The History Blog

The UK’s National Archives has compiled an astonishing interactive map detailing the locations and dates of all the bombs that fell on London and environs during the Blitz. The Bomb Sight project has taken the original bomb census maps which documented the Blitz as it happened between October 7th, 1940, and June 6th, 1941, and uploaded the data onto web map. The bomb census maps used to only be available to visitors who went in person to the Reading Room of The National Archive, so this is an incredible resource now at the public’s fingertips for the first time.

You can type in a zip code to pull up a map of all the bombs in the area, or you can just browse the maps by zooming in and out as you please. You can click on each bomb for details, then click a “read more” link to see period photographs from the Imperial War Museum and the BBC’s People’s War archive of the devastated area. They’ve also collected memories of the bombings from people who lived in the area, so when you zoom in on one bomb you can read first person accounts of the experience from survivors. The sheer density of information is mind-boggling.

The website is having timeout errors right now because it’s so amazing, but don’t give up. You get a whole new understanding of the Blitz by seeing it mapped out. Here are the bombs that fell on London on September 7th, 1940, the first night of bombing:

Here are the bombs that fell on London during the second week of October:

Here are the total bombs that fell on London at night from October 1940 to June 1941:

In. Sane. It’s hard to believe a city could survive that with any structures left standing at all. The statistics — 20,000 civilians dead, a million plus homes destroyed, 57 consecutive nights of bombing — as horrific as they are can’t convey the scale of destruction. An interactive map is worth a million stats, to coin a new cliche.

Bomb Sight is also working on an Android App with Augmented Reality, which uses GPS data so people walking around in London can find out if a bomb hit anywhere near them. People not in London will also be able to explore the city with this app.

Until fairly recently, all I knew about the Dust Bowl was a general outline. I knew that a combination of overfarming, drought and wind had caused massive dust storms through the Plains states of Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico during the 1930s. I had seen pictures of displaced farming families taken by Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. I had read The Grapes of Wrath. But I had no concept of the full scale of the calamity until I saw a History Channel program called Black Blizzard (view a short clip here, DVD for sale here) two years ago.

It was a revelation to find out that the amount of topsoil displaced during the decade could fill the Grand Canyon, that dirt which had once supported amber fields of grain was blown so far that it blanketed Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York City before landing in the Atlantic Ocean, that it was impossible to keep the talcum-like dust out of the house no matter how many wet sheets were stuck to the walls, that people and animals caught in storms died of suffocation, that the gradual buildup of dust in the lungs caused dust pneumonia which was even deadlier, especially for children and the elderly who died in misery, coughing up mud. Then there were the grasshoppers and hares who descended Old Testament-style upon any plant material that managed to survive the widespread erosion, drought and wind storms.

It was a decade of hell on earth and it was entirely man-made. Before the Civil War, the Great Plains area was known as the “Great American Desert.” Rainfall was scarce and cyclical. The native grasses with their deep roots and moisture retention capabilities thrived in the region’s semi-arid climate, but crops would not. As white settlers increasingly moved west of the Missouri after the Civil War, they bumped into a wet cycle. Hack climatologists decided that the increase in rainfall was a result of the increase in settlement, that “rain follows the plow” and that therefore the Great American Desert was now a lush fertile land to be farmed at will. The government espoused this theory and actively encouraged settlement and farming, with no attention paid to even the most basic good farming practices like crop rotation and terracing.

With the increase in immigration in the early 1900s, more and more settlers claimed a homestead in the Great Plains. The prime farming land near rivers that could be irrigated was already taken, and the government specifically encouraged farming of the prairies in the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 which doubled the size of land grants to 320 acres per farmer to make up for the lack of water resources. Using deep plough techniques which eradicated the native grasses and exposed the topsoil to the winds, farmers planted thousands of acres of single cash crops like wheat and cotton. High prices during World War I and another wet cycle in the 1920s encouraged ever more extensive ploughing and planting. Prices dropped drastically after the Wall Street Crash in 1929, but that only gave farmers more incentive to plant as much as they possibly could to make up for the shortfall.

When the wet cycle ended and drought began in 1930, the land which had been so dramatically altered by farmers over the preceding decades literally threw itself in their faces. Those deep furrows ploughed into the topsoil exposed it to the winds. Without water or grasses to keep it in place, the dirt was simply swept away, sometimes creating massive rolling clouds that for days blanketed everything in their path with dust and grew so huge they blocked out the sun. Some farmers tried to tough it out hoping next season the rain would fall again, but as the years went on and conditions only got worse, by 1935 many lost their homes to the banks and were forced to move, seeking out employment as migrant workers. A total of 2.5 million people moved out of the Plains states between 1930 and 1940. Many of them wound up in California and the Pacific Northwest.

As soon as Franklin Roosevelt took office, his administration initiated programs to conserve soil, encourage anti-erosion farming practices (even as late as 1937 the government literally had to pay farmers to utilize crop rotation or terracing or contour ploughing), plant a shelterbelt of 200 million trees from Texas to Canada to break the wind and keep the soil in place, distribute canned foods to help the needy, and purchase drought-stricken cattle from ranchers so the strongest animals had access to more resources. By the end of the decade, these programs helped significantly reduce the amount of blowing soil. In the autumn of 1939, rain fell again.

In standard History Channel fashion, the show I saw two years ago was packed with CGI and reenactments for which I have a limited tolerance, but it also featured survivors of the Dust Bowl telling their stories for which I have an unlimited hunger. Although I didn’t know it at the time, by the time I watched that program, Ken Burns and his team had been working for a year on collecting oral histories for his own documentary on the Dust Bowl. Realizing that time was short if they wanted to record the memories of people who lived through the hellish period, in 2009 Burns made a direct plea on PBS asking people for their stories, pictures and film of life in the Dust Bowl. His team scoured the Plains states, putting ads in local newspapers, visiting senior centers, looking for people who could convey the compelling stories of their dirt-besieged youths. They were successful.

The oral histories are the focus of this documentary. No cheesy re-enactments, no low-rent CGI. Just real people who went through hell and lived to tell the tale. Also playing a starring role are the pictures taken by the immensely talented photographers of the Farm Security Administration and period films shot by professionals and amateurs.

Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl debuts Sunday, November 18th at 8:00 PM on your local PBS station, followed by episode two on Monday night. The website has an excellent collection of Dust Bowl photographs, clips and other videos about the documentary, and biographies of the survivors featured. This video about the eye witnesses is my favorite.

Today is the 1933rd anniversary* of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Starting at 8:00 AM MT, Pliny the Elder will tweet the eruption live just as it all went down.

I felt this was a fitting occasion for my first tweet, which was actually a retweet. It’s a little strange and offputting, but then again, so are tremors in the earth and a Vulcan’s forge inside a mountain belching smoke.

Twitter Pliny is a feature of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s A Day in Pompeii exhibit which runs from September 14th, 2012 to January 13th, 2013. They have some neat companion events for children and adults, from a toga party to lectures by volcanologists.

*According to traditional dating based on a letter Pliny the Younger, nephew of the elder Pliny who was visiting his uncle on that fateful day, wrote to the historian Tacitus describing the events 25 years later. Archaeological evidence suggests the eruption took place later, sometime in November. A second letter from Pliny to Tacitus puts the date at November 23rd.

SPOILER ALERT: Here are Pliny the Younger’s letters to Tacitus. Do not read if you want to be surprised by Twitter Pliny’s live updates.

The Churches Conservation Trust (CCT), a national charity dedicated to the conservation of England’s historic churches, has created a fascinating interactive online history of the Royal Coat of Arms. The CCT is particularly well-placed to illustrate this history because ever since Henry VIII created the Church of England to secure a divorce, the Royal Arms have been displayed in churches as a pointed symbol of the sovereign’s role as head of the church.

One hundred of the 340 churches under the CCT’s purview have painted, stone, wooden, plaster, stained glass, tapestry, etc. versions of the Royal Arms inside. The earliest, St. James’ Church in Cameley, dates to the 12th century reign of Richard I (1189-1199), the first monarch to add his heraldry to the Great Seal. Appropriately for a man known by the sobriquet “Lionheart,” his Arms featured three white lions on a red background. They were the first style of the Royal Arms to be used by themselves as Royal Arms, and the three lions of England have been on every Royal Coat of Arms ever since. Click on the picture of the painted lions here to zoom in on it.

From Richard I until Henry VIII, the Royal Arms were reserved for the tombs of kings in Westminster Abbey, or for the tombs of noblemen who claimed a family connection to the monarchs in more modest parish churches. For example, the tomb of Sir William Gascoigne, Chief Justice of England under Henry IV, is a carved alabaster monument in All Saints Church, Harewood. The Royal Arms are carved on the foot of the tomb because his first wife, Elizabeth de Mowbray, was descended from the House of Plantagenet.

The lion and unicorn on either side of the shield (called supporters) were added by King James I, who was also King James VI of Scotland, when he ascended to the throne after Elizabeth I’s death in 1603. The Stuart shield had two silver unicorns supporting it, so as a compromise he added England’s lion to support the left side of England’s shield and the unicorn of Scotland to support the right. As with Richard III’s wild boars, the new supporters were noticeably well-endowed.

Surprise, surprise, Oliver Cromwell was not a fan. Under the Commonwealth, the Royal Arms were changed to State Arms. No genitals were in evidence. King Charles II brought them back to the Royal Arms with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 where they remained jutting proudly until the first half of the 19th century. Queen Victoria opted for the Ken doll look.

Click through the Evolution of Royal Arms timeline for zoomable images and fascinating details about how the Royal Arms developed over the years in different churches. Each entry has a link to the website of the specific church, so if you want to make an itinerary of Royal Arms visits all the information is at your fingertips.

For a quick visual overview of the different Royal Arms from the first official one in 1198 until today’s, see this timeline. The symbols are easier to pick out in the digital renderings than they are in some of the historical shields.

I love this rollover explanation of the modern Royal Arms. You hover over a given part, click on the symbol you’re interested in and a little window pops out with details about that specific element. I had no idea about the mantling. It’s the floral looking scarf attached to the helmet (called the helm) on top of the shield.

The mantling is based on the small cloth or cloak that would hang from a knight’s helmet, over his shoulders, to protect him from the elements. It was often depicted as torn or jagged – perhaps alluding to the cuts and slashes it would have received in battle, which would have greatly enhanced a knight’s reputation on his return home.

There’s also a handy introduction to the many and vast complexities of heraldry, such as the rules governing colors, symbols, division, and how heraldry relays familial histories.

For archaeology nerds, the section on conservation is a must-read. Conservator Sally Woodcock explains how and why many of the Royal Arms in churches have suffered damage over the years, the methods they use to stabilize the pieces and in some cases reverse the damage, and best of all, uses before and after pictures to illustrate the process.

All the information is concise and readable but still detailed and intelligent. It’s an excellent educational resource for young and old alike, because the subject of heraldry can be incredibly daunting to tackle with its arcane nomenclature and dense symbolism. The Churches Conservation Trust has created a practical introduction to the entire field by way of sharing the exceptional examples of Royal Arms in its churches.

More than 350 original World War II artworks from the National Archives collection have been scanned and uploaded to Wikimedia. Wikimedia UK gave the National Archives a grant to take high resolution pictures of part of their 2000-piece collection of art created for Ministry of Information propaganda during the Second World War. The long-term goal is to scan the entire collection, but they’re starting off with 350 posters, drawings, oil paintings, portraits, and caricatures by well-known artists and talented artists who should be well-known, including famous images and slogans.

The National Archives is hoping the new visibility of their collection will garner additional attention from scholars and the public. They’re also hoping the crowdsourcing power of Wiki will help them identify some of the unknown artists and fill in other informational blanks. Wikimedia is excited to have a whole new source of images to accompany old and new Wikipedia entries. Many of the artists in the collection who already have a Wikipedia page haven’t had any representations of their work on the page until now.

Some of the artworks have been classics of the propaganda poster genre, like the “Careless talk costs lives” posters from the campaign against sharing sensitive information with civilians (especially dangerous blondes). Others are sketches that were submitted to the Ministry but never published. You can see notes penciled in on the borders, among them a pointed critique of artistic license: “Bomb racks open from centre and not from side as in your sketch.”

There is a series of flattering oil portraits of Allied leaders about two-thirds of the way down on the second page by Austrian artist William Timym who moved from Vienna to London in 1938 after the Anschluss. He was naturalized a British citizen in 1949 and would later become known as the creator of the Bleep and Booster series of animated shorts.

It’s the more dramatic war scenes that most catch my eye. Terence Cuneo is widely collected today for his post-war paintings of railways and locomotives. He was also the official artist for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. During the war he served as a combat engineer in the British Army and as an artist for the War Artists Advisory Committee. In the Wikimedia collection you can see his paintings of an invasion in the Far East, tanks in production, tanks in battle and most striking of all in subject matter at least, the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Final Solution.

One of my favorite pieces is an oil painting by Eve Kirk, a landscape painter and graphic designer whose wartime work showed at the Royal Academy in 1945. It depicts Tower Bridge and the Thames harbor protected by a sky full of barrage balloons. Barrage balloons were tethered balloons intended to collide with and damage low-flying, fast-moving aircraft like dive bombers. They were deployed in British cities starting in 1938. By 1940 there were almost 500 of them in the skies over London.

Then there are the symbolic illustrations, like the proud Aslan-like lion representing England painted by Tom Purvis, the British pincer cracking the swastika by Frank Newbould, the squirrels lining up to get their ration of coal by Clive Uptton, the British and Soviet arms strangling the German eagle rising from a bombed-out city by an unknown artist, and also by an unknown artist, this sort of dark Pink Floyd vision of a sword impaling a bleeding Germany through to a rainbow and sun behind.

Last month, New York City’s Department of Records announced that it had digitized and uploaded 870,000 of the best photographs out of the 2,200,000 kept in the city’s Municipal Archives. The pictures date from the mid-1800s onward and document every aspect of city governance, from bridges to iconic buildings to mug shots to crime scenes to road work that captures vibrant immigrant neighborhoods as they were before gentrification flattened their characters. A few of them have been published before, but most of them are revelations.

The Department of Records has been working for four years to make this vast store of hidden gems available to the public as part of an initiative to make city records generally accessible. Until now, if you wanted to see any of these pictures, you had to go to the archive building and go through the microfilm and print records. Although the entire archive hasn’t been uploaded at this point because it’s on a tight technological and funding budget, the department will continue to add new content to the online database.

Those technological limitations became immediately obvious when the day after the database opened, it crashed. The interest was massive and came from all over the world, which meant that the poor server never caught a break.

“There is so much world-wide interest,” said Eileen Flannelly, deputy commissioner for the city’s Department of Records. “We knew it would be huge in the city and for New Yorkers, but the actual interest coming in from Germany and Spain and Brazil and the Czech Republic, all of these places, they can’t get enough of it. Like 12,000 hits every few minutes in the middle of the night.”

It was down for weeks before they finally got their act together. Now the site is stable and therefore finally bloggable.

Most of the pictures were taken by anonymous municipal workers in the course of their duties, although there are some standout pieces by professionals like Eugene de Salignac, the Boston-born descendant of French nobility who at the age of 42 became the official photographer for the Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures in 1906. The department’s only photographer, over the next three decades he took 20,000 pictures of Manhattan’s most famous landmarks as they went up. He retired in 1934 and died in 1943, a virtual unknown, until in 1999 Municipal Archives photographer Michael Lorenzini recognized that a number of outstanding photographs had to be the work of one man. Lorenzini dug through the archives and historical records and finally put a name to the prodigious talent, bringing de Salignac out of obscurity into museum exhibits and coffee table books.

The database also includes a grimly fascinating collection of glass-plate photographs taken by the New York City Police Department. It’s the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world, and it’s amazing how many of these grisly murder scenes are so artful they could easily be stills from a film noir.

Less bloody but just as fascinating are the 1,279 images collected by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that between 1935 and 1943 collected pictures from Art Project photographers and others for inclusion in publications like the WPA Guide to New York City. When the program ended, the Municipal Archives acquired the collection.

You can search the database by keyword or department, or you can browse by categories. I prefer the categories because I like going through the pictures from oldest to newest.

The feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families of Appalachia has transcended its origins as a bloody multi-generational backcountry conflict to become a metaphor for all vendettas. Yet, despite its lexical fame and inherent drama, it has rarely been depicted on television outside of documentaries, cartoons (Bugs Bunny, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo have all done versions) and a particularly awesome episode arc of Family Feud. Starting Monday at 9:00 PM EST, the History Channel will step into that void with Hatfields & McCoys, a three-episode miniseries starring Kevin Costner as William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield and Bill Paxton as Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy.

I understand the show is basically faithful to the historical record, although of course it’s fictionalized to some degree. If you don’t want to read spoilers for something that happened 140 years ago, stop here. If you want to follow in the footsteps of these most notorious of feuders, check out the Pike County website which has a handy printable brochure (pdf) describing the key Hatfield-McCoy landmarks, as well as tips for other activities in the area, places to eat, hike, etc. They also have a companion CD to enhance your Hatfield-McCoy driving tour. Call Pike County Tourism at (800) 844-7453 or contact them via email to purchase a copy.

And now for the backstory.

The Hatfields and McCoys were early settlers of Tug Valley, an area on the border between Kentucky and what is now West Virginia. The Hatfields lived mainly on the West Virginia side in Mingo County, the McCoys on the Kentucky side in Pike County. During the Civil War, the Hatfields fought for the Confederacy while the McCoys sided with the Union. The trauma of the war underpinned much of the conflict between the two families.

In fact, the first to die at the hands of the other family was Asa Harmon McCoy, a Union soldier who returned home after breaking his leg. He was immediately threatened by a posse of ex-Confederate vigilantes headed by Devil Anse Hatfield who called themselves the “Logan Wildcats.” After he was shot at while drawing water from his well, Asa Harmon fled his home and hid in a cave. The Wildcats found him by following his slave Pete (yes, the Union soldier had a slave well after the Emancipation Proclamation) to the cave where they shot Asa dead on January 7, 1865.

The McCoys blamed Devil Anse, who as it happened was not among the killers that day because he was home sick. It was Devil Anse’s uncle Jim Vance who probably did the killing. Nobody was ever brought to trial. Much of the community, even many members of his own family, thought Asa had it coming for fighting for the Union, so no witnesses ever came forward and the case was never officially solved.

It was 13 years before tensions erupted again; this time the central bone of contention was a pig. The McCoys said the pig belonged to them, but the Hatfields claimed that since it was found on their property, it was now theirs. Unlike the murder of Asa Harmon, the pressing matter of the pig was taken to court, or rather, to the home of the local Justice of the Peace, Anderson “Preacher Anse” Hatfield. Bill Staton, who was related to both feuding families, testified for the Hatfields and the Hatfield judge ruled in the Hatfields’ favor.

Two McCoy men took their revenge by killing Staton. They were acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defense.

The next year came the Romeo and Juliet portion when Roseanna McCoy, daughter of Randolph, and Devil Anse’s son Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield fell in love. She squealed on her own family in order to save Johnse when they captured him. Despite that and despite the fact that she was pregnant with his child, Johnse married someone else, specifically, Roseanna’s cousin Nancy. The McCoys were less than pleased, and in 1882 Roseanna’s brothers Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud killed Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse’s younger brother.

The brothers were on their way to trial when Devil Anse captured them, waited until Ellison died of his wounds, and then killed all three of them in retribution. Sadly, that wasn’t even the peak of the violence. The culmination of this murderous madness came in 1888 with the New Year’s Night Massacre. The Hatfields, led by Uncle Jim Vance, surrounded Randolph McCoy’s home in the dark of night and shot up the cabin before setting it on fire. Randolph managed to escape, but two of his children were killed and his wife was beaten severely and left for dead.

By now the murders were making headline news all over the country. The governors of Kentucky and West Virginia were under pressure to stop the slaughter. Devil Anse’s brother Wall (played in the History Channel mini-series by Powers Boothe who was so chillingly brilliant as Cy Tolliver on Deadwood) and seven other Hatfields were arrested for one of the New Year’s Night Massacre killings. After legal vicissitudes that reached as high as the United States Supreme Court, all of the men were found guilty. Seven were condemned to life in prison. Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts was sentenced to hang from his neck until dead.

Although trials on various Hatfield-McCoy charges continued into the 20th century, the bloody murder sprees stopped after the hanging. Almost a hundred years passed before Hatfields and McCoys shook hands in 1976. That laid the groundwork for that awesome three-parter of Family Feud in 1979, and by 2000 the Hatfield and McCoy descendants were having joint family reunions. They officially signed a truce document in 2003, inspired to come together permanently by the events of September 11, 2001.

Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used remote-operated submersibles to discover a 19th century shipwreck in the northern Gulf of Mexico before an enthralled audience of 2000 watching via online streaming video. The wood of the hull had long since rotted away, but the high definition cameras captured gorgeous images of the surviving copper cladding that once protected the hull under the waterline. Cameras also revealed the anchor and a vast number of artifacts including cannons, boxes of muskets, glass bottles, ceramics and a rare ship’s stove that is one of very few surviving examples worldwide and only the second one ever found in the Gulf of Mexico.

The ship’s name was not discovered, but the ceramic plates with a green pattern around the edges were popular between 1800 and 1830, and the copper sheathing suggests the ship dates to the first half of the 19th century, a busy time in the region. The War of 1812, the Mexican War for Independence, the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War all saw copious naval action in the Gulf during that period. The presence of muskets and cannons on board indicate that the ship was involved in wartime activities.

One of the things that make this find so spectacularly photogenic is that the artifacts are perched on the sea floor, exposed to submersible view. The shipwreck site is deeper than 4,000 feet; it’s also 200 miles off the United States Gulf coast and the mouth of the Mississippi which is constantly depositing sediment into the Gulf. That not only makes for crisp images and exposed artifacts, but also allows researchers to figure out from the placement of the artifacts how the ship was used.

Until recently, the area has been relatively unexplored. The wreck first pinged in 2011 when the Shell Oil Company surveyed the area for sources of oil and gas. The sonar information was vague, but was of sufficient interest for Shell to alert the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) of something worth exploring. The BOEM asked NOAA to investigate this site and others during its mapping and diving missions this spring.

The NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer set out for a 56-day mission in March of this year. They used multi-beam mapping sonar and a remotely operated submersible named “Little Hercules” to explore four potential shipwreck sites in the Gulf of Mexico. Little Hercules made a total of 29 dives, recording the wrecks and a great variety of underwater life, including some corals that the scientists watching on board and online had never seen before. This shipwreck was the last of the four and the most historically significant.

Now the BOEM has to decide whether to give Shell a permit for oil and gas exploration/extraction that will disturb the seafloor. Here’s hoping the natural and historical wealth documented by Little Hercules will remain unmolested.

Below is some of the footage the live viewers witnessed on Little Hercules’ April 26th dive, including the discovery of the anchor. For some truly jaw-dropping HD images of marine biodiversity captured during the mission, see NOAA’s photo and video log page. They are not to be missed, seriously.

Headstones are a rich source of information for historians and genealogists, but since they’re not easily scanned like paper documents, you usually have to visit in person. Thanks to a program funded by a tax on plastic bags and staffed primarily by volunteers, people looking for their Irish forebears will be able to view headstones from selected historical cemeteries in Ireland.

Experts train local volunteers for two weeks. The volunteers take pictures or good ol’ fashioned pencil rubbings of headstones, and then collect any other information — stories, legends, audio of oral histories and video of the headstones — associated with the graves. Smartphones, digital cameras and GPS devices facilitate data collection and digitization. The data is then uploaded to the Historic Graves website where people can search for specific graves using keywords, family names, year of birth, or year of death. You can also search by graveyard, or, if you don’t know the cemetery’s name, by map.

It’s a brilliant way to utilize the knowledge and passion of local heritage groups, parks employees, schools and volunteer graveyard maintenance organizations to share a wealth of Irish history with people who might otherwise never have a chance to see where their ancestors are buried, or even just to enjoy the beauty of and history behind these cemeteries.

[Project coordinator John] Tierney said historic graveyards were full of heritage and character and were “unique connectors between people and place”.

“The goal is that communities will develop a richer view of their local heritage with benefits for locals and for tourists who find Irish historic graveyards so fascinating. Many of the 19th and early 20th century Irish city graveyards have links across to families and communities in the UK and by making the burial data available via the web and smartphone devices, it is hoped to connect into the growing area of genealogical tourism.”

The data will be parlayed into handy county, area, and national cemetery trails for local and international heritage tourists to follow. There will also be a separate mausoleum trail.

The survey started eight months ago and there are already over 6,000 graves from 80 graveyards in 12 counties recorded and published on the website. Data from various older surveys has been centralized and added to the site, which is why there are graveyards in England and Scotland visible on the map. They have a long ways to go, though. There are over 3600 historic cemeteries in Ireland and the ultimate aim of the project is to document and digitize every one of them.

If you’d like to help, you can sign up to transcribe memorial inscriptions from the photographs. Register to be a transcriber here, then view the pictures and transcribe the names and dates. Your transcription will be published as soon as you submit it, making that record instantly searchable.

See some beautiful cemeteries and surveyors at work on the Historic Graves YouTube channel.

When Google Art Project launched in January of last year, it gave anyone with a computer access to 17 major museums in nine countries including the US, France, Germany and the UK. The interface was on the clumsy side, unfortunately, making it hard to navigate, and although some stand-out individual pieces were presented in almost microscopic detail, the overall coverage was limited.

Now Google has announced the completion of the second version of Google Art Project. From 1,000 gigapixel ultra-high resolution images of paintings, the database now offers 32,000 images of not just paintings, but photographs, sculptures, textiles, rock art, ancient artifacts and so much more from 151 museums in 40 countries. If you’d like to take a turn through some of those museums and institutions, 46 of them have virtual tours, including the White House, Athens’ Acropolis Museum and the nearest and dearest to my heart, the Musei Capitolini on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

The interface is vastly improved. You can navigate speedily from collection to collection. If you want to take a virtual tour of the museum, click the yellow man icon in the upper left next to the museum name and the Details button, then navigate just as you would use Street View in Google Maps. If you’d like to browse the artworks instead, just click on the thumbnails in the collection gallery. Click the details button for more information about the piece, including a link to the artwork on the website of the museum. Of course you can also search for individual artworks or artists using the menu in the top left.

They also have a much more user-friendly personal gallery where you can not only save the images in a collection of your own, but also make notes and share them with friends. If you’re in the mood to be surprised, click the Discover button on the left vertical menu (it looks like a light bulb) and Google Art Project will take you on a random tour of its wonders. You can browse it as a gallery or view as a slideshow.

The educational resources are greatly enhanced. Click on the Education link on the menu at the bottom of the screen to get an art historical overview in the Introduction and Look Like an Expert sections. The DIY section offers tips and ideas for ways to use Google Art Project as an educational and creative resource, to create a virtual exhibition of your own unbounded by geographical and financial limits. DIY even connects to 10 other museums’ own proprietary educational databases, like the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History which I dearly love and have spent many lost weekends perusing.

The Google Art Project YouTube channel has introductory videos about using the site, about the artists and the museums. Here is a trippy preview of some of the incredible museum views and gigapixel artworks:

Here is the Google Street View camera as it records 360 degree views of every public room in the White House: