How do we know if we’ve lived through a major shift toward greater equal­i­ty? Maybe it’s when his­to­ry text­books start telling dif­fer­ent sto­ries than the ones they’ve always told about heroes in knee breech­es, waist­coats, epaulets, top hats, and beards. Aside from the occa­sion­al his­tor­i­cal fig­ure in bon­net or bloomers, most texts real­ly have just told “his sto­ry.”

In the U.S., at least, stud­ies show that only 11% of the sto­ries in his­to­ry text­books are about women. Is this because 50% of the pop­u­la­tion only con­tributed to 11% per­cent of the country’s events? No, even the kids know—like the kids in the video above from a new app called Lessons in Her­sto­ry—his­to­ry most­ly fea­tures men because “a lot of it was writ­ten by men and was most­ly all about men.”

Text­book mak­ers, and the school boards who give them march­ing orders, may stick to their guns, so to speak, but anoth­er major shift could ren­der their dic­tates irrel­e­vant. Smart­phone and tablet tech­nol­o­gy has become so famil­iar to today’s kids that instead of turn­ing the pages, they “swipe, like, in the his­to­ry books,” as one of the young­sters puts it.

Stu­dents stuck with the old patri­ar­chal ped­a­go­gies can eas­i­ly sup­ple­ment, enhance, or sub­sti­tute their edu­ca­tion with new media. While there are some seri­ous down­sides to this phe­nom­e­non, giv­en a dis­tinct lack of qual­i­ty con­trol online, the inter­net has also opened up innu­mer­able oppor­tu­ni­ties for telling the sto­ries of women in his­to­ry.

Lessons in Her­sto­ry, built by an orga­ni­za­tion called Daugh­ters of the Evo­lu­tion, takes a unique approach. Instead of sup­plant­i­ng text­books, it adds to them in an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty smart­phone app (cur­rent­ly designed for ios devices) stu­dents can point at pic­tures of his­tor­i­cal dudes to pull up sto­ries about a notable women from the same time.

Grant­ed, some of these women, like Har­ri­et Tub­man and Saca­gawea, had already been grant­ed access to the lim­it­ed space allot­ted female fig­ures in grade school text­books. But a great many oth­er peo­ple in the app have not. Fea­tur­ing a diverse selec­tion of 75 her­stor­i­cal women, Lessons in Her­sto­ry is the prod­uct of ad agency Good­by Sil­ver­stein & Part­ners’ chief cre­ative offi­cer Mar­garet John­son, who launched it at this year’s SXSW.

The app has pret­ty lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion at the moment. It works with one text­book, A His­to­ry of US, Book 5: Lib­er­ty for All? 1820–1860, and with a hand­ful of his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs on its web­site. (Many of the women fea­tured made their mark after 1860.) But with plans to expand and with the back­ing of a large ad agency, who may or may not have their own designs in mar­ket­ing Lessons in Her­sto­ry, it promis­es to make women’s his­to­ry more acces­si­ble to stu­dents who already spend more time star­ing at screens than pages.

“There’s a say­ing,” writes Cara Cur­tis at The Next Web, “’you can’t be what you can’t see.’” Apps like Lessons in Her­sto­ry, along with a num­ber of influ­en­tial books and web­sites for young peo­ple that nar­rate the past through the lens of women, indige­nous peo­ple, African-Amer­i­cans, artists, activists, work­ing peo­ple, and so on, show kids that no mat­ter who they are or where they come from, peo­ple who looked like them have always made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

His­to­ry remem­bers, and will like­ly nev­er for­get, the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Leonar­do da Vin­ci. But what about the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Johannes de Fontana? Though he came along a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions before Leonar­do, Johannes de Fontana, also known as Gio­van­ni Fontana, seems to have had no less fer­tile an imag­i­na­tion. Where Leonar­do came up with every­thing from musi­cal instru­ments to hydraulic pumps to war machines to self-sup­port­ing bridges, Fontana’s inven­tions include “fire-breath­ing automa­tons, pul­ley-pow­ered angels, and the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing draw­ing of a mag­ic lantern device.”

Those words come from Port­land State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Ben­nett Gilbert, who takes a dive into Fontana’s note­book of “designs for a vari­ety of fan­tas­tic and often impos­si­ble inven­tions” at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Filled some time between the years 1415 and 1420, its 68 draw­ings meant to entice poten­tial patrons include plans for “mechan­i­cal camels for enter­tain­ing chil­dren, mys­te­ri­ous locks to guard trea­sure, flame-throw­ing con­trap­tions to ter­ror­ize the defend­ers of besieged cities, huge foun­tains, musi­cal instru­ments, actors’ masks, and many oth­er won­ders.”

It would seem that Fontana lacked the sense of prac­ti­cal­i­ty pos­sessed by his suc­ces­sor Leonar­do — and Leonar­do dreamed up not just a vari­ety of fly­ing machines but a mechan­i­cal knight. That may have to do with the era in which Fontana lived, “more than two hun­dred years before the dis­cov­er­ies of New­ton,” a time “of tran­si­tion from medieval knowl­edge of the world to that of the Renais­sance, which many now regard as the ori­gin of ear­ly mod­ern sci­ence.” And so his designs, many of them lib­er­al­ly dec­o­rat­ed with unearth­ly-look­ing crea­tures and bursts of flame, strike us today as at most half plau­si­ble and at least half fan­tas­ti­cal.

Fontana’s draw­ing style, too, reflects the state of human knowl­edge in the ear­ly fif­teenth cen­tu­ry: “The tow­ers and rock­ets, water and fire, noz­zles and pipes, pul­leys and ropes, gears and grap­ples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occu­pa­tion at the dawn of the Renais­sance fill Fontana’s sketch­book. His way of illus­trat­ing his ideas, how­ev­er, is dis­tinct­ly medieval, lack­ing per­spec­tive and using a lim­it­ed array of angles for dis­play­ing machine works.” Yet this makes Fontana’s note­book all the more fas­ci­nat­ing to 21st-cen­tu­ry eyes, and throws into con­trast some of his more plau­si­ble inven­tions, such as “a mag­ic lantern device, which trans­formed the light of fire into emo­tive dis­play.”

Will some bold schol­ar of the ear­ly Renais­sance one day argue that Fontana invent­ed motion pic­tures? But per­haps the man who designed “an awe-inspir­ing fire-illu­mi­nat­ed spec­ta­cle, most like­ly serv­ing as a pro­pa­gan­da machine, for use in war and in peace” would­n’t approve of a medi­um quite so ordi­nary. We might say that the most valu­able lega­cy of Johannes de Fontana, more so than any of his inven­tions them­selves, is the glimpse his note­book gives us into the the human imag­i­na­tion in his day, when fact and fan­ta­sy inter­min­gled as they will nev­er do again. And in the case of some tech­nolo­gies, we should prob­a­bly feel relieved that they won’t: Fontana’s “life sup­port sys­tem for patients under­go­ing grue­some surg­eries” may be fas­ci­nat­ing, but I can’t say I’d be eager to make use of it myself.

See his man­u­script online here.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates Strik­ing Posters of His Own Inven­tions

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

The 10 Com­mand­ments of Chindōgu, the Japan­ese Art of Cre­at­ing Unusu­al­ly Use­less Inven­tions

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.