During the summer and early fall of 2003 The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library featured the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists - A Bicentennial Celebration shown in the Philip Sills Exhibit Hall of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, The Ohio State University Libraries, and The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.

Ohio has remarkable place in the history of American cartooning. The number of well-known cartoonists who were born, educated and/or worked in the state is amazing. It was fitting during this bicentennial year to honor our state’s extraordinary legacy with this exhibition.

The digital version of the exhibition Ohio Cartoonists: A Bicentennial Celebration highlights the accomplishments of six of the state's most notable late nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper and magazine cartoonists.

The on-line version presents the works of only six cartoonists: Edwina Dumm, Billy Ireland, Winsor McCay, Charles Nelan, Frederick Burr Opper and Richard Outcault. However, the images of comics and cartoons worth a visit.

Posted by Bibi on January 24, 2008 08:16 PM in Comics, History ||

Flickr Blog announced The Commons: a pilot project created in partnership with The Library of Congress.The Library team contributed choosing around 1500 photos from their most popular collections to share on Flickr. The result is presented in two incredible photosets: 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It's called "no known copyright restrictions." Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

You can help the project describing the photographs, adding tags and comments in the The Library of Congress's collection on Flickr. All you need is being a Flickr member, and you can do it for free.

Related posts:
Bound for Glory
America's Library
The great Houdini
Creative Americans
Panoramic Photographs
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii
Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American

Posted by Bibi on January 17, 2008 08:24 PM in Flickr, History, Photography, Photography, Vintage ||

Morning Sun: a film and a website about Cultural Revolution. A very interesting site with full of information of the Cultural Revolution and its changes in the Chinese culture, with articles, photographs, posters, paintings, artwork, artifacts, audio, badges, videos, suggestions of links and books.

A range of techniques and perspectives are used in the Morning Sun website to reflect on the origins and history of the Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976). We approach the period not from a simplistic linear perspective, but from a panoptic one, encompassing a broad overview while allowing the user to focus in on individual histories, narratives and events that reveal the complex contradictory forces that led to an era of unrivalled revolutionary fervor and political turmoil.

Related posts:
Chinese Pamphlets
Chinese Pop Posters
Chinese Public Health Posters
Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages
Vintage Chinese Propaganda Posters

Posted by Bibi on September 19, 2007 03:28 PM in Culture, History, Politics, Politics, Posters ||

The on-line exhibition from the Bibliotèque nationale de France Comics Before Comics (La BD avant la BD) presents precious panorama of the comics beginning. The visual travel begins with the ancient illustrated bibles made for Kings and the aristocracy's books, inquires about its style origins, it shows the story of narrative, the page layout procedures and it ends with the use of sound in images - dialogues and onomatopoeia.

The exhibition gives a short vision of the comics pre-history, using great examples, like the Bible of Stephen Harding, Danse macabre, Cantigas de santa Maria, Histoire de la fondation de l'ordre cartusien and Little Sammy Sneeze by Winsor Mac Cay, among the several other examples. For a fast visual panorama try iconography page.

Posted by Bibi on March 30, 2007 07:47 PM in Books, Comics, History ||

A fabulous exhibition: Women of Our Time - photographs of some of twentieth-century America's famous and influential women. Even without big pictures, the site is very interesting covering those influential women of many different areas: photographers, writers, actresses, poets, athletes, designers, civil rights activists, singers, reformers, journalists, dancers and the aviator Amelia Earhart. There are brif biographies with the portraits, an audio explanation from the exhibition's curator and very "documentary" about the evolution of photographic portrait.

Some other women portrayed in this exhibition: Rosa Parks, Althea Gibson, Jeannette Rankin, Josephine Baker, Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Ella Fitzgerald and Margaret Sanger.

Posted by Bibi on March 8, 2007 05:01 PM in Culture, History, Photography, Photography ||

I would like to congratulate all the women for our International Women's Day. I won't write any manifesto or any protest about the injuries that we are still suffering, all the prejudice and violence that keep happening against us. I will do something I do much better to celebrate this important day: blog links about it.

- American Women!: A Celebration of Our History. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum's exhibit to celebrate 106 female personalities have shaped our American experience

- A Petal from the Rose: Illustrations by Elizabeth Shippen Green. It's the first exhibition in decades to focus solely on Green's art, and this and the accompanying essay highlight distinctive features of her illustrations and working methods.

- By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920. A pretty nice collection of 38 pictures including portraits related to the campaign for woman suffrage in the United States. Also featured are photographs of suffrage parades, picketing suffragists, and an anti-suffrage display, as well as cartoons commenting on the movement - all evoking the visible and visual way in which the debate over women's suffrage was carried out.

- Classic Feminist Writings: the on-line archive contains classic feminist writings that helped define Second Wave feminism. (via Plep)

- Humor's Edge: Cartoons by Ann Telnaes. This exhibition celebrates Ann Telnaes's generous gift to the Library of Congress of eighty-one original drawings that represent the range of themes that engage this gifted artist who has recently emerged as a leader in American editorial cartooning.

- IdeaFixa, a Brazilian art e-magazine, homages the women's day in its fifth issue with the theme "woman". Highlights to the illustrations by Jonathan Weiner, the Jorge Bispo's portraits of men in wedding dresses, the collages by Kareem Risz and the social critic of Lauren Greenfield's pictures. In Portuguese and English, with NSFW images.

- International Women's Day 2007 site: information about IWD events in many countries, news and pictures.

- Pages from Her Story: diaries, journals, memoirs, reminiscences, letters, speeches and interviews of American women divided in nine historical eras.

- Nine nice posters of Women's day at the Museum of Russian Posters.

- Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture's Special Collection Library acquires, preserves and makes available to a large population of researchers published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present.

- The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress. The papers span the years 1898 to 1977, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1948, three years before Arendt’s naturalization as an American citizen. The collection is organized in the following series: Family Papers, Correspondence, Adolf Eichmann File, Subject File, Speeches and Writings File, Clippings, Addition I, Addition II, and Addition III.

- The Water-Babies: Illustrations by Jesse Willcox Smith. Her works evoking the innocence of youth and demonstrating the artistry of illustrated books are among the Library's great graphic treasures.

- The Zora Neale Hurston Plays present a selection of ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist.

- United Nations' special site: International Women's Day 2007, which theme is "Ending Impunity for Violence against Women and Girls".

- Women's History Month: The Library of Congress recognizes the wisdom and tenacity of women throughout U.S. history, highlighting the 2007 theme, "Generations of Women Moving History Forward." It isn't new that the LoC has an impressive archive, but it's always great when they point to many of the hidden treasures of the site. Explore the sessions of audio and video, images (pictures and illustrations) and the collections. Visit also the National Women's History Project.

Posted by Bibi on March 8, 2007 04:19 PM in Culture, Events, History, Illustration, Photography, Photography, Posters ||

For all of you that celebrate... a happy Valentine's Day. I won't celebrate, but that isn't an excuse to not blog about it - it never was. And that's why I made a selection of links to all the romantic souls that read this blog, or that are just searching for pretty Valentine's day images.

- A Sampler of things with happy Valentine's day through his posts: Valentines Day Card, More Valentines Wishes, Vintage Valentines and Happy Valentines Day.

- Craftbits have a good list of Valentines Day Crafts: 20 Valentine's cards ideas, crochet hearts, Valentines Day survival kit, jar of hugs & kisses, and much more.

- CRAFT blog has a Valentine's Day Card Contest and Inspirational Links. If you want to join in you've got until this Friday at 5pm PST to get your entries in for the "Recycle Your Heart" CRAFT Valentine's Day Card Contest. Made you craft including some sort of recycled goods in your card, and submit it at The CRAFT Pool.

- Google's Valentine's day logo of this year looks yummy - Official Google Blog explains the logo. Melted chocolate just could be better with ice-cream! Anyway, the previous Valentine's Google logos: 2005, 2004, 2003, 2001 - and a Heart, 2000 - and that Heart.

- Love in the stacks is a nice post of the blog of the Digital Library Services from The University of Iowa Libraries pointing to highlights of their Valentine's day collection.

- Many Faces of Valentine's Day: Love and romance through the ages, presented by the Virtual Museum of Canada. An excellent on-line exhibition with many images of vintage Valentine's cards, images and ephemera.

- Send some love with fd's Flickr Toys, creating a a customized Valentine's day card from you to your contacts. I did one for the last valentine's day.

- The Firefox's maniacs have a very coloured card full of hearts to send from Spread Firefox.

- The Woodland Park Zoo offers four Valentine's Day Greeting E-Card with pretty pictures of animals.

- WikiHow explains How to Make Valentine's Day More Meaningful and How to French Kiss. What? Who needs to learn how to kiss? Eleven-year-old teenagers?

- Will it Blend? shows what you can do with annoying Valentine gift. Actually they said to not try this at home: too bad.

- YouTube also celebrates the Valentine's day with Dump Cupid video cards. Strange stuff.

And to those are so lovely as I am, a nice Wikipedia article about St. Valentine's Day massacre.

More about Valentine's day: Flying Pig, Zombie Valentine, Recipes to Valentines' Day, The Comic Valentine of mid-Victorian England, How-to Fold Paper Roses, A Flowering of Affection, For your Valentines' day, Valentines Book of Styles: a better use for furniture and Valentine's Day.

Posted by Bibi on February 14, 2007 05:06 PM in Craft, Culture, Events, History, Video, Vintage ||

Women Physicians: 1850s - 1970s. This interesting collection contains thousands of visual registries divided in five areas: the early years of the college; student life, academic life and student culture; racial and ethnic diversity among women physicians; missionary and public health work, at home and abroad; and medical women in the military. (via Plep)

This collection consists of correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, college records, images, diaries, publications and ephemera documenting the history of women physicians beginning with the first medical school for women, Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP). Founded in 1850, WMCP trained thousands of women physicians who practiced in all parts of the world, and provided rare opportunities for women to teach, practice, perform research and manage a medical school. WMCP was also a long time refuge for women students and faculty who faced quotas and discrimination elsewhere.

Posted by Bibi on February 11, 2007 04:08 AM in History, Science, Science ||

There was a time when Valentine's cards were much more fun: they had humour and caricatures.It wasn't like today, that we just find those super sweet cards, full of nauseating cheesiness with enough sugar to attract a whole beehive. The Scrap Album has a precious collection with few of those old cards: The Comic Valentine of mid-Victorian England: A collection of curious Valentines.

In mid-Victorian England the custom of sending daintily printed valentines, overflowing with hearts, cupids and poetical posies was generally understood to consist of an exchange of missives between special loving friends.

Yet beneath the sweet exterior and tender words of these lace-paper beauties lurked something far more sinister - the comic valentine !

These scurrilous printed sheets, entered into the humour of the common and middles classes, fun and mischief were their elements.

In reality they were masterpieces of the grotesque, venomous in humour, spiteful and rude, expressing anything but love.

Don't worry, if you prefer a classic romantic cardtake a look at Saint Valentine's little tokens of Love, a collection of Lace-Paper Valentines. The Victorian valentine is a dainty creation of lace paper, pretty flowers and sweet scents. They were perfectly original and won admiration from all the fair to whom they were presented.

More vintage Valentines' cards: For your Valentines' day and A Flowering of Affection.

Posted by Bibi on February 9, 2007 02:04 PM in Culture, History ||

Illuminating the Renaissance The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe.

Featuring more than 130 works of art, this exhibition focuses on the finest and most ambitiously illuminated books produced in Flanders (parts of present day Belgium and France) between 1470 and 1560. During this period, illuminators radically transformed the appearance of the illustrated page, introducing the mastery of light, texture, and space achieved by the finest panel painters of the day.

The virtual exhibition shows only 19 of those work, that can be zoomed and explored. Visit also The Making of a Medieval Book and Picturing the Natural World from the Getty Museum.

More illuminations: Bestiaire du Moyen Âge, Enluminures : base de données, The Medieval Bestiary, The illuminated Middle Ages, Books of Hours, Bibi's box: The Aberdeen Bestiary and Gode Cookery.

Posted by Bibi on February 1, 2007 12:02 PM in Books, History, Painting ||

Valentine's day is coming, so it's better I start posting something about it. And I found something nice about it: A Flowering of Affection: A Victorian Valentine Cards at the Lilly Library. A selection of nineteenth century Valentine cards, from the sentimental to the comic. The history of Valentine's cards, images of cards and more images of fancy cards for girls. I hope this starts to inspire you.

Valentine's Day is a holiday with a long history. Though it bears a saint's name, its origins seem more firmly rooted in pagan celebrations of the beginning of spring than in the history of its martyred namesakes. Valentine's Day traditions are wide-ranging, but have long involved the exchange of some love token or small gift with one's valentine. In 18th century England and North America, these exchanges often took the form of hand-made valentine cards. By the 19th century, these traditions expanded. Home-made cards were widely replaced by commercially produced valentine cards, and the cards were sent not only to one special valentine, but often to a wider circle of friends and relations.

Related post: The Scrap Album

Posted by Bibi on January 31, 2007 11:10 AM in History, Vintage ||

From the collection of the New York Public Library, Russia and Eastern Europe in Rare Photographs, 1860- 1945. A huge collection with thousands of images, photos and political cartoons, in more than 150 albums. Many were originally part of Romanov palace libraries nationalized by the Soviet government and sold abroad for hard currency.

Subjects include Russian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and ecclesiastical art; views of cities, as well as small provincial towns; secular architecture; tsarist- and Soviet-era political exiles; and the diverse peoples of the Russian Empire. A number of albums include portraits of the Tsar or the imperial family; state occasions, military maneuvers, and relaxation at the imperial hunting lodge are all depicted. Represented as well are military operations, particularly during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Russian Revolutionary-era photos are extensive, ranging from the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution, to the Stalinist period.

Posted by Bibi on January 30, 2007 12:25 PM in History, Photography, Photography ||

Political Cartoons of the Lilly Library: America in Caricature 1765 - 1865. The caricatures depict times of turbulence in American history and range in date from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 and to the presidential elections of 1860 and 1864 which brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House. Few images, but still an interesting place to visit for its historical content.

Posted by Bibi on January 29, 2007 11:54 PM in Comics, History ||

The fabulous collection of American Social Hygiene Posters (ca. 1910-1970) from the University of Minnesota has everything girls and boys need to know for a healthy sexual life (or maybe not):

The social hygiene movement of the early twentieth century combined moral indignation and public health methods in an attempt to combat prostitution and venereal disease. Especially during the two world wars, civilian and military authorities produced many posters to educate armed forces personnel on how to remain disease-free and “fit to fight.” The U.S. Public Health Service and the American Social Hygiene Association prepared elaborate poster displays during the 1920s as part of a campaign to eradicate what we now call sexually transmitted diseases.

Other way to browse the collection with 212 posters is using the search. One other preciosity displayed in the collection this poster:

"Pick-up" acquaintances often take girls autoriding, to cafés, and to theatres with the intention of leading them into sex relations. Disease or child-birth may follow.

Avoid the man who tries to take liberties with you. He is selfishly thoughtless and inconsiderate of you.

Believe no one who says it is necessary to indulge sex desire.

Know the men you associate with

Don't forget to read What sex brings to the girl and What sex brings to the boy. (via coisas do arco da velha)

Posted by Bibi on January 29, 2007 06:29 PM in History, Posters, Vintage ||

OISR.ORG Poster Exhibition: Images of Japanese Labor and Social Movement in the Post-1945 Japan, is a great on-line exhibition by the Ohara Institute for Social Research. Hundreds of vintage posters of confederations, industry federations and enterprise unions, Mayday and youths, women's movements.

Ohara Institute for Social Research owns about 1400 posters of labor and social movements in the post-1945 period. Many of the posters are those in the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s when labor unions, legalized for the first time in 1945, engaged in intense struggles with employers and the government in order to win better wages and working conditions.

(via Plep)

Posted by Bibi on January 27, 2007 01:46 AM in History, Posters ||

I don't know about you, but bestiaries always amuse me. It's incredible see how the imagination of artists work, registering the images of animals very known of us and imaginary creature very diffuse in the Medieval age through manuscripts as real animals. The exhibition Bestiaire du Moyen Âge (Medieval Bestiary) has a fabulous collection of bestiary images in medieval illumination.

Through the illuminations, this virtual exhibition tells the story of bestiary, the first of them, the importance of those images to illustrated books, to the science and human knowledge in epochs where the distances kept it limited. The second part can be even more interesting, with bestiary's interpretation. The French version has extra parts with details of manuscripts. the animals symbology, demons and the satiric books with animals.

More beasts and illuminations: Enluminures : base de données, The Medieval Bestiary, The Aberdeen Bestiary, Books of Hours, The illuminated Middle Ages, The Fantastic in Art and Fiction and Medieval Macabre.

Posted by Bibi on January 22, 2007 05:26 PM in Animals, History, Illustration ||

American Airpower Heritage Museum's Save the Girls is a project to preserve, restore and display the world's largest collection of original World War II aircraft nose art. Pin-ups paintings on airplanes: 33 original nose art panels that represent the artistic expressions of young men at war BTW, follow the parenting advice and don't open the site at work too. (via blog aeiou)

Posted by Bibi on January 18, 2007 10:23 PM in History, Pin-ups, Vintage ||

The Guardian Unlimited Do not adjust your screen talks about the excellent exhibition Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 from Library of Congress.

Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II.

The on-line exhibition shows 70 pictures of that epoch and the Guardian selected 12 of them to make a slideshow.

Posted by Bibi on January 9, 2007 04:55 PM in History, Photography, Photography ||

A fabulous collection: Canadian War Poster Collection - The holdings of the Print Collection in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division include some 250 Canadian posters from the two World Wars.

During the First World War, the imagery of Canada's posters was, both thematically and graphically, similar to that of British war posters.This visual affinity was partly due to the imperial and constitutional ties between Canada and Britain.In addition, Canada targeted posters at specific ethnic groups. There were specially designed posters for French Canadians, Irish-Canadians and Canadians of Scottish descent. The bulk of the posters encouraged men to enlist and the public to buy Victory Bonds.
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In the Second World War, Canadian posters reflected the fact that Canada was not under attack by an aggressor on its own turf. Whereas some countries' war posters portrayed violence in graphic detail, Canada's posters generally avoided such direct images. While war posters again encouraged enlistment and financial support of the war effort, advancements in communication made appeals for discretion and secrecy staple messages of many Second World War posters. Another frequent theme was the encouragement of workers to increase productivity.

Posted by Bibi on June 26, 2006 07:34 PM in History, Posters ||

Are you searching for new recipes? Try Books for Cooks! Book images, information, history and, of course, recipes, from the Medieval food until the 1900s food.

This unique collection of cookery books will transport you back in time. It will take you to medieval banqueting tables laden with peacocks and pastry ships; to the medicine cabinets of noblewomen; and to royal picnics in the jungle. It will show you how the poor were encouraged to re-use coffee grounds in Victorian London, and how a rationed population attempted to stay healthy during World War 2. You will find recipes for puddings and roasts, for beauty treatments and bed bug repellents, for pies made with live birds and frogs, and for dishes spiced with ingredients as valuable as jewels.

Related post: Gode Cookery.

Posted by Bibi on June 14, 2006 04:20 PM in Books, Food, Food, History ||