The Public Domain Review

Photographs of wild flowers taken by photographers from a Christian utopian community that settled in East Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century.

A 650-page philological foray into ancient sexuality, surprisingly light on STDs.

A “part-talkie” that offers a simple solution to modern urban isolation: love.

The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif’s evolution across history, discovering how — through times of disease, war, and economic inequality — printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation.

The only fully illustrated herbal from the incunabula period of German history.

Macrophotographs of a myriad array of creepy crawlies, captured with the help of a 20-foot long camera.

A 17th-century treatise on women’s right to education, written by an exceptional polyglot.

The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath — political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera — and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures.

An intriguing photograph taken during Thomas Eakins’ studies of animal locomotion.

A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.