History Archive:

A modern representation of old rail and ferry routes in the mid-atlantic.

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I don’t think most people realize how many Russians died during WWII and how that defined the rest of the 20th century. The below videographic tells the entire WWII story in detail.

A beautiful language tree by sssscomic.com.

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I first posted about this awesome graph back in 2010, but it is now available from HistoryShots as print. Besides all the rare economic info, what’s fascinating to me is that this was orginally created as a piece of wall advertising. The most commonly circulated version had it as an ad for an envelope company, though I’ve seen others.

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“A Guide to Paint and Color” (Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau) was written in the year 1692 and contains over 2100 colors. You original book can be viewed here.(via)

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Type in any name and see how popular it was across the USA over the past 60 years. (blog post explaining methodology)

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Loren Munk

In: Culture History

25 Feb 2014

Artist Loren Munk has created many beautiful interpretations of art history, genres, and incubators.

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My personal favorite:

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According to this Harvard study, on average people today are just as likely to be better off than our parents than the generation 50 years ago was. I wonder if they adjusted incomes for debt? (I’m too lazy to check).

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I’m not sure why it took the Washington Post six months longer than the NYT to do an article and map about this. NYT’s interactive map/chart combo helps grasp what they’re measuring:

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I love these huge old maps. Apparently flying across the country then required taking a  train for some stretches though. Hehe. (via Slate)

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National Geographic is adding 500 of their classic maps to the Google public data archive. Basically, these are layers mapped onto Google’s existing map engine.  The press release contained two examples, but bizarrely, no link to the public gallery where the NattyG maps will eventually appear.

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In some ways, this strikes me as a bit silly. but having access to these historical maps at all is a good thing, and it’s remarkable how accurate many of them were.

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We’ve seen maps of languages around the world but it’s interesting to look a little deeper at how specific words differ across countries. Michael Kelley makes a few guesses over at Business Insider as to what explains some of the difference.

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In honor of the 150th anniversary of an awesome speech, here’s the powerpoint version by Peter Novig:

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The making of.

I still prefer the Baby Name Voyager, but this is a nice presentation.

Also: Jacob? Barf.

Boys

Girls

 

 

PopChartLab created this compendium of audio recording and playing devices over time. It’s pretty comprehensive. However, I think PopChartLab is on the verge of becoming the Buzzfeed of infocharts: pointless compiled lists of cartoonized objects. Cocktail Chart of Film and Literature?!? Fictional Beers?!? Nebula of NES Games?!  Shark jumped.

Going back to the original topic: am I the only who occasionally calls his iPod a “walkman”?

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Nicely done. I suspect some people might think that London is given credit for more than it deserves.

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