Illustration From: Mary Bean Or The Mysterious Murder by Miss J.A.B.,Cincinnati: H.M. Rulison, 1852.Saco, Maine 1850: The partially-clad body of a beautiful, young woman is found, bound to a board, floating in a stream. An immediate scandal ensues when the local police cannot identify the body. Newspaper reports take on an alarmist tone: Where is the girl's family? Why is she alone and far from home? Who has brought about her untimely death, and why? A new online exhibit hosted by Biddeford, Maine's McArthur Public Library reveals the history of this murder case so sensational it inspired three books in...
Pancho Villa Rides Again Thanks To Mexican Archives.
General Pancho Villa in Mexico City in 1914.(Courtesy of Casasola Archives.)"Riding with Pancho Villa," a new photography exhibit, has just opened in Abilene, Texas, celebrating the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, and held in conjunction with events honoring the founding of the Republic of Texas (1836-46).Hosting the events is Frontier Texas!, a nearly seven-acre Disneyland-meets-the-Wild-West historical theme park of sorts, designed to revive "the Old West with the help of state-of-the-art technology." A museum in which visitors can get up close and personal, virtually anyway, with the "people who played out their lives on the Texas frontier." Frontier Texas's "cutting-edge...
Medical Library’s Contagious Exhibit Sure To Go Viral
She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea.U.S. Public Health Service,United States, 1940s.Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: "Christian."A sultry, heavily-made-up woman squints provocatively, while smoking a cigarette. WWII posters usually addressed men, and fingered promiscuous women as the source of contagion.They are an unholy alliance of science, art, medicine, politics, history, advertising, and propaganda. Dramatic images use visual shorthand to convey danger, disease, and death. Shadows, crowds, skeletons, vermin, blob-like micro-organisms, and sinister sick-o's threaten innocent men, women, and children. But these aren't posters for grindhouse horror flicks from the fabulous 50's. They're government issue placards...
Purdue Library Celebrates Wind Beneath Earhart’s Wings
George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart, circa 1935. (All photos courtesy of Purdue University libraries.)The modern "manufacturing" of celebrities involves finding a camera-friendly face and figure with a charismatic personality, plus an indefinable personal magnetism, and using the power of mass media to create an overnight sensation. Result? A legion of people famous for being famous. Accomplishment is no longer a prerequisite for stardom: savvy promotion trumps talent. But a new exhibit at Purdue University's Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center proves this phenomenon existed far earlier than the advent of "reality T.V." America's most famous female...
New Swiss Library Will Run Like Clockwork
A Bird's Eye View Of The Rolex Learning Center.(All Images Courtesy Of SANAA.)Viewed from above it looks like a flat, wavy rectangle full of randomly placed holes-- and it's Swiss. A cheesy description, perhaps, but one that fits a glorious modernist library which opened on February 22, 2010 in the city of Lausanne. The Japanese architectural firm known as SANAA has created a single-story, slice-like structure so sublimely constructed it seems to float above the ground.Lausanne's Floating Library.The Rolex Learning Center for the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a single fluid space that undulates like free-flowing waves over...