Best Of MetaFilter

Via Buzzfeed, Photos Of How People Celebrated Juneteenth 100 Years Ago.

Photo by Dina Litovsky

The co-ordinates are: 53.136107, -0.222877 ♰; Where the Amish go on holiday ⛱; Life on the Slow Train: Views of a Vanishing China 🛤; The Castles of Wales 🏰

Dorothea Lange self portrait

Dorothea Lange digital archive 📷 New Jersey: Images of the Garden State 📷 Streetview of 1940s NYC 📷 Inspiring Incarcerated Individuals to Visualize Their Dreams in Photos 📷 Ingrid Pollard: pastoral interlude

Waiting to come home by mripp (cc by)

Dame posted Retours, "a digital magazine on the intersection of railway history, design and photography."

John Margolies photo via publicdomainreview.org

Great post by zamboni about John Margolies’ photographs of roadside America

Discworld by CarbonNYC [in SF!] (cc by)

Black hole time! PhysicsMatt answers why the accretion disk is a disk rather than a sphere, and RedOrGreen explains a bit about interferometry (and other stuff) in the Mefi thread on the reveal of the first black hole image.

"Out of Nowhere" by Ray Kelly

So MANY great photo posts this month: a rare view of Victorian Women of Color; "Through Our Eyes" asked 100 homeless people in Spartanburg, South Carolina to take pictures of their lives; Vintage aerial photos of rural America; Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century?; Six degrees of Copenhagen by Jens Juul; WaterWigs project by Tim Tadder; Restricted Areas series by Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko; freaky and cute Secret Friends; photographs by Degas; using drones to portray scenes of inequality in South Africa; Famous landmarks photographed from the "wrong" direction.

WC [toilet facilities] by State Records NSW

History pals!

Enjoy some newly-animated historical city photos, plus barnacles on the history of Australian public bathrooms "in case you're the sort of person that wants to see 115-year old survey sketches of toilets and urinal blocks".

Or listen to the meticulously recreated ambient sounds of 1700s Paris.

How about Marie Duval, 19th century woman cartoonist called 'one of the forgotten wonders of nineteenth-century art .. the bizarre dreamlike distortions of her comic world look like some steampunk 21st-century version of Victorian London."

Or the re-discovered ancient Chinese texts that rewrite the early history of Taoism and Confucianism.

Speaking of, what are some examples of historical events that are commonly misunderstood?

Did you catch teponaztli transcribing some diary pages from 1799-1804 New York City? "The most I've seen her write about anything was how much she hates games, which I love for its being an angry rant from 200+ years ago."

Or enjoy the brief video on the baseball fan Wild Bill Hagy, which is a time capsule of 1979 Baltimore.

Harking back to 1979, share some sense-memories in what was it like when everybody smoked?

Or looking further back - what was sugar like in 1631?

Finally, what are the best history nerds on Youtube?

inside elevation by parramitta (cc by)

Why does Wyoming have such a low population compared to neighboring states? barchan explains, jeb adds: "everything in the West comes back to water".

Ever wonder what a "nor'easter" is? Check out the great answers from Seymour Zamboni, plastic_animals, and weathergal in rules of thumb for weather patterns in the USA.

Lots of different places have unique colloquial weather terms too. (Gullywashers, the foxes' wedding, and lots of wind terms again from barchan.)

Also in language surveys: What are some antiquated place nicknames (like the Borscht Belt)? What do other languages call it when your foot "falls asleep"?

Different cultures also have their own languages of flower-meanings. Plus some cool info from sukeban on how new imported flowers like roses made their way into kimono designs in the late 19th century.

For geography/history detectives: How can I tell, just from clues in the document itself, when a world map was made or figure out when a photograph was taken?

Did you see the new photos from the formerly-hidden-from-visitors North Korean subway system?

Some great answers in travel threads recently: Italy: non-traditional but amazing?, and also Scotland: what not to miss.

Leica 35 mm, 1928 by national museum of american history (cc by-nc-sa)

Also note how this photograph doesn't perfectly look like reality. Much of this comes from the fact that it was shot with grainy high-speed film, with unrealistic tones which we already contextually relate to a previous era. It looks like a photo from the 60s, because the technology wasn't there to make the shot look realistic.

"Wow, I love a lot of these. But as I was going through the reddit thread, I came across this picture. It isn't the most stunning example of colorization, but it was striking to me nonetheless. The person in the photo is my great uncle, Raymond Bowman..."

milkcrateman recognizes a relative.