The Public Domain Review

More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn’s gymnastics were meant to train a new form of body politic.

After a transformative moment on the Devon Coast, Vaughan Cornish devoted his life to the study of waveforms.

Some 50 years before collage would become an established art form, came these pioneering Victorian images all of which exude a certain decorative detail: blood.

During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility. Iwan Rhys Morus follows the interplanetary safari that is John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

A strange 1797 text — in a personal eye dialect and entirely devoid of punctuation — written by the eccentric 18th-century businessman known for his wildly good luck.

A year before his death, the artist Howard Pyle set off for Italy, leaving unfinished on his Delaware easel his final painting The Mermaid — a profoundly haunting work of art.

These two treatises detail the art of leaf preservation through “skeletonization”.

On September 15, 1885, twenty-five years after his capture in Sudan, Jumbo the elephant tragically died when struck by a freight train. Ross Bullen takes us on a spectral journey through other collisions between elephant and machine — in adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, and psychic science — revealing latent anxieties at the century’s turn.

Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art.

Hand-coloured plates of “the utmost fidelity” for William Hamilton's documentation of the late-eighteenth-century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.