The Public Domain Review
https://publicdomainreview.org/blogAn online journal exploring curious and obscure works that have entered the public domain, featuring essays, collections, and cultural commentary on historical art, literature, and media.
Entries
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As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead. Roger ...
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Marvels, wonders, and monstrosities: something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects.
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One of the most elaborate works of literary insult ever written.
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Moneymaking caricatures by a teenage Monet, before he turned to Impressionism.
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In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patie...
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"Tall-tale" or "exaggeration" postcards illustrating the bounties of California.
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A utopian novel where men are no longer necessary.
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Illustrations of Javanese *wayang kulit* puppets with vivid colour and gilding.
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Does the flâneur, that curiously modern figure who wanders metropolitan streets, have a political consciousness? For ...
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Unruly steeds from King Mu’s mythology, cavorting across a silk scroll.
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A bestselling 18th-century cookbook, containing the first recipe for curry in English.
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A wondrous illuminated manuscript, which gathers and illustrates the marvels of the world and beyond.
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Observations of “snow flowers” made by microscope in Edo-era Japan.
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Taking dictation, revising manuscripts, typing copies, literary amanuenses often labour for little compensation and e...
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A forgotten bridge between Spiritualism and UFO encounters.
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A WWII propaganda film narrated as an "auto"-biography
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Before the attention economy consumed our lives, “pursuit tests” devised by the US military coupled man to machine wi...
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Etchings of birds in a somewhat theatrical style.
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Slides from twenty years of lecturing about the workings of the universe and the fate of the soul.
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The memoirs of an aristocratic man revolutionised into an anarchist communist.