The Times Archives
For those of you with an interest in history (the last five letters of the word being really what it is all about, if you think about it), the online archives of The Times is particularly interesting. They've scanned selected pages from their issues from 1785 up to 1985, 200 years!
Aside: As a printer, I was initially interested in the printing method used back then, studying just how they produced newspapers at the time. I even enlarged the scanned images of the pages just to get a closer look at the magnified type, and how they laid the text out. I ended up reading a lot of material on old printing methods, mostly letterpress methods.
Some of the interesting stories now available for us to read as The Times reported it back then are: Marie Antoinette Goes To The Guillotine, The Battle of Waterloo, The Great Famine In Ireland, Abraham Lincoln's Assassination, Florence Nightingale, Jack The Ripper, Amelia Earhart, Winston Churchill And His Great Speech, and The Falklands War. There are a lot more on a lot of other topics and events. There's even an interesting 1921 human interest article: What Women Really Want.
Head on over to read, get a picture of life in Europe at that time, and you'll find out that at its basest, the human condition, and what drives people to do what they do, hasn't changed in more than a century (and for far longer, far, far longer). And yet, it all remains so interesting. Reading these stories from the past could very well teach us something about ourselves also. There is an old adage that goes "History is doomed to repeat itself"; and another one, "The more things change, the more they stay the same". So perhaps there are clues to how current events might just turn out in these old pages from The Times.
Would that we could have the same online access to Philippine newspapers and books, and from periodicals and publications from other countries as well!
Consider too, that what is published today, whether in hard print or online, just may be read 100 years or more hence (as long as the human race hasn't destroyed itself yet). Today's stories will interest those future readers in the same way that The Times archives interests us today. And that will include your own blogs, people!
Aside: As a printer, I was initially interested in the printing method used back then, studying just how they produced newspapers at the time. I even enlarged the scanned images of the pages just to get a closer look at the magnified type, and how they laid the text out. I ended up reading a lot of material on old printing methods, mostly letterpress methods.
Some of the interesting stories now available for us to read as The Times reported it back then are: Marie Antoinette Goes To The Guillotine, The Battle of Waterloo, The Great Famine In Ireland, Abraham Lincoln's Assassination, Florence Nightingale, Jack The Ripper, Amelia Earhart, Winston Churchill And His Great Speech, and The Falklands War. There are a lot more on a lot of other topics and events. There's even an interesting 1921 human interest article: What Women Really Want.
Head on over to read, get a picture of life in Europe at that time, and you'll find out that at its basest, the human condition, and what drives people to do what they do, hasn't changed in more than a century (and for far longer, far, far longer). And yet, it all remains so interesting. Reading these stories from the past could very well teach us something about ourselves also. There is an old adage that goes "History is doomed to repeat itself"; and another one, "The more things change, the more they stay the same". So perhaps there are clues to how current events might just turn out in these old pages from The Times.
Would that we could have the same online access to Philippine newspapers and books, and from periodicals and publications from other countries as well!
Consider too, that what is published today, whether in hard print or online, just may be read 100 years or more hence (as long as the human race hasn't destroyed itself yet). Today's stories will interest those future readers in the same way that The Times archives interests us today. And that will include your own blogs, people!
posted by pgenrestories at 5:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home