publicdomainreview.orgadded August 2026
Public Domain Reviewby Hunter Dukes13 May 2026
Longitude by Way of Wounded Hounds: Kenelm Digby’s Sympathetick Powder (1669 edition) One afternoon in 1624, the writer James Howell stumbled upon his colleagues engaged in a duel.
Public Domain Reviewby Hunter Dukes30 Apr 2026
Even the greatest monuments from the ancient world are no match for the accomplishments of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie became “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about”, as Marx...
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht22 Apr 2026
Sixty years before Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed, another confrontation between man and bug: this time, between the common flea and an off-kilter fellow in a three-piece suit.
Public Domain Reviewby Ross MacFarlane16 Apr 2026
“A Beautiful Purplish Hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s Experience with Ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884) The New York physician Frank Dudley Beane (1851–94) was not the most prolific writer.
Public Domain Review14 Apr 2026
Fifteen years ago, The Public Domain Review began its life as an online journal, a creature of the internet — and proudly so.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit9 Apr 2026
It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The...
Public Domain Review8 Apr 2026
The Public Song Project began as a listener engagement experiment on a WNYC radio show — three years on, it has grown into something considerably more expansive: concerts at Lincoln Center and the...
Public Domain Reviewby Roger Luckhurst2 Apr 2026
As populations flocked to city centres in the 19th century, church cemeteries began to overflow with the dead.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit1 Apr 2026
Elizabeth I’s Manuscript Copy of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses (1559) In 1559, a French humanist named Pierre Boaistuau arrived in England.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit26 Mar 2026
It is never much of a surprise when modern writers engage in petty fights. The insults exchanged between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner have become cliché; the sub-tweet is almost a literary...
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit25 Mar 2026
At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre.
Public Domain Reviewby Tamara Sanderson19 Mar 2026
In early modern Europe, around the time when lenses began to bring the world (and heavens) into newfound focus, patients started appearing in medical records with a particular ailment: a firm...
Public Domain Reviewby Thea Applebaum Licht11 Mar 2026
Between about 1905 and 1915, the United States entered a golden age of postcards. Cheaper and faster mail service, the advent of “divided back” cards (freeing the entire front for images), and...
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit5 Mar 2026
When the Ancient Greeks wrote of the Amazons, that mysterious society of women who lived either in Libya or the Caucasus or Central Asia (accounts vary), they imagined a world quite like their own...
Public Domain Reviewby Erica X Eisen3 Mar 2026
Hear the word “shadow” and one’s mind immediately goes to the realms of the unreal — the illusory, the insubstantial, the image that flits momentarily against a surface before dissolving into the...
Public Domain Reviewby Paul Sullivan25 Feb 2026
Does the flâneur, that curiously modern figure who wanders metropolitan streets, have a political consciousness?
Public Domain Reviewby Erica X Eisen17 Feb 2026
In the Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (Mutianzi zhuan, ca. 475–221 BCE), considered the oldest extant travelogue in Chinese literature, the titular ruler journeys to the mythical Kunlun mountains...
Public Domain Reviewby Hunter Dukes17 Feb 2026
Long before the The Joy of Cooking or The Silver Spoon, a Georgian-era cookbook caused a revolution in English kitchens.
Public Domain Reviewby Mathilde Montpetit11 Feb 2026
Snail Homes, Bog Bodies, and Mechanical Flies: Robert Testard’s Illustrations for Les secretz de l’histoire naturelle (ca.
Public Domain Reviewby Christine Jacobson4 Feb 2026
Taking dictation, revising manuscripts, typing copies, literary amanuenses often labour for little compensation and even less recognition.
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