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Kay Cunningham

Instruments for Science, 1800-1914: Scientific Trade Catalogs in Smithsonian Collections - 3 views

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    Digitized versions of trade catalogs. Browse by company name, type of instrument, or category--acoustics, astronomy, balances, biology, chemistry, drawing instruments, education, electricity, engineering, geophysics, math, medical apparatus, meteorology, microscopy, natural history, natural philosophy, navigation, optics, photography, physics, spectroscopy, surveying. Images may be freely downloaded for personal, research and study purposes only; see the Permissions link forfurther details. Provided by the Smithsonian Institution
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    Kay - saw your post and thought you'd be interested in the new set of scientific teaching collection videos we've (NMAH) posted on YouTube. We are in the middle creating a website for these videos, and we'll be adding more over the next year or so. http://www.youtube.com/user/SmithsonianAmHistory?ob=0&feature=results_main
Ed Webb

Timbuktu mayor: Mali rebels torched library of historic manuscripts | World news | guar... - 1 views

  • Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts,
  • The manuscripts had survived for centuries in Timbuktu, on the remote south-west fringe of the Sahara desert. They were hidden in wooden trunks, buried in boxes under the sand and in caves. When French colonial rule ended in 1960, Timbuktu residents held preserved manuscripts in 60-80 private libraries.The vast majority of the texts were written in Arabic. A few were in African languages, such as Songhai, Tamashek and Bambara. There was even one in Hebrew. They covered a diverse range of topics including astronomy, poetry, music, medicine and women's rights. The oldest dated from 1204.
  • they exploded the myth that "black Africa" had only an oral history. "You just need to look at the manuscripts to realise how wrong this is."
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  • only a fraction of the manuscripts had been digitised. "They cover geography, history and religion. We had one in Turkish. We don't know what it said."
  • Mali government forces that had been guarding Timbuktu left the town in late March, as Islamist fighters advanced rapidly across the north. Fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – the group responsible for the attack on the Algerian gas facility – then swept in and seized the town, pushing out rival militia groups including secular Tuareg nationalists.
  • As well as the manuscripts, the fighters destroyed almost all of the 333 Sufi shrines dotted around Timbuktu, believing them to be idolatrous. They smashed a civic statue of a man sitting on a winged horse.
  • The rebels enforced their own brutal and arbitrary version of Islam, residents said, with offenders flogged for talking to women and other supposed crimes. The floggings took place in the square outside the 15th-century Sankoré mosque, a Unesco world heritage site.
  • They weren't religious men. They were criminals
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    Such a tragedy
David Hilton

Center for History of Physics - American Institute of Physics - 0 views

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    This is a collection of sources and archive material maintained by the American Institute of Physics "to preserve and make known the historical record of modern physics and allied sciences". How inter-disciplinary!
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