todaysdocument:

American Red Cross in Great Britain. One unit of the famous “Flying Squadron” priding themselves on being able to get under way within three minutes of the time a call is received. American Red Cross., ca. 1918

Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross on May 21, 1881, after her experience with the International Red Cross in Europe, focused on providing disaster relief and support for military veterans, still core parts of their mission today.

stuffmomnevertoldyou:

Meet Paul Poiret, the French haute couture designer credited with freeing women from corset.

In the 1910s during the heyday of his design career, Poiret was known as “The King of Fashion”, or even more impressively in Paris as Le Magnifique. Innovating beyond the corseted silhouette that horizontally slices the female figure in two, Poiret sought to move fashion beyond the restrictive undergarment that had clung to women’s torsos for centuries. His looser, more draped (as opposed to tailored) dress designs helped usher in the new, unlaced chapter in women’s fashion. As described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “In freeing women from corsets and dissolving the fortified grandeur of the obdurate, hyperbolic silhouette, Poiret effected a concomitant revolution in dressmaking, one that shifted the emphasis away from the skills of tailoring to those based on the skills of draping.”

nprfreshair:

Kevin Whitehead on Bing Crosby’s influence on popular music:

Bing Crosby’s influence on modern singing is so huge, we barely notice it anymore. It spread out through deadpan crooners like Perry Como, folksy colloquialists like Johnny Mercer, and warm sexy baritones like Billy Eckstine. Later singers who effectively undersell a song are indebted too, like Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen.

Image of Bing Crosby reading the sheet music is from a CBS radio recording session in the fall of 1954, at the CBS studio in Hollywood courtesy of HLC Properties Ltd.

 

markcoatney:

webbys:

This past year marked the 25th Anniversary of the Graphics Interchange Format. From its humble beginnings at Netscape, to its current prominence in today’s Tumblr-driven culture, the GIF has come a long way, bb.

All this week, in honor of the Lifetime Achievement Award GIF inventor Steve Wilhite is receiving at this year’s Webbys we will be celebrating GIF WEEK. It’s like shark week but way, way better. 

And FYI, it’s pronounced “jiff.” And that’s according to the guy who invented it. If you have any problems with that, take it up with this guy. 

I’ll be cold and buried before I recognize the soft G. 

(via pewinternet)

From How Space Stations Work:

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched its first space station — Skylab 1 — into orbit. During the launch, the station was damaged. A critical meteoroid shield and one of the station’s two main solar panels were ripped off and the other solar panel was not fully stretched out. That meant that Skylab had little electrical power and the internal temperature rose to 126 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).

The first crew, Skylab2, was launched 10 days later to fix the ailing station. The crew consisted of Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin. The Skylab 2 astronauts stretched out the remaining solar panel and set up an umbrella-like sunshade to cool the station. With the station repaired, the astronauts spent 28 days in space conducting scientific and biomedical research.

Modified from the third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, Skylab had the following parts:

• Orbital workshop - living and working quarters for the crew
• Airlock module - allowed access to the outside of the station
• Multiple docking adapter - allowed more than one Apollo spacecraft to dock to the station at once (However, there were never any overlapping crews in the station.)
• Apollo telescope mount - contained telescopes for observing the sun, stars and Earth (Keep in mind that the Hubble Space Telescope had not been built yet.)
• Apollo spacecraft - command and service module for transporting the crew to and from the Earth’s surface

Skylab was manned by two additional crews. Skylab 3 consisted of Commander Alan Bean and astronauts Jack Lousma and Owen Garriot. They spent 59 days in space. The final crew, Skylab 4, consisted of Commander Gerald Carr and astronauts William Pogue and Edward Gibson. This crew spent 84 days in orbit, conducted experiments and photographed comet Kohoutek.

Skylab was never meant to be a permanent home in space, but rather a workshop where the United States could test the effects of long-duration space flights (that is, greater than the two weeks required to go to the moon) on the human body. When the flight of the third crew was finished, Skylab was abandoned. Skylab remained aloft until intense solar flare activity caused its orbit to decay sooner than expected. Skylab re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned over Australia in 1979.

Learn more about Skylab over at NASA’s mission hub. Image credit: NASA.

pbsthisdayinhistory:

May 13, 1846: The Mexican-American War Begins

On this day in 1846, U.S. Congress declared war on Mexico. The Mexican-American War was a defining event for both nations, transforming a continent and forging a new identity for its peoples. By the war’s end in 1848, Mexico had lost nearly half of its territory (the present American Southwest from Texas to California) and the United States had become a continental power.

Explore a timeline of the Mexican-American war to learn about events that preceded the war, its battles, and the aftermath.

Image: Battle of Veracruz during the Mexican-American War. 1851 Painting by Carl Nebel.

semiticmuseum:

This is one of many detailed scenes adorning the mummy case of Padimut, a priest and engraver who lived in ancient Thebes in the 22nd Dynasty (945-712 B.C.E.).  Coffin paintings such as this are often self-referential in nature, describing the ideal journey of the deceased through the underworld, the land of Duat; sometimes they even include instructions, much like the mummy texts. 

This scene shows Osiris sitting in judgment of Padimut’s heart, which is being weighed against the Feather of Truth.  The assumption is that if Padimut’s heart is not at least as light as the Feather, he will be unable to proceed safely to paradise.  In fact, his soul might actually be devoured by one of the strange beasts populating the underworld.  Anxiety about these consequences fueled what we might now think of as a religious-industrial complex, which played a major role in the social structure and economic landscape of ancient Egypt.

This image was painted over layers of cartonnage, a composite of plaster, linen, and papyrus.  You can visit Padimut’s mummy case at the Semitic Museum in our “Egypt: Magic and the Afterlife” exhibit.

(via missedinhistory)

nprfreshair:

Patricia Volk tells Terry Gross about how Elsa Schiaparelli changed women’s underwear:

Women’s underwear before World War II was kind of elaborate. It was usually made of silk and it had pleats and it had to be ironed. This was in France. There was no such thing as ‘drip dry’ and when the war started, most of the men went to the front and the women had to take jobs. There was gas rationing and so everybody had bicycles and you had to be licensed to ride a bike in Paris and in one year bike licenses tripled: it went up to 11 million. The way women dressed with these long skirts and this very elaborate underwear didn’t lend itself to riding a bike so Schiap changed panties completely. First of all, there was famine, so she got rid of the buttons and put elastic in the waist so that as you were losing weight, your panties would stay on. Then, she made them out of drip-dry material, so you didn’t need a maid to iron them … and she added a double-slung crotch and suddenly women could ride their bikes with a lot more freedom.

Image via Vintage Everyday

stuffmomnevertoldyou:

If you’ve ever wondered How Tupperware Works, Cristen has you covered.

In the time that it takes to read this sentence, a handful of Tupperware parties all across the world have probably just started…

(image via National Museum of American History)