The Public Domain Review

With his enormous hair, painted face, and dainty attire, the so-called "macaroni" was a common sight upon the streets and ridiculing prints of 1770s London. Dominic Janes explores how with this new figure — and the scandalous sodomy trials with which the stereotype became entwined — a widespread discussion of same-sex desire first entered the public realm, long before the days of Oscar Wilde.

Peddling lies in public goes back to antiquity, but it is the with the Tabloid Wars of the 19th-century when it first reached the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today.

We present our highlights from the lesser known corners of The Metropolitan Museum's public domain collection, now made available free from restrictions on use.

Two years after Verdi's death and two years before his own, the great Francesco Tamagno sings the death scene of Othello, Niun Mi Tema.

Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America.

Visually dazzling set of hand-drawn charts created by Du Bois, condensing an enormous amount of data on African-American life into aesthetically daring and easily digestible visualisations.

Short from Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, published a year after the end of WW2, exploring the characteristics and causes of despotism.

Images of imaginary utopias and dystopias used to illustrate an allegorical poem by Bartolomeo Del Bene (1515-1595) — a reworking of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethicsis.

The inaugural issue of the official journal of the Simplified Speling Soesiety, a group of passionate spelling reformists active in early 20th-century Britain, who boasted George Bernard Shaw amongst their members.

Wonderful series of miniatures from a late 12th-century herbal with delightfully abstract depictions of plants including Cannabis), and a variety of medieval medical procedures, such as cauterization and the removal of haemorrhoids.