Oct 26, 2008

Weak Endnotes

by Cliopatria

Margaret Soltan's"News from Sweden," University Diaries, 24 October, reports that the country's King Karl XIII illustrated his diaries with drawings of – ah – penises. In comments, in time for Halloween, Dave Stone points to a photograph of Karl XII's exhumed body, showing"quite vividly" what an 18th century .50 caliber bullet did to the man's skull.

Holland's Nationaal Archief, the largest public archive in the Netherlands, has 14 million images in its collections. Nearly 400 of them, illustrating pre-World War II working conditions, are now on Flickr. Paris en images offers 25,000 historical photographs of the city. Thanks to AHA Today and Manan Ahmed for the tips.

Manan's"Gandhi in Western Academy," Chapati Mystery, 23 October, draws on Vinay Lal's"The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate," Economic & Political Weekly, 4 October, to consider our limited engagement with the Mahatma.

Robert Draper,"The Making (and Remaking) of McCain," NYT, 26 October, is a report from the inside of the McCain presidential campaign – the kind that isn't supposed to appear until after it's all over, if at all.

More Comments:

Ben W. Brumfield - 10/27/2008

I've spent part of last week honing my Dutch by translating the captions on the Nationaal Archief's photos. Much remains to be done -- most of the WWII photos are translated into English, many into German, and some into French or Portugese, but very few of those photos relating to workplace inspections have been translated.

The photos themselves are of a disappointingly low resolution, but the NA is said to be working on this.

That said, the comments to the WWII photos are excellent. Many of the German propaganda photos have been researched by Flickr users, so we discover that the tanks driven by the Wermacht soldiers pictured cheerfully helping French farmers plough are actually captured Renaults.