True Size is a mapping website that allows you to specify and country and move an overlay of it across the globe, to demonstrate how the Mercator projection does not represent the true size of many countries.
The Journal of Art In Society published an interesting piece about how Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ spent 60 years as a misidentified piece with the Jesuits, after an adventure with connections to 1916 revolutionary Tom Clarke and famous artist Harry Clarke!
During another excellent episode of the Blindboy podcast with Manchán Magan, we learnt how the purchasing of the guns for the 1916 Rising was financed by Manchán's relative The O'Rahilly from the proceeds of selling bird shit. Listen to the end to be rewarded with this unique quirk of history.
Moral panics have been happening at least as far back as 1100 when the clergy warned against the wearing of pointy shoes called Poulaines. The shoes were worn by nobles, grew pointier and pointier, and were eventually seen as the epitome of the "impropriety of the behaviour of men", which was deduced as the cause of The Black Death in 1348.
The National Library of Ireland published a scanned copy of an Irish-English spelling primer from the 1830s, including translations between Cló Gaelach letters and English letters.
Archaeologists have found a lost Mayan city on the Yucatán Peninsula using an old lidar survey from 2013 that was conducted to monitor the carbon reservoirs in Mexico's forests.
This week I attended a fantastic talk at the Liverpool Irish Centre about Frongoch, the internment camp in North Wales where 1,800 revolutionaries from the 1916 rising were held for 7 months, including Michael Collins. It became known as the University of Revolution because the prisoners took classes while interned, but also made plans while all together for the war of independence that followed after their release.
