have gathered since then:
Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them.
See also: The Master List of Historical Women in Combat. But that's not all:
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:
(in more than one way)
Sometimes intriguing:
Tipsy:
Or simply cool:
But mostly it's complicated, and often marred by colonialism:
Luckily, modern tech lets us peer into it, like in this 3D portrait of Tenochtitlan, but also:
Otherwise, history has the advantage of being divisible by eras somewhat.
What is it with wells and curses?
Otherwise findings are often surprising:
‘We Couldn’t Believe Our Eyes’: A Lost World of Shipwrecks Is Found (12 November 2016) Archaeologists have found more than 40 vessels in the Black Sea, some more than a millennium old, shedding light on early empires and trade routes.
Endearing:
Or shiver-inducing:
See also: posts tagged Antiquity and Middle Ages.
These range from funny:
To appalling:
And from long ago, various coolness:
There were good things too, back then: In 1982, a 10-year-old American wrote to the head of the U.S.S.R. He wrote back and she became our youngest diplomat (9 December 2018)
There used to be strange research, like Project Stargate (16 February 2013), and also cool tech:
Some remnants aren't any fun:
Photographer Tamas Dezso has been documenting the disintegrating communist infrastructure left behind in Romania after the Red Giant fell.
Anca Petrescu, the architect who designed the People's Palace, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s monstrous monument to totalitarian kitsch, dead at 64.
Others, on the contrary: The Data Center Inside a Cold War Nuclear Bunker (2 May 2013).
And for another cool story: How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War (25 April 2008)
Creatures of Thought is a great blog about the history of tech, and Tedium also has much to say about that.
The history of game hints pages, before the internet took over (3 December 2023) POKEs, maps and cheats.
The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Survival of dBase (17 November 2023) The story of the pioneering desktop relational database from its inception in the late 1970s all the way to its current state in the present day
The Most Famous Image in the Early History of Computing (28 February 2016) Spoiler: it's the portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, made on the programmable loom that bears his name.
Last but not least, a trio of very old links:
And a few that are timeless: