via ResearchBuzz: Firehose: guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins on the Library of Congress blog
An image from “Map and Views Illustrating Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” 1585–6.
There is a mystique surrounding libraries with old, rare books, and the Library of Congress is no exception. Just think of all the dark and vast vaults of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division that are closed to the public and imagine what undiscovered treasures they hold. Now, thanks to the digital age, the stacks are open and searchable—everyone can access these untold treasures through our newly released web portal.
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via The National Archives Blog by Erica Peacock
This year [2017] sees the 100th anniversary of the battle of Passchendaele. It was one of the bloodiest campaigns of the First World War and will be forever associated with the appalling conditions created by the continuous rain and mud of the battlegrounds. Men died needlessly for little military gain.
Back home in Britain, people were often ignorant, or complacent, about the truth of what the men were suffering in the trenches. The agonies suffered by the men at Passchendaele were very different from the myth of glorious sacrifice propagated at home. The war poet Siegfried Sassoon had seen and experienced the horrors of the trenches and was determined to convey the grim reality through his poetry.
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via the OUP Blog by Fyodor Dostoevvsky, Nicholas Pasternak Slater and Sarah J Young
St Petersburg Russia by MariaShvedova. Creative Commons via Pixabay.
Crime and Punishment is a story of a murder and morality that draws deeply on Dostoevsky’s personal experiences as a prisoner. It contrasts criminality with conscience, nihilism with consequences, and examines the lengths to which people will go to retain a sense of liberty.One of the factors that brought all these things together was the novel’s setting, around the Haymarket in St Petersburg, where the grandeur of the imperial capital gives way to poverty, squalor, and vice. The city here is not merely a backdrop but reflects the imposition of the will of one man, its founder Peter the Great, who famously decreed its existence and oversaw its building, which cost the lives of thousands of slaves. In Notes from Underground, the narrator describes St Petersburg as ‘the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole wide world’ – again alluding to that problem of abstraction and its potential to elevate ideas over lives. In this most ideological and willed of cities, the most ideological and willed of murders seems bound to happen.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
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via New Statesman by Emily Wilson
PICTURE: ARCHIVART / ALAMY
In 312 CE, Constantine had a vision of the cross as the emblem that would lead him to military victory: “In hoc signo, vinces!” (“With this sign, you will win!”) The story may be fake history: it is told only much later, in contradictory forms, by two authors with their own Christian axes to grind, and Constantine was probably never as fully and exclusively committed to the faith as the later hagiographers suggest. But officially, he did become the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. A small Jewish cult that had mostly been ignored by the ruling Roman elite had acquired the attention of the most powerful man in the world. A few decades later, in 380 CE, Theodosius made Christianity the sole authorised religion of the Roman empire.
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via the Guardian by Daniel Glaser
Summer fun: we have a so-called ‘reminiscence bump’ for events in adolescence. Photograph: Halfpoint/Getty Images
Recently I was asked to choose a track that changed my life, as part of an event called OneTrackMinds. Without hesitation I chose the one I first heard when I was 17, effortlessly skipping back over decades to hook into a song from my late adolescence. I had my reasons for selecting this particular piece, but a neurobiological phenomenon was at work here, too.
The so-called reminiscence bump, based on many well-established studies about memory, refers to the way we recall memories from adolescence and early adulthood more vividly as we grow older – compared to, say, remembering something from last week. So much of what we remember isn’t to do with our mental state now, but about the state of our brain when the memory was first ‘processed’.
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via Big Think blog by Frank Jacobs
Finding a Strange Map for this blog involves a lot of scrolling – and one full stop. As was the case with this map. Among a crop of merely informative maps and charts, there it was. Yes! It was love at first sight.
So what are we looking at here? A 90-year-old public transport diagram, apparently. The hand-coloured pastels and the modernist sans-serif font seem contemporary with the year in the legend. Which reads, in German: Traffic volume on elevated and underground railway lines, 1927.
The city is not mentioned, but stops with historically resonant names like Potsdamer Platz and Alexanderplatz provide a hint, even if you don't know much about German topography: this is Berlin.
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via Interesting Literature
For most of us, nursery rhymes are the first poems we ever encounter in life. They can teach us about rhythm, and about constructing a story in verse, and, occasionally, they impart important moral lessons to us. More often than not, though, they make no sense at all. In this post, we’ve picked ten of the very best nursery rhymes, though this list isn’t designed to be comprehensive, of course.
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via OUP blog by Wolfram Kinzig
Council of Nicaea 325 by Fresco in Capella Sistina, Vatican 1590. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
It is no exaggeration to say that, historically speaking, next to the Bible the early Christian creeds are the most important texts of Christianity. In the Latin Church, the Roman creed, which was recited at baptism, was considered so important that in Late Antiquity people claimed that it had been composed by the apostles themselves; thus it came to be called the Apostles’ Creed. Later the individual clauses of this creed were even ascribed to individual apostles (although there was considerable confusion as to which apostle had said what and the number of the clauses didn’t quite fit either). In the East, the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople, which had been adopted at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 and based on the Creed of the Council of Nicaea of 325, continues to hold pride of place in the liturgy.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
As NASA continues to examine the treasure trove of data from the New Horizons project, one interesting phenomenon at Pluto's equator has been identified as massive ice blades made of methane.
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