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This is how I often feel in the morning before I’ve had any coffee.  [via]

Indonesia born photographer and illustrator Agan Harahap uses his Photoshop skills to insert pictures of superheroes like Spiderman, Superman, The Flash, Darth Vader (?) and Batman into memorable political and wartime photos from the mid-20th century.  His new project is called “Superhero Photography”  I love the instant alternative history of this, with superheroes helping us win WWII, and how he makes their costumes look old and from that specific time period.  But why not Captain America and Red Skull?  Too obvious? [via here/here]

When it comes to my nerdery, Strat-O-Matic hits several sweet spots: history, baseball, statistics and board games.  Invented in 1961, the dice rolling game is fun for settling those abstract questions like how would Ty Cobb hit against Roger Clemens in their primes, etc.  You can play historical teams against one another and it’s all really fun if you are into any of the above mentioned subjects. 

One of the things the game never had was the participation of the great Negro League players like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, ad infinitum.  Until now!  MORE »

“Tonight, after dinner, I have been advised of my sentence: I am to be executed like a criminal at eight in the morning,” began Mary Queen of Scots on a cold February morning in 1587. 

Her final letter will be on display until Sept 21 at the National Library of Scotland to promote a new visitors’ center and allow the public a chance to see rare treasures tucked away in the library’s vaults.

The letter, which will likely not emerge again to the public in a long time, was written to the King of France.  Mary complains she had been deprived of her papers with which to make a will and  asked the French king to pay the wages and pensions of her servants.

With the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which basically throws up double middle fingers at historical accuracy, it’s always a good time to revisit other movies that did the same, although without the intention of Tarantino.

Amongst the list compiled by the Times Online, are three Mel Gibson movies: Braveheart, The Patriot, and Apocalypto. Surely he should be arrested for crimes against history, no?

2 Braveheart, 1995

Not only was the Scottish hero William Wallace gruesomely executed in 1305, having been captured by the English at Falkirk, but seven centuries later his memory was exhumed, smeared with blue face paint and mutilated by Mel Gibson. Wallace was not the poor villager the film depicts, but a landowner and minor knight. The litany of fibs extends from Wallace’s love interest (Queen Isabella would have been about two-years-old at the time) to his kilt – a garment not developed for another three centuries. The historian Sharon L. Krossa likens it to “a film about Colonial America showing the colonial men wearing 20th century business suits.”

Still a good movie though.

Despite her being the butt of many schoolyard jokes, I’ve often wondered how Helen Keller learned to communicate with the world.  Here she is in this 1930’s video with her friend and teacher Anne Sullivan talking about just that.

From Coilhouse: “It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.” [via]

Barton Gellman in the WaPo reports today that Cheney has revealed his frustration with the former president:

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

One wonders how history will view the relationship between Bush and Cheney and how that impacts the legacy of Bush’s presidency.  History has never been kind to Vice-Presidents, but then history has never had a Vice-President quite like Dick Cheney.  [via]

“A Short History of America” by Robert Crumb, from Crumb, the 1994 documentary by Terry Zwigoff. [via]

There’s plenty to explore at We Choose The Moon, but you’ll also want to bookmark it so you can follow the events of 40 years ago recreated in real time, beginning with the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16th. There’s also plenty of pictures and information from the John F. Kennedy museum.

Right now, the Apollo 11 crew is ready for launch, but they are still four days out.  [via]

The world was watching, but now 20 years later to the day, even Chinese youth barely know the significance of the student protests — or what has become known as The Tiananmen Square Massacre (or in China, The June Fourth Incident).  Even as a 10-year-old there was power in those images.  Captivating, historical.  There was no way to understand its significance.  But the image was all that matter.  A lone student in a white shirt standing up to a tank.  The courage of a lion.

James Fallow, writing in The Atlantic, “I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family’s experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.”

The NY Times Lens blog,  has a great story about the photographers who took the pictures of the man in the white shirt staring down the tanks in Tiananmen twenty years ago.

As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

There are plenty of great stories and essays about today and I’d encourage anyone to just dive and read.

Update: The New York Times has an audio-slideshow from Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist who happened to be Beijing bureau chief for The Times in 1989. He recalls the city’s mood during the student protests leading up to June 4, 1989 and gives a pretty solid history lesson of the events surrounding the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

In Australia?!?  A list of Jewish prisoners saved by Oskar Schindler has been found in a Sydney library.

The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was found between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.

“This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers,” she said.

“It’s an incredibly moving piece of history.”

[via Clusterflock]

[via darkroastedblend]

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things I’ve read in a few weeks.  “This is not a political blog. However, this is a story I couldn’t pass up: the story of how voting patterns in the 2008 election were essentially determined 85 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period. It’s also a story about how soil science relates to political science, by way of historical chance.”  There are also maps involved.  Lots of maps. The convergence of history, geography and politics – what more could you want? [Vigorous North via Kottke]