And We Were Young is an upcoming animated documentary by Andy Smetanka about American involvement in one of the final battles of World War I (trailer). The documentary will feature first person accounts of the costly Meuse-Argonne offensive of 1918, and will be animated with paper cutouts and silhouettes on 8mm film. Smetanka is raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

Thanks to Richard for the tip.

Portraits by Florida-based artist Scott Scheidly are “a series of ‘fabulous’ depictions of tyrants, dictators and popes.” Each portrait is framed in hot pink, including one of Kim Jong-il donning heart-shaped glasses and another of Hitler sporting a pink and purple uniform (and more). Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco recently debuted the series at ArtPadSF fine art fair and states “Scheidly’s work casts some of history’s most notorious characters in a new light rife with suggestion and commentary on masculinity, power, and satire.”

via The Daily What

images via Spoke Art Gallery

This 1955 newsreel clip from British Pathé shows a demonstration flight of the Hiller Flying Platform, an experimental manned hover craft then in development by the US Army and Navy. The military ultimately ruled the platform impractical and it never entered service.

photo via The Smithsonian

The British Council has launched an online archive of 120 documentary films on British life that were created during the 1940s. The films were originally intended as cultural propaganda to counteract negative propaganda from Nazi Germany during World War II. The films are now available for viewing and downloading. The project is a collaboration between the British Council, the BFI National Film Archive, and Google.

via MetaFilter

photos via Retronaut & NYC Corners

photos via Retronaut & NYC Corners

photos via The New York Public Library & NYC Corners

NYC Corners is a blog of contemporary and historical photos of New York City street corners. Whenever possible, the blog’s editors present the photos as fascinating “then and now” historical comparisons.

via EV Grieve & Dennis Crowley

Earlier this year we wrote about The Lively Morgue, a New York Times photo archive Tumblr. Recently Tumblr sent Jessica Bennett and K. Ryan Jones to The Times newsroom archive (aka “the morgue”) in order to capture a rare behind-the-scenes look (video & article).

image via Nancy Sinatra blog

Nancy & Lee in Las Vegas is an hour-long Swedish documentary TV special that follows Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood both onstage and behind-the-scenes during their 1972 concerts at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. This often candid film was directed by Torbjörn Axelman and was produced by Sinatra’s late husband, Hugh Lambert. It also features scenes with Nancy’s mother, Nancy Barbato. As a longtime fan of both Sinatra and Hazlewood, I really appreciated this look at their sometimes less-than-glamourous time on a casino stage (and their jazzy live version of the song Jackson). It is available to purchase on DVD from The Video Beat.

According to the Nancy Sinatra blog, Sinatra performed in Las Vegas from 1969 to 1982. Billboard reviewed the Riviera Hotel show in February 1972:

“Gowned in a backless, silver pants outfit and banked in a magnificent stage set with white light she knows how to sell hard, man type songs to the cafe crowd. Opening with ‘Let Yourself Go,’ she goes immediatley into ‘Candy Man,’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine When He’s Gone,’ and a country arrangement of ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ which had heavy use of the steel guitar…[Lee Hazlewood's] duets with Miss Sinatra are solid and strong. The RCA recording team did their hits plus the new ‘Arkansas Coal.’”

Torbjörn Axelman also directed the 1970 TV special starring Hazlewood titled Cowboy in Sweden. Here’s a clip from that special that features Hazlewood’s song, The Night Before:

image via The Centre of the World

via Dangerous Minds

The Miami New Times Riptide blog is reporting that the Miami, Florida mansion where scenes from the 1972 porno flick Deep Throat were filmed is currently listed for sale. The home was built in 1961 and was owned by aristocrat Baron Joseph “Sepy” De Bicske Dobronyi before he passed away in 2010.

Miami New Times compares the film scenes with some images of the mansion today:

The film follows the plight of Linda Lovelace (playing a fictionalized version of herself), a sexually liberated woman who can’t quite reach the big O. For help she visits a doctor, and well, what do you know the doctor apparently keeps his office in one of the mansion’s cottages…

Linda then becomes some sort of sexual nurse and visits a patient in a wine cellar…

Here are some more interior images of the mansion:

via Habitat for Hermanity and Zillow Blog

images via Zillow and Super Seventies

Old Maps Online is a site that allows users to easily find digitized historical maps from libraries and other archival sources. The site’s search function is based on Google Maps—users can simply search for a location or region and relevant map results are listed. Old Maps Online is a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth in the UK and Klokan Technologies in Switzerland.

via ars technica

Map via David Rumsey Map Collection

“Beat School,” a 1961 news clip by British Pathé, depicts the Burgess Hill Boarding School, an unusually relaxed school in Britain that allowed students to wear whatever they pleased, dance to rock & roll, and even smoke on campus. The students look rather astonishingly like contemporary hipsters (of course it’s the actually other way around).

via Dangerous Minds

The TEA.Tanic is a stainless steel tea bag holder designed by Gordon Adler that is made to look like the Titanic sinking. Adler designed it for the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking. It is available to purchase from his site.

via Freshome

These snapshots of the residents of Cold War-era Prague were taken clandestinely by the Surveillance Directorate of Czechoslovakia’s secret police (StB) between 1969 and 1989. The photos were assembled by The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive for the 2009 exhibition and book, “Prague through the Lens of the Secret Police.” For more photos, see this gallery by Vice.

via PetaPixel & Popular Photography

The New York City Department of Records has launched an online gallery featuring 870,000 historical photos, maps, audio and motion picture recordings dating as far back as the 1880s. Included in the online gallery—a 1980s-era collection that includes a photo of every house and building in the city (collected originally for tax appraisal purposes).

via New York Post

photo by Eugene de Salignac/New York City Municipal Archives

Rev. Bob being accosted by The Normals in the MTV commercial for The Church of the SubGenius

In 1991, The Church of the SubGenius leader Rev. Ivan Stang was commissioned by MTV to create a commercial for their Art Breaks series. Stang both starred in and directed this awesome piece which featured music by DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh and art miniatures and masks by the late artist, St. Joe Riley. While the commercial is a delight to watch, the “making of” video is even better with all kinds of outtakes, storyboards and behind-the-scenes footage. Nearly 21 years later, its message is still relevant, although I doubt MTV would back such a project these days. Interestingly enough, MTV has brought back its Art Breaks series in a Tumblr blog but with all new works.

“Afronauts” by Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel is a fictional photo essay inspired by the true story of Zambian school teacher and eccentric Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who started an unofficial amateur space program in his home country in 1964, during the height of the Space Race. Here’s a short clip on Nkoloso’s program via British TV channel Sky1:

via Wired

Little Girl Giant

French street theatre company Royal de Luxe brought three giant marionettes to participate in Liverpool’s Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacular. The show was performed in the streets of Liverpool on April 20-22, 2012 and was part of the city’s centenary commemoration of the Titanic disaster. In 2009, the same puppets performed collectively in “La Géante du Titanic et le Scaphandrier” in Nantes, France.

Sea Odyssey is a magical tale of love, loss and reunion played out on a gigantic scale. It will take place in key city spaces, moving across North Liverpool and the city centre, wowing the hundreds of thousands of people who are expected to descend on the city over the three days.

photos by Claire Trish and sw77

The 1914 A.L.F.A. 40/60 HP Aerodinamica Prototype was a very early attempt at creating an aerodynamic automobile. Thanks to its teardrop shape, the Aerodinamica could attain a top speed of 86 mph from its 70 horsepower engine. The car was designed by Marco Ricotti of Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Castagna. It was based on the A.L.F.A. 40/60 HP, a road and race car from the company that would eventually become Alfa Romeo.

via Retronaut & Car Styling

photo 2 by John Lamm, all others via shorey.net

Things Don’t Seem Wonderful If You’ve Seen Them All Your Life was illustrated in 1912 by political cartoonist John T. McCutcheon and it’s as every bit true today as it was back then.

via Dan Shick and 100 Years Ago Today

Los Angeles Times blog, L.A. at Home, recently ran an article describing the background behind Mad Men character Don Draper’s swanky 1960s era Manhattan-based high-rise apartment and the origin of its vintage mid-century furnishings.

Apartment 17-B, right, set decorator Claudette Didul said, is “in a high-rise that feels like it was built in 1960 with a white-carpeted sunken living room and a fascinating fireplace and a Case Study-style kitchen with two pass through windows.”

It also sports walnut cabinetry with a built-in television set and one of those new-fangled-for-the-time push-button phones.

Didul said Draper’s love of sleek modern lines and high-tech gadgetry and manly appointments (leather lounge chair, countertop cocktail bar with a drum-shaped ice bucket) is contrasted with his new wife Megan’s youthful taste and love of color.

images via L.A. at Home

“John Cage Unbound, A Living Archive” is an online multimedia project about American composer and avant garde music pioneer John Cage. Hosted by the New York Public Library, the project invites musicians and other creatives to submit videos of their own interpretations of Cage’s work for addition to the online archive. Visitors to the site can view submitted videos as well as a portion of the library’s collection of Cage’s original notes and manuscripts.

We invite you to participate in the creation of a video archive documenting the musical work of one of the 20th century’s most significant composers. We want to inspire and engage you with John Cage’s unique vision of music and its role in the world. In doing so, we hope to advance our knowledge of Cage and his work by sparking a global conversation among musicians, artists, and creative thinkers.

Specialty history publishing company, The History Press, live-tweeted the Titanic tragedy in real time as if on board the ship itself to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of its sinking. They have also created an iPad app titled Titanic: Her Journey which “collates the knowledge of the world’s foremost Titanic experts in the most interactive way to date.”

via Clint Marsh

This stern view of the Titanic was taken as the ship came came to a stop having dropped anchor. The head and shoulders of a seaman can be seen above the rear funnel, which was in fact a ventilation shaft, he climbed up to get a grandstand view of Titanic’s arrival at Cobh.

On April 14, 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and on April 15, 1912 the “unsinkable” ship sank killing 1,523 passengers. Prior to its fateful voyage to New York City, the ship traveled from Southampton to Cobh (Queenstown) in Ireland. For that short trip, Father Francis Browne was gifted a first class ticket by his uncle, Robert Browne (Bishop of Coyne). An avid photographer, Fr. Browne snapped a series of photographs of the Titanic that give insight to life onboard and are an important part of its history. The entire image gallery can be found at Titanic Photographs and more of the history behind the photographs can be found at the Father Browne website. A commemorative book of digitally remastered photographs titled Father Browne’s Titanic Album: Centenary Edition is available to purchase at Messenger Publications. Yes, the Titanic tragedy was real and not just a movie.

Inside the Gymnasium
Mr. TW McCawley the physical educator poses at a rowing machine and Mr. William Parr, electrician who was travelling first class, is seated on some form of exercising machine, hold still for the duration of a time exposure. Both men were lost.

This interior view of the Titanic’s First Class reading and writing room conveys some idea of the opulence of the liner’s grand interiors

This man standing on the boat deck close to the gymnasium is believed to be Jacques Futrelle the American short story writer who was lost with the ship.

Father Francis Browne, 1939

via Isik Mater

photos by Fr. Francis Browne & Fr. Michael Garahy

As the 100 year anniversary of the Titanic disaster approaches, Twitter is abuzz with people who are just discovering Titanic was a real ship and not just a James Cameron movie.

via Gothamist & Keith Andrews

Alien: The Easter Edition by Will Tribble, an Easter themed tribute to Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction horror film Alien.

via io9

Wall Writers is an upcoming documentary about the graffiti pioneers of 1960s New York City and Philadelphia (trailer). The film is directed by Roger Gastman.

WALL WRITERS uncovers the origins of wall writing in New York City and Philadelphia in the late ‘ 60s and features interviews with writers such as New York’ s TAKI183, the first wall writer to garner mainstream media attention. TAKI, as well as Philadelphia’ s CORNBREAD, were paramount in making graffiti the phenomenon that it is today.

via Animal