public domain review
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Sexy, Scandalous Science
For centuries the study of flowers and the cultivation of gardens were deemed to be safe pursuits for genteel young ladies – providing they did not aspire to become professional botanists…Carl Linnaeus’s sexual system for the classification of plants, based…
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A Comic History of Rome
The Public Domain Review takes a look at The Comic History of Rome, a book that satirized Roman history as well as Victorian society.
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Neanderthals in 3D
The Public Domain Review examines “the masterpiece” that is Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a book published in 1911 that includes early 3D images.
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Europe’s First Taste of Chocolate
And what do we make of chocolate? Are you not afraid that it will burn your blood? Could it be that these miraculous effects mask some kind of inferno [in the body]? The Public Domain Review examines 17th century texts…
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The Future of Old Art
The Public Domain Review previews literature and art that will be entering the public domain in 2015, including work from Flannery O’Connor and Ian Fleming.
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The Human Monster
[Julia seemed like] a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, someone who had been taught a few artistic turns, like a trained animal. [But] for the few who knew her better, she was a…
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Discovering a Smart Poet
Smart was known, with his “disturbed mental state,” for his loud, feverish, constant praying, and you can read some of that catatonia in Jubilate, with its litany of “for”s and its incantatory quality. Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring…
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An Illustration of Madness
The Public Domain Review takes a look at John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, a book that is widely believed to be the first full account of paranoid schizophrenia.
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The Influence of Being Under the Influence
For the Public Domain Review, Richard Millington explores the influence of cocaine on the poetry of Georg Trakl and compares it to the ways other artists’ addictions have shown up in their work.
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Lord Byron was the Original Vampire
On the same night that Mary Shelley released Frankenstein’s monster, John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, wrote “The Vampyre,” the first fully realized English vampire story. The Public Domain Review takes a look at how Byron served as the model…
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The Ghost and the Ghost Writer
Patience Worth was the author of several critically-acclaimed novels and poems, often published in journals and anthologies alongside canonical authors like Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was also a ghost. The Public Domain Review tells the strange tale of Patience…
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a Gas
In the early 1800s, anyone who was anyone in British high society was part of a hot new trend: inhaling laughing gas. The Public Domain Review takes a look at the nitrous oxide fad and some of its more prominent…