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A great collection of medieval sources! Some links broken, but most work.

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A great collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature with teacher resources for using in the classroom! You might need a state library membership (but if that’s so, its free to get one and it’s helpful to have anyway!!)

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When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar,” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.” It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book “The Women’s History of the World” (recently republished as “Who Cooked the Last Supper?”) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.

Sandi Toksvig, ‘Top 10 unsung heroines’  (via herdirtylittleheart)

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National Library of Australia has heaps of great digital resources for the secondary history curriculum.

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It’s been a while since we checked in on how the Renaissance is doing with its ocean mysteries, so here is a marine biology update circa 1550.

Seals come in two forms:

Buff

& Triangular

Walruses are horrifying

But whales are worse

Fish can have human faces

but not always where you’d expect

As for the rest

… it’s probably better left alone.

[All images except chest face fish from Historiae animalium liber IV : De piscium & aquatilium animantium natura. Chest face fish from The noble lyfe & natures of man of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes yt be moste knowen]

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Well, I have a new favourite poet.

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A Swedish woman hitting a neo-Nazi protester with her handbag. The woman was reportedly a concentration camp survivor. [1985]

Volunteers learn how to fight fires at Pearl Harbor [c. 1941 - 1945]

Maud Wagner, the first well-known female tattoo artist in the U.S. [1907]

A 106-year old Armenian woman protecting her home with an AK-47. [1990]

Komako Kimura, a prominent Japanese suffragist at a march in New York. [October 23, 1917]

Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer of the Apollo Project, standing next to the code she wrote by hand that was used to take humanity to the moon. [1969]

Erika, a 15-year-old Hungarian fighter who fought for freedom against the Soviet Union. [October 1956]

Sarla Thakral, 21 years old, the first Indian woman to earn a pilot license. [1936]

Voting activist Annie Lumpkins at the Little Rock city jail. [1961]   (freakin’ immaculate)

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“The Undesirable Immigrant who knew all the languages” -- Percy Learson [1926]

Under the Colonial Immigration Restriction Act (also known as the White Australia Policy), any immigrant hoping to migrate to Australia had to pass a “dictation test of fifty words in any European language” [my italics].

This meant that any “undesirables” (a majority of which were non-European) who could speak English well could be forced to take the test in a different language - like French or German. As the cartoon remarks, an “undesirable” would have to know all the languages to be confident in getting passage to Australia.

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From the personal collection of Frank Hurley [1917-18]

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For those studying ancient languages (like myself), resources can seem pretty scarce, so I found this awesome website that goes through the basics such as alphabets, pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence structure, forms of the language (such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns etc.) and lessons with writers in the ancient language (like Ceasar, Tacitus, Livy, Virgil, Homer, Hesiod, Plato and so on) so your totally immersed.

It covers languages such as: Albanian Armenian Baltic Old English Old French Gothic Greek (Classical) Greek (New Testament) Hittite Old Iranian Old Irish Latin Old Norse Old Russian Vedic Sanskrit Old Slavonic Tocharian

and all of these are free

You can access this site Here

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15+ Rare Photos Of Victorians Proving They Weren’t As Serious As You Thought

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Wine selling advertisement and prices, Ancient Roman Herculaneum, Italy

via Wikipedia