The Public Domain Review

On a voyage from England to Bombay, C. V. Raman penned a short paper that forever changed how we see the sea.

This book by Hokusai assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary.

A survey of the Smithsonian by the first curator of photography in the United States.

Outselling books by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells in their day, Marie Corelli’s occult romance novels brim with fantasies of telepathy, mesmerism, and radioactivity. Steven Connor revisits The Life Everlasting (1911), where the recent discovery of radium shapes the mechanics of phantasmal machines and psychic forces able to pass through all impediments.

Written by an exterminator, this treatise wanders into a surprising mode: one inflected not by disgust, but rather coy wonder and begrudging awe.

Thirty albumen silver prints of designs created through ornamental lathework.

These caricatures of well-known Philadelphians transpose human heads onto animal forms.

For almost 250 years, a mysterious pleasure park sat on the banks of Amsterdam's canals. Angela Vanhaelen leads us on a tour of the bawdy fountains, disorienting maze, and mechanical androids in the Oude Doolhof — an attraction that mingled pagan, protestant, and imperial desires.

In this Hebrew medical diagram, the human body is mapped onto a house: the stomach becomes a kitchen; the lungs, latticed windows.

Was an alien woman really cast back into the sea after surfacing on the coast of Japan in 1803?