The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
Latest from this source
A 19th-century hyperpolyglot reported to have known up to 72 languages, the biography of Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti explores the boundaries of how we characterize multilingualism.
Before Freudian psychoanalysis became the dominant approach to psychotherapy, physician Morton Prince pioneered influential ideas about dissociation, hypnosis, habit formation, and talk therapy that helped shape the early development of American psychotherapy.
Buraq, the winged steed associated with the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey, evolved from a briefly described figure into a richly imagined symbol through Islamic literature, visual art, philosophy, and centuries of religious and cultural interpretation.
Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland uses a two-dimensional world to explain higher dimensions while satirizing the class and gender hierarchies of Victorian England.
In the 19th century, inventors developed techniques for reducing photographs to microscopic size, creating tiny images known as Stanhopes that could be hidden inside jewelry, pocketknives, and other objects and later adapted for wartime communication.
Early military pursuit tests helped establish the scientific study of attention and laid the groundwork for modern human-machine interaction research.
Portraits, caricatures, and other forms of visual media helped establish scientific authority and support Britain’s expanding imperial ambitions.
Early recordings were not simply inventions but cultural products shaped by musicians, entrepreneurs, audiences, and new technologies that transformed how people experienced and purchased sound.
A famous photographic hoax illustrates how confirmation bias and flawed investigation can lead people to misinterpret evidence and accept extraordinary claims.
The invention of motion pictures emerged from competing inventors, industrial technologies, financial obstacles, and overlooked contributors whose innovations helped shape the birth of cinema.
Imagined devices such as Francis Bacon’s sound-houses and the “cat piano” reveal how speculative musical instruments have influenced music, technology, and cultural ideas about sound.
A Scottish artist and theorist argued that the same principles governing musical harmony also determine beauty in architecture, color, geometry, and the human form, revealing how music influenced 19th-century theories of aesthetics and perception.
As France approached revolution in the late 18th century, architects Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux rejected the ornate Baroque and Rococo styles in favor of spheres, cubes, and pyramids, creating visionary designs that reimagined architecture and influenced generations of architects.
Long before film editing became cinema’s defining artistic technique, novelist Frank Norris was using literary methods that anticipated cross-cutting, visual montage, and modern cinematic storytelling.
A Danish physician transformed the narwhal into a “sea unicorn” to preserve the medicinal trade in alicorn horns and sustain centuries of European folklore.
In the early 1900s, a St. Louis woman claimed a long-dead Puritan spirit dictated novels, poems, and plays through a Ouija board, raising enduring questions about authorship, spiritualism, automatic writing, and literary history.
In the 19th century, naturalists and hobbyists gathered, pressed, and cataloged seaweed in elaborate albums that combined scientific research, botanical art, and personal fascination with the natural world.
Machiavelli’s '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00002ED0-QINU`"' reveals how Renaissance humor normalized deception, misogyny, and social inequality while exposing the cultural values that shaped early modern Europe.
An exploration of how Franz Hessel’s '"`UNIQ--nowiki-00002EC2-QINU`"'Walking in Berlin'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00002EC3-QINU`"' captures everyday life, memory, and social blind spots in Weimar-era urban culture.
European cabinet and gallery paintings reveal how private art collections became subjects of paintings themselves, shaping modern museums, curation, and the display of art.
In the 19th century, two eccentric aristocrats built elaborate Moorish-inspired castles in Italy, blending architecture, mysticism, and experimental healing into immersive private worlds.
From the Mona Lisa to Dutch genre painting, the smile has long been a complex, culturally coded expression in portraiture, revealing social norms, artistic challenges, and shifting ideas of human emotion.
An ambitious visual archive assembled images from across cultures and history to interpret dreams, trace archetypes, and explore the boundary between individual and shared human psyche.
Using early microscopes and detailed observation, Grew identified plants’ internal structures and functions, shaping the foundations of botany and comparative anatomy.
A closer look at how Victorian freak shows and the medical establishment shaped the life and legacy of Joseph Merrick, challenging familiar myths about his rescue and care.
From pigs executed for murder to rats defended in court, medieval legal systems once put animals and even objects on trial—revealing how law has long been used to impose order on a world that can seem chaotic and unpredictable.
From Buddhist monks to Renaissance musicians, fingers and palms once served as portable, visual, and kinesthetic tools for storing knowledge.
Known as the “German Princess,” Mary Carleton was a notorious 17th-century impostor whose publicized life of bigamy and deception became a foundational influence on the English novel and the female grifter archetype.
The often-uncredited work of women shaped how modern literature was written, revised, and published.
By Christine Jacobson in Literature | Public Domain Review | English | Guide to Language Arts and Writing
Photographs taken during and after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre document the scale of the violence against Greenwood, reveal how white participants framed the destruction, and shape how this history is understood today.
In the late 1800s, a constructed language spread across Europe and the United States before internal conflicts and the rise of Esperanto led to its decline.
By Arika Okrent in Language | Public Domain Review | English | Guide to Linguistics: The Science of Language
In 1890, American historian Henry Adams traveled to the South Pacific and worked with Tahiti’s royal family to create a unique blend of memoir, ethnography, and colonial history that recorded the island’s culture and past.
Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal blends Enlightenment rationalism with occult superstition, providing detailed entries and striking illustrations of Hell’s most infamous demons, from Astaroth to Belphégor.
In 1889, Elizabeth Bisland set out on a globe-spanning journey to rival Nellie Bly, combining courage, literary talent, and a sharp intellect to make history in one of the most remarkable travel feats of the 19th century.
In Musaeum Clausum, Thomas Browne catalogs imagined books, strange objects, and rare curiosities, revealing how early-modern thinkers sought to preserve and make sense of the fragile and fleeting treasures of the past.
In midsummer Strasbourg, a strange contagion compelled citizens to dance for days without rest, leaving historians to unravel whether fear, faith, or mass hysteria fueled the frenzy.
The life and memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi reveal the invention of modern clowning, the physical and emotional toll of the stage, and the enduring influence of his performances on theater and popular culture.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, shaped by personal loss and her love of nature, tells the story of an orphaned girl who restores a forgotten garden—and changes the lives of those around her.
In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, a “gospel of the witches” that drew on Italian folklore—but new research suggests the writer and medium Roma Lister may have played a hidden role in shaping the text and, ultimately, the modern revival of witchcraft.
The 18th-century Bildungsroman '"`UNIQ--nowiki-000026AC-QINU`"'René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences'"`UNIQ--nowiki-000026AD-QINU`"', critiqued hegemonic systems of church and state through the artful combination of multiple literary genres.
Solitary confinement began as a Quaker-inspired experiment in silence and moral reform in early American prisons, but over time its redemptive intent gave way to harsh, isolating punishment that remains in use today.
In 1872, Victoria Woodhull defied every expectation of her time—running for president, speaking before Congress, publishing revolutionary ideas, and challenging laws, norms, and social hierarchies—to fight for women’s rights, labor justice, and personal freedom.
From seasonal cycles and reincarnation to cosmic destruction and rebirth, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers developed competing theories of how time repeats—and what that repetition means for human life.
Ornamental gardens and Alpine-style cottages transformed the English countryside into miniature Swiss landscapes, blending Romantic ideals with playful kitsch.
Ostrich feathers once drove global fashion and trade, revealing the origins of sustainable practices and ethical awareness in the plume industry.
Robert Hunt’s 19th-century fusion of scientific inquiry and poetic imagination shows how empirical discovery and artistic expression can illuminate the natural world together.
From accidental trips in London parks to the hallucinatory landscapes of Alice in Wonderland, magic mushrooms shaped folklore and visions of fairyland in 19th-century Britain.
Wilson Bentley, a self-taught farmer in Vermont, captured thousands of snowflakes on film, revealing their intricate designs and leaving a lasting legacy in meteorology and the study of nature’s frozen wonders.
Dutch astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoek saw the stars through both a telescope and a political lens—his drawings of the Milky Way reveal how perception, experience, and ideology shape our view of the cosmos.
Kidnapped from West Africa as a child and brought to Boston, Wheatley became the first African-American woman published in English, using her poetry to navigate freedom, fame, and the politics of her time.
Francis Galton’s experiments in biometric detection promised a revolution in crime-solving, but also laid the groundwork for racialized thinking that echoed into modern genetics.
Long before they became symbols of climate change, polar bears helped shape Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas about how species adapt to their environments.
In Georgian Britain, Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine sparked panic over “beastly” side effects, exposing how new science can collide with old beliefs.
Long before modern science warned of global warming, the Founding Fathers believed human activity was reshaping the planet’s climate—and they set out to prove it.
At the turn of the 20th century, mathematicians, mystics, and modernists blurred the line between physics and philosophy. Their search for a hidden spatial realm—the so-called “fourth dimension”—transformed art, inspired the occult, and reimagined the very structure of reality.
With skillful pigeon portraits and a daring act of literary piracy, Pauline Knip secured fame, scandal, and a place in art history.
Centuries before photography, the camera obscura transformed ordinary rooms into magical spaces, casting the outside world inside and revealing how light, shadow, and perspective shaped early modern visions of reality.
In the early 20th century, architects and artists like Hugh Ferriss drew on the myths and monuments of ancient Babylon to imagine futuristic skylines—melding ziggurats with modernism in a visionary blend of the past and the possible.
For centuries, physicians used urine to diagnose disease, predict death, and even determine sexual history—analyzing its color, consistency, and contents with remarkable confidence.
The Mughal emperors in India faced a sartorial quandary: Should they continue wearing their traditional Central Asian attire or adopt the lighter cotton clothing of this warmer climate?
From dissecting hearts to designing ornithopters, James Bell Pettigrew saw spirals as the blueprint of nature—but his grand vision was lost to history.
Labelled a “cretin” and “imbecile” in his lifetime, the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind had profound talents when it came to drafting the feline form and inspired later French Realists, early psychiatric theorists, and Romantic visions of the artist as outsider.
After weeks of watching young tendrils slowly corkscrew their way toward the sun, Charles Darwin invented a system for making botanic motion visible to the naked eye.
Associated Authors
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is an author, journalist, and curator.
Eva Moreda Rodríguez is a musicologist and cultural historian at the University of Glasgow whose research focuses on the political and cultural history of Spanish music.
Nicholas Humphrey is a British theoretical psychologist whose work explores the evolution of consciousness, perception, and social intelligence.
Ray Davis is an essayist and publisher.
Natalie Lawrence is a writer, researcher, and illustrator living in London.
Henry Giardina is a writer and critic whose work explores literature, film, culture, and intellectual history.
D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science, writer, and professor at Princeton University whose work explores attention, perception, technology, and the history of human knowledge.
Lauren Collee is a writer and researcher.
Ned Pennant-Rea is a London-based editor and writer.
Laura Kolb is an associate professor of English at Baruch College specializing in early modern literature.
Thomas Patteson is a musicologist, writer, and musician whose work explores music technology, electronic music, improvisation, and the history of sound.
Christine Jacobson is a cultural heritage professional.
Sasha Archibald is a writer and editor whose work explores art, history, books, and cultural iconoclasts.
Deirdre Loughridge is a musicologist and historian of music technology whose research examines the relationship between music, technology, and human experience.
Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine.
Kensy Cooperrider is a cognitive scientist, writer, teacher, and podcaster.
Dobrota Pucherová is a researcher, author, and editor specializing in world literature.
Dr. Raphael Calel is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.
Jon Crabb is an editor at British Library Publishing.
Kirsten Tambling is an art historian specializing in 18th-century art.
Anika Burgess is a writer, photo editor, and author of Flashes of Brilliance: The Genius of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History.
Christopher S. Celenza is a historian of the Italian Renaissance and dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
Michael Erard is an author, journalist, and linguist known for his deep exploration of language, culture, and the human brain.
Mike Jay is an author, cultural historian, and curator.
Jane Brox is the author of five award-winning non-fiction books.
Claire Hall is a historian of ancient Greek science and religion.
Seán Williams writes and broadcasts on German and comparative cultural history.
Claire Preston is a professor of early modern literature at Cambridge, specializing in the intersection of 17th-century science and rhetoric. Renowned for her award-winning work on Sir Thomas Browne and Edmund Spenser, she explores how the “New Science” and the era’s information overload shaped English prose and the cultural history of the natural world.
Thea Applebaum Licht is a writer and researcher.
Frederika Tevebring is a lecturer in global cultures and interdisciplinary education at King’s College London.
Andrew McConnell Stott is a professor in the English department at the University of Southern California specializing in British popular culture from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Vincent Carretta is a professor and author specializing in 18th-century literature.
Simran Agarwal is a researcher and writer based in Mumbai.
Ian Stewart is a mathematician, science writer, and emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick.
Keith C. Heidorn was a meteorologist and climatologist.
A.D. Manns is a historian and writer.
Nadja Durbach is a historian of modern Britain and professor of History at the University of Utah.
Michael Engelhard is a writer and wilderness guide.
George Prochnik is an award-winning author and essayist whose work explores psychology, intellectual history, biography, and culture.
Whitney Rakich is a writing tutor at Yale University.
Paul Sullivan is a Berlin-based travel and culture writer, author, and editor, and the founder of Slow Travel Berlin.
Brian Jonathan Garrett is an instructor of philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University whose research explores the history of biology and its connections to metaphysics.
Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of music at Cornell University whose research explores the history of music, cognition, aesthetics, and theories of mind from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Nicholas Jeeves is a designer, writer, and lecturer at Cambridge School of Art.
Lucas Thompson is an academic specializing in contemporary U.S. and Anglophone literature, aesthetics, and film, publishing extensively on 20th-century fiction and ordinary language philosophy.
Arika Okrent is an author and linguist.
Erica X Eisen researches and writes about art history.
Matthew Goodman is a New York Times–bestselling author of five books, including The City Game and Eighty Days, whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Review.
Mary Losure is an author of narrative nonfiction and former environmental reporter whose books explore unusual episodes from history, science, and culture.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the chair of the department of English at Dartmouth College.
Ava Kofman is a journalist. She is the 2023 recipient the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism.
Patricia Fara is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge and the author of several books on science, empire, and the history of scientific ideas.
Irfan Shah is a writer, film historian, and researcher specializing in pre-cinema media archaeology and the origins of motion pictures.
Iván Moure Pazos is a historian of art and senior lecturer at the University of Santiago de Compostela whose work explores the intersections of literature, architecture, and visionary art.
Hunter Dukes is the managing editor of the Public Domain Review and Cabinet Magazine.
The Observatory Guides
