The Public Domain Review

“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity.

A collage and poetry collaboration by two members of a storied ménage à trois.

A seemingly modern moment of abstraction in a medieval manuscript, representing silence as a yellow rectangle.

A Christian socialist speech by the first woman to run for president and the first person to publish the Communist Manifesto in the US.

A man who “believed in nothing, not even himself”, Henri Rochefort is now a minor footnote in the annals of modern journalism. However, at the height of his notoriety, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, his writings, political activities, imprisonments, and escapes were the stuff of newspaper gossip around the world. How did a self-described “errant journalist and literary poacher” rise to power on the wings of sarcasm and ridicule to reshape France’s political landscape? Vlad Solomon explores the life and times of this populist forerunner.

Perhaps greatest hoax in American natural history.

Engravings based on watercolour images made at one of the first British colonies in North America.

An early treatise on chromotherapy — the supposed science of healing physical and psychic ailments with colour.

Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form. Kirsten Tambling reconstructs the biography of this elusive figure, whose savant-like qualities inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider.

The very first drawing of the microscopic "water bear" by a theologian turned microscope explorer.