u/onl-li

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land area, but its population is surprisingly concentrated. Roughly 70% of Canadians live in three major regions: the Quebec–Windsor Corridor, Calgary–Edmonton Corridor, and British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.

Geography, transportation routes, economic opportunities, and climate have all played a role in concentrating settlement in these areas, especially in southern Canada. It’s a great map for visualizing just how unevenly Canada’s population is distributed.

Read more here - https://onl.li/maps/population-demographics/70-of-canada-s-population-lives-in-these-three-regions

This wonderfully chaotic hand-colored etching, “We Have the Exhibition to Examine,” captures a crowded art exhibition where the paintings almost seem secondary to the enormous bonnets, elaborate dresses, and fashionable spectators packed into the gallery.

Created by British caricaturist William Heath (also known as “Paul Pry”) and dated 1810–1840, the scene pokes fun at fashionable society and the spectacle of attending exhibitions. One of the captions even jokes about seeing a “Revolution among the Bonnets.”

Apparently, struggling to see over someone’s giant hat at a public event is a problem with a very long history.

These four pages are from a pamphlet issued by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) advertising plays that local suffrage groups could order and perform.

What surprised me is how organized the whole operation was.

The pamphlet wasn't just recommending political plays. NAWSA was basically acting as a theatrical distributor. It selected works that were practical for amateur productions, sold copies of the scripts, collected performance fees, kept a 5% commission, and forwarded the rest of the royalties to the playwrights. Most scripts cost only 10–30 cents, with performance rights generally running $2.50–$5.

And the catalog had some pretty remarkable names.

One of the offerings was George Bernard Shaw's Press Cuttings, a comedy making fun of politicians and the anti-suffrage movement. There were also British suffrage plays by Cicely Hamilton, Christopher St. John, Beatrice Harraden, Gertrude Jennings and others. The pamphlet says these English works were supplied through an arrangement with Edith Craig and London's Actresses' Franchise League, with NAWSA serving as their American agency.

The American side is just as interesting.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known today for The Yellow Wallpaper, appears twice in the catalog. Her play Something to Vote For centers on a women's club president who becomes involved in a fight over dangerously adulterated milk—a way of connecting the ballot to public health and consumer protection. She also wrote Three Women, another play offered here.

There's also The Girl from Colorado by Selina Solomons. Solomons wrote it during California's successful 1911 suffrage campaign; its plot involves a woman from Colorado—where women already had voting rights—converting an anti-suffrage relative to the cause. Solomons herself was an important organizer in the California campaign.

Another 10-minute piece, If Women Voted, was written by Inez Milholland. A couple of years later Milholland became one of the most recognizable faces of American suffrage when she rode a white horse at the head of the huge 1913 suffrage procession in Washington, D.C.

But my favorite item mentioned in the pamphlet might be an entirely different production called An Entertainment to Make Votes for Women.

Its premise: a state legislature in the year 2099 is debating whether MEN should finally be given the right to vote.

So more than a century ago, suffragists were already using gender-reversal satire to make their argument.

The theater strategy makes a lot of sense when you think about it. A short play could be staged in a meeting hall, club, drawing room or community venue with a small amateur cast. Instead of asking an audience to sit through another political speech, organizers could turn arguments about voting, labor, marriage, government and women's independence into comedy and drama.

British suffrage activists had developed a particularly strong theatrical movement. The Actresses' Franchise League, founded in 1908, helped produce and circulate political plays, sketches and performances, and scholars have identified suffrage drama as an important part of the wider campaign for the vote.

NAWSA's American catalog essentially turned that idea into a distribution network.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission, which preserves this brochure in the Erminia Thompson Folsom Collection, describes it simply: suffragists brought attention to their cause by staging plays in their communities, and this pamphlet showed them which plays they could order from NAWSA.

It's a neat reminder that political movements in the early 1900s weren't limited to marches, speeches and pamphlets.

They had propaganda theater, mail-order scripts, performance licenses, international distribution agreements—and apparently dystopian comedies about men begging for voting rights in the year 2099.

Images: National American Woman Suffrage Association / Erminia Thompson Folsom Collection, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The Wikimedia Commons files catalog the four scans as 1920 and mark them public domain in the United States.

I came across this fantastic 1955 piece called “Color Crazy” in the Science History Institute collection, and I’ve been digging into the people behind it.

The photographs were taken by Leslie Gill (1908–1958), a well-known commercial and fashion photographer. The text on the second page is credited to Nancy Wieler.

Wieler turns out to have been a fashion writer/editor associated with McCall’s magazine in the early 1950s. She had fashion articles published there by at least 1952, and by 1954 she was actually listed on the magazine’s fashion staff. One of her other credited pieces was a 1954 fashion feature called “She Chooses Water Colors.”

“Color Crazy” itself focuses on the explosion of color in mid-century fashion—particularly hosiery, nylon, synthetic textiles, and coordinating clothing colors. It’s a great little snapshot of how synthetic materials and increasingly bold colors were being marketed to women in the 1950s.

The Science History Institute dates the piece to 1955 and preserves it as a two-page advertising/fashion work. I haven’t yet found definitive proof of which magazine originally published “Color Crazy,” although Wieler’s connection to McCall’s makes that an interesting possibility.

There also seems to be surprisingly little biographical information online about Nancy Wieler beyond her fashion work, so I’d love to hear from anyone who recognizes the name or knows more about her career.

The Brandenburg Gate is one of Berlin’s most recognizable landmarks, but its history goes far beyond being a tourist attraction.

Built between 1788 and 1791 and inspired by the Propylaea in Athens, the Gate has witnessed some of the biggest turning points in German and European history. Napoleon seized its famous Quadriga in 1806, the monument survived heavy damage during World War II, and its location beside the Berlin Wall turned it into a powerful symbol of Cold War division.

Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech nearby in 1987. After the Berlin Wall began opening in November 1989, the Brandenburg Gate crossing officially reopened on December 22, drawing more than 100,000 people. Germany formally reunified less than a year later.

Today, the Gate has largely transformed from a symbol of division into one of German unity, freedom, and reunification.

TL;DR: The Brandenburg Gate started as an 18th-century royal entrance, was looted by Napoleon, survived two world wars, became trapped beside the Berlin Wall, and ultimately emerged as one of the most recognizable symbols of German reunification.

Find out more at https://onl.li/tools/fact-finder-449/general-knowledge/the-brandenburg-gate-a-symbol-of-unity

An early portrait of the Rolling Stones taken in July 1963. From left to right: Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, and Keith Richards.

It’s fascinating to see the band at the beginning of its journey, before decades of hit records, massive tours, and rock-and-roll history.

Which early Rolling Stones song is your favorite?

Judge Roy Bean—known as the “Law West of the Pecos”—holding court in Langtry, Texas, while trying an accused horse thief.

The courthouse was also a saloon.

And apparently, there were no other peace officers anywhere nearby.

So, to summarize:

• Judge behind the bar
• Defendant accused of stealing a horse
• Courtroom serving whiskey
• Backup law enforcement nonexistent
• West Texas, naturally

Now thats insane...

Source: https://scienceblog.com/t-writing-a-single-100-word-email-with-chatgpt-consumes-approximately-the-volume-of-a-standard-bottle-of-water-the-global-infrastructure-processing-ai-queries-is-projected-to-use-the-equivalent-of-hal/