theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Via kottke.org, Robert H. Zakon’s Hobbes’ Internet Timeline 1957-2004, and the gopher archive of the 1994 version. From the entries for 1993:
Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634%
annual growth rate of service traffic. Gopher’s growth is 997%.
Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stacey Chase visits Sabbathday Lake village in southern Maine, home to the last four surviving members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, otherwise known as the Shakers.
“I don’t know the mind of God,” [Brother Arnold] Hadd says. “However, I do believe that if we live in faith—as we do—that, as we have been called and chosen, there will always be others who will also be called and chosen to this life.”
An archive of material on the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, part of the compendious store of records at Northwestern University’s Chicago Historical Homicide Project. The project began with
…the discovery of the availability of a rich log of more than 11,000 homicides maintained consistently and without interruption by the Chicago Police Department over the course of 60 years, from 1870 to 1930.
Xeni Jardin points to an AP wire service story by Sonja Barisic about the exoneration of Grace Sherwood. Sherwood, a midwife, was convicted 300 years ago of being a witch, the only one found so in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
She was “tried by water:” bound hand to foot and dumped in the Lynnhaven River. She floated, and hence was found guilty.
The so-called “Witch of Pungo” was not executed, however, but she was jailed for perhaps eight years. Gov. Timothy Kaine offered the pardon.
“With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice,” Kaine wrote. “We also can celebrate the fact that a woman’s equality is constitutionally protected today, and women have the freedom to pursue their hopes and dreams.”