Yet another fine source of digitized medieval content is the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. This site was designed to enable users to find fully digitized manuscripts currently available on the web.
Found via World History Blog. Image from Flickr user marctonysmith.
High in the Alps near the border between Italy and Switzerland is the Great St. Bernard Pass, used by humans to cross the mountain range since the Bronze Age. As they headed north to conquer somebody or other, the Romans erected a temple to Jupiter there. In 1049, Bernard of Menthon (canonized St. Bernard in 1923) built a hospice on top of the temple ruins as a shelter for travelers.
Found on mental_floss. Image from Flickr user miragelin.
I hope you all enjoy this first video podcast. I know the volume is low, I’m looking into how to correct that for the next episode, please leave any suggestions in the comments section.
More information:
The Other Boleyn Girl
Henry VIII of England – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
The Wives of Henry VIII
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
He had a rough life during the Ice Age, walking around with a couple of broken ribs and a possibly cancerous lesion on his jaw before dying at a young age. Now, at least 10,000 years later, visitors in Los Angeles, California, can see the remains of “Zed,” a Columbian mammoth whose nearly intact skeleton is part of what is being described as a key find by archaeologists at Los Angeles’ George C. Page Museum.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society is offering an online look at the 28 May 1776 document by which John Hoar of Lincoln emancipated his enslaved worker Cuff. (This article is in the N.E.G.H.S. collection, but was discussed at a Massachusetts Historical Society meeting in 1894. Hmmm.) In the transcription, “the P. Cuff” and “his P. master” should be “the s[ai]d. Cuff” and “his s[ai]d. master.”
Found on Boston 1775. Image from flickr user tbridge.
On February 20, 1792, the President signed into law the Postal Service Act, which created the United States Post Office Department. But the Postal Service Act wasn’t the creation of a new agency as much as it was the “officialization” of an existing one, so let’s step back to just before the Revolution got started…to 1775.
Found on Today’s History Lesson. Image from Flickr user Gregalicious.
Google is officially denying widespread Internet rumors that its Google Earth software located the mythical sunken city of Atlantis off the coast of Africa. Either that, or Google is totally trying to hide something. Since I always appreciate a nice juicy conspiracy theory, I’m going to go with the latter.
Found on C|Net. Flickr image from user Trevor Haldenby.
William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy.
Found via CNN. Flickr image from user Tony the Misfit.
Here is a great blog post from another Orange County blogger Chris Jespen of OC History Roundup.
The Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction at Disneyland began at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. Disney created the show as the centerpiece of the State of Illinois Pavilion. The lifelike “audio-animatronic” figure was groundbreaking technology at the time, and paved the way for many future attractions like Pirates of the Carribean. Lincoln’s face was sculpted by Imagineer Blaine Gibson, who based it on a life mask made of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The photo below shows Gibson and Walt Disney and looking at a copy of the life mask next to Gibson’s sculpt.
Image from flickr user caniswolfie.
As announced in this BBC article the Queen has launched a new website containing videos from her youtube channel and much more.