Back during the 1920s, Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film, shot The Open Road, “a series of ten-minute travelogues of Britain,” which were meant “to be shown before the main feature in cinema programmes,” according to the British Film Institute.

Everyone on the internet knows the bitter disappointment of clicking on lists that sound more interesting than they turn out to be, just as enthusiasts of American history have grown weary of hearing claims about what has or hasn’t “changed America.

What would a modern Marie Antoinette look like? Her hair would hang down; her once crooked teeth would be straightened; she’d continue to wear designer clothes; and, yes, she’d sadly have some surgical enhancements too. A far cry from how the more stately Queen Elizabeth I might look today.

In 1941, England found itself in an all-out-war with Nazi Germany. It had sustained severe damage when the Nazis unleashed the Blitz on 16 English cities between September 1940 and May 1941.

When archivist Stacey Chandler was combing through one of the “Massachusetts” files recently at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, she stumbled on something unexpected: a letter to Kennedy from an obscure writer named Kurt Vonnegut, volunteering his services on Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

From the The Finnish Defence Forces comes the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, a collection of 160,000 photographs taken during World War II when Finland fought to free itself from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.

In the early ’90s, the so-called “Iron Archives” of Russian political documents from the Cold War era opened up to historians, shedding light on the earliest days of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin’s diplomatic alliance.
But not all of the Russian documents were declassified at that time.

In the past, we’ve brought you sound recordings from the 19th century — recordings that recapture the long lost voices of figures likes Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Gladstone, Tchaikovsky, and Thomas Edison.

Like so many daily comestibles we completely take for granted—salt, sugar, and (far fewer of us) tobacco—coffee has a long and often brutal history. And like many of these substances, it tends to be addictive. But coffee has also inspired a longstanding social tradition that shows no signs of ever going out of fashion.