The Public Domain Review

During the Enlightenment, when Diderot wrote his letter, blindness had become a topic of intense philosophical debate.

In this early version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we find illustrations drawn by the author Reverend Charles Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll.

In 1838, as the United States began its Exploring Expedition to the South Seas, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel that masqueraded as a travelogue. John Tresch guides us along this strange trip southward, following the pull of its unfathomable mysteries.

The masks gathered here come from a report by Matilda Coxe Stevenson, one of the most dedicated ethnographers of Zuni at the turn of the 20th century.

An impressive compendium of British trees in etchings and words.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Play.

Observing the visible features of Martian landscapes, Giovanni Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately — shapes that resembled dim lines, crisscrossing the extraterrestrial desert.

Unique series of maps showing a particular empire’s knowledge revealed through a mass of broiling black cloud.

On the evening of May 31, 1921, several thousand white citizens and authorities began to violently attack the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Karlos K. Hill investigates the disturbing photographic legacy of this massacre and the resilience of Black Wall Street’s residents.

In zodiac man illustrations, astrological signs appear alongside the parts of the body they were thought to influence.