The Public Domain Review

After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor. Channelling these fragmentary voices, Alicia Puglionesi considers the relationship between communication, reputation, and survival after death.

Completed in his early twenties, Dürer's pillow studies seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams.

Arthur Wesley Dow's influential arts education handbook fused Japanese ukiyo-e with the author's unique minimalism, which he derived from the landscapes of New England.

This turn-of-the-century guide to pigeon breeds marries the concerns of fanciers with the evolutionary theories of naturalists.

From the vast confines of his imaginary prisons to the billowy scenes that comprise his grotteschi, the early works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi wed the exacting details of first-hand observation with the farthest reaches of artistic imagination. Susan Stewart journeys through this 18th-century engraver-architect’s paper worlds.

Against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Judith Sargent Murray’s essay made what was, at the time, a radical claim: women are the intellectual equals of men.

The oldest complete seventy-eight card tarot sequence, this mysterious deck contains a multitude of puzzles for both scholars and cartomancers.

Brad Fox tells a history-story that pulls on a life-thread in the tangle of things. But that only makes it all a little knottier, no?

For William James, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity.

Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center.