A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
As a child, I sometimes watched the TV series “Emergency”, which ran from 1972 to 1979. Even though it featured crises and injuries that could easily happen to me or my friends or family, the show must have had some kind of attraction. Perhaps it was all of the heavy equipment or the explosions. With […]
Updated, June 2016, May 2017 Sometimes I see something so mysterious and compelling — like “Ice cream, bisque of black bread, a la Delmonico” — that I need to track down its story. Most of the time, I lose interest or have no hope of finding the answer, but sometimes lightning strikes and I find […]
San Francisco is a great postcard city: dramatic views of the Bay and hills, the Golden Gate, old and new buildings. And so it’s not surprising to find a bunch of San Francisco images in a collection of early 20th century postcards. This particular postcard collection was produced by the Detroit Publishing Co. and are […]
The Golden Age of Whaling attracts my interest because it was such a dramatic and absurd undertaking. During its peak years, the industry had a few hundred sailing ships searching vast areas of open ocean for the earth’s largest living creatures so they could kill them and process their carcasses at sea to obtain valuable […]
I find it easy to get lost in the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections, which contain hundreds of thousands of images and a massive collection of menus. One recent morning I was looking for something and stumbled into a large ‘box’ of early 20th century postcards from the Detroit Publishing Company. While browsing through […]
If you worked on a whaleship during the Golden Age of Whaling (ca. 1820-1860), you wouldn’t have known your salary. From the lowliest “boy” all the way to the captain, the salary wasn’t a fixed daily amount, but something distinctive to the whaling industry known as the “lay.” When you a contract to work on […]
The Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library has grabbed my attention and I’m wondering if I should start a new blog called “Menu Masala.” A food history nerd could spend a lot of time looking for menus with compelling art, analyzing the how contents have changed over time, searching for special […]
On January 6, 2016, the New York Public Library announced that it was expanding access to more than 180,000 public domain images through improved interfaces and tools (e.g., APIs, metadata). I started looking through the collection and found some amazing items (so far, dozens of images reviewed and 20 “keepers” for further review). Now and […]
Updated below After my review of The Box and my port mapping exercise, I thought I’d sail back into port and unload a few port-related charts. The first shows the growth of three big West Coast ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. As international trade has expanded and the container shipping industry has become […]
Not finding a satisfactory history of the evolution of Wilshire Boulevard in Kevin Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book, I searched for old maps to find the answers (my review of Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book). The Los Angeles Past blog led me to the 1897 edition of Maxwell’s Los Angeles City Directory at the California Digital Library […]